Body & Soul - Jazz Piano

"Body and Soul" is a popular song written in 1930 by Edward Heyman, Robert Sour, Frank Eyton and Johnny Green. It was introduced by Libby Holman in the revue Three's A Crowd and used as a soundtrack theme in the 1947 film named for the song.

"Body and Soul" became a jazz standard, with hundreds of versions performed and recorded by dozens of artists. The most famous of these is the take recorded by Coleman Hawkins and His Orchestra on October 11, 1939 at their only recording session for Bluebird, a subsidiary of RCA Victor. Hawkins' solo on this take is considered to be "one of the finest examples of pure, spontaneous creative artistry in the history of jazz.

[citation needed] It was one of the first straight jazz records (as against swing) to become a commercial hit. This was unusual, as the song's melody is never directly stated in the recording; saxophonist Hawkins two-choruses' worth of improvisation on the tune's chord progression constitute almost the entire take.[1] In 2004, it was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.

About the composer
John Waldo Green was the son of musical parents, and was accepted by Harvard at the age of 15, entering the University in 1924. Between semesters, bandleader Guy Lombardo heard his Harvard Gold Coast Orchestra and hired him to create dance arrangements for his nationally famous orchestra. His first song hit, Coquette (1928), was written for Lombardo (with Carmen Lombardo, Guy's brother, and lyricist Gus Kahn.

Green was educated in music, history, economics, and government. His instruments were the piano and the [trombone], although he abandoned the latter after college. He married three times, had a daughter with actress Betty Furness and two daughters with MGM "Glamazon" Bunny Waters. His father compelled him to take a job as a stockbroker. Disliking the job, and encouraged by his young bride, the former Carol Faulk (to whom he dedicated I'm Yours), he left Wall Street to pursue a musical career.

Before the marriage ended in the mid '30s, Carol remarked, "We didn't have children, we had songs." It was during his first marriage that most of his hit standards were composed, including "Out of Nowhere", co-authored with Edward Heyman (1931), "Rain Rain Go Away" (1932), "I Cover the Waterfront", "You're Mine You", and "I Wanna Be Loved" (all 1933), and "Easy Come Easy Go" and the wonderful, but obscure "Repeal The Blues" (both 1934). He also composed the theme for Max Fleischer's Betty Boop cartoons in 1932, with Edward Heyman as lyricist.

His earliest songs appeared with the billing "John W. Green," a styling he reverted to in the 1960s. After that anyone addressing "Johnny" was put right with the statement, "You can call me John - or you can call me Maestro!" "Out of Nowhere" by Johnny Greene and Edward Heyman became a standard piece of gypsy swing, a musical style established by Django Reinhardt in the 1930's. Gypsy swing remains popular to this day, for additional information see Django Reinhardt and Rosenberg Trio.

If you need the sheet music of "Body and Soul" Standard just click here:
http://www.jazz-styles.com/htm/scores

If you want, you can Download this song from Amazon.com, here is the link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002

iTunes here:
http://ax.itunes.apple.com/us/album/l
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