Ten Best Jazz Songs

Our Editor-In-Chief has requested lists of '10 best of' so here is a list of my ten favourite songs. There are so many to choose from, and if you asked me another day, the list could vary. I have a special interest in lyrics so that affects my choice, and I sing only some of them at jams, though I'm intending to learn all of them eventually. Not in order of preference.

1. Strange Fruit:  The more serious songs first. I soon realised, that not all jazz songs were 'moon and June' love songs. Jazz has its share of protest songs such as Strange Fruit, made famous by the inimitable Billie Holiday. Lynchings as such don't happen now (I hope) but police brutality does, so the song is still heartbreakingly relevant today in these times of Black Lives Matter.

2. Love For Sale: Another totally relevant song. The lyricist is very much on the side of the woman working as a prostitute. The whole issue of women's rights provide the background to this song.

3. Willow Weep For Me: Now for the serious love songs. This song of lost love is full of rich images, such as 'To weep my tears along the stream'. We've all done it at sometime. I imagine singing this in a green glade of trees.

4. Good Morning Heartache: This song of lost love is verging on the obsessive, 'can't shake you no-how'. Local singer Gabi Heller has suggested that it's perhaps about addiction and jazz pianist Alan Law says that by making  'heartache' a character in the song, we can manage the emotions better. I think it's about clinical depression.

5. Miss Otis Regrets: It is said that Cole Porter wrote this one for a bet. I sing this in folk clubs and half the audience believes that it is a folk song – it helps that someone dies, which is pretty well obligatory in folk songs! So the background to the song is a bit humorous but the song is serious and full of irony. I like this as sung by Kirsty McColl to the accompaniment of a drumming band, though it's not a jazz performance.

6. There Are Such Things: Now for some lighter love songs. This song deserves to be better known. It's a sweet love song which is optimistic about life in general. 'Not caring what you own but just what you are' it says. It was introduced to us students at Blue Jazz Voices by guitarist Steve Glendinning and I've never heard it anywhere else.

7. You Took Advantage of Me: Such Fun! Another Blue Jazz Voices song which pokes fun at the conventions of romantic love. 'I suffer something awful each time you go, and much worse when you're near.' Lyrics by the wonderful Lorenz Hart. Lance tells me that the song was originally sung by two people who weren't sure whether to resume their love affair or not.

8.  Fever: More fun! I knew this song as a child though goodness knows what I made of its erotic lyrics then I simply can't imagine.

9.  Crazy Rhythm: This is about jazz itself and comments on the effect that the 'new music' had on American society 'What's the use of prohibition, You produce the same condition'. Fun, and some American history provided as well in the verse, where it' explains that people come to settle from all over the world and 'their native folk songs they soon throw away'

10. Straight No Chaser: A very different sort of song, very tricky to sing and to get the boppy rhythm right. Tune by Thelonious Monk to which Carmen McRae added words which really are about how tricky it is to get the boppy rhythm right. I like this for its cleverness: a challenge to sing.

Ann Alex