Maybe being in Jazz band when I was in high school has colored my perspective, but I much prefer watching videos of live performances to listening to meticulous recordings. There’s something to the improvisational spectacle that I find really captivating. A lot of that probably stems from my being painfully incapable of improve, but fortunately for me, very few jazz standards feature the bari sax. But I digress… After listening to Ellington’s “Take the A Train” several times, I managed to track down a recording from 1964 featuring Ernie Sheppard on vocals and bass.

What I think is really special about jazz, and what we haven’t really seen thus far in the semester, is that the forms are incredibly fluid. It’s not always about playing the right note or the right rhythm, but rather choosing to play with intention. This song, like many other standards, essentially uses a lot of the techniques that we’ve looked at in classical music. Much like the sonata, we are given a theme that is developed and returned to; however, the development is subject to the soloist – they can stray as far away from that theme as they like so long as they stay within the basic chord progression. In the Spotify recording we hear the trumpet soloist around 0:52 taking the main rhythm and melody and reinterpreting it, in particular this one pattern of long-short-long. Because he uses these motives, it still has a semblance of unity: it sounds like it belongs in the piece.