Who Plays the Tune in “Body and Soul”? A Performance History Using Recorded Sources

Abstract

AbstractThis essay explores the multiple histories, traditions, and authorities present in more than 200 recorded performances of “Body and Soul.” The early recordings (dozens of them from 1930 alone) demonstrate both enormous variety and distinct British and American performance patterns, but few of these innovations survive beyond 1940. Coleman Hawkins's version from 1939, and not the original sheet music or early performance history, set a standard key (D-flat—even for singers!) and a slower standard tempo (quarter = 90, although later it became even slower). Charlie Parker and others in the 1940s, however, were influenced by the Chu Berry and Roy Eldridge recording of 1938, which introduced a “jump” chorus widely reproduced for two decades. Billie Holiday determined which set of lyrics would be sung, but not the form in which they would occur. John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner's new modal approach in 1960 created both direct imitators and also a new tradition of trying to neutralize the harmonic complexity of the tune, which Hawkins had so carefully exploited. This study asks whether a more African and less European model of jazz tunes might reveal a less fixed and more complex notion of a musical work that includes orally preserved and recorded innovations and performance traditions. This research also explores how the record itself, as a physical object, has become an authority.