1. Count Basie Orchestra – One O’Clock Jump. Appropriately enough, we were just talking about Basie in my jazz history class last week. I don’t like “One O’Clock Jump” nearly as much as the tunes we looked at in class — “Doggin’ Around” in particular had me grinning like a maniac, whereas this one is a little square and rhythmically dull. HOWEVER, Basie’s piano solo is fantastic. He plays sixteen notes in sixteen bars — I mean that literally, I counted. “Less is more” is go!

2. Claude Thornhill Orchestra – Harbor Lights. Like Tommy Dorsey’s “Alone,” a traditional romantic pop song remade in a big-band context. What’s weird about it, though, is the degree to which the two styles don’t feel integrated: when the trumpets come back in after the vocal part ends, with aggressive kick-drums under them, they seem wildly out of place. Actually, that whole passage is just kind of weird: after the kick-drum part, there are just a couple of measures of straight rather than swung rhythm, so that a fragment of the song’s melifluous melody gets turned into a series of sharp staccato eighth notes — and then all of a sudden the saxes have the tune and it’s smooth and nice again. And then there’s a gap in the texture with only a muted trumpet playing, kind of hesitantly. There are no transitions between any of these passages, and they almost seem as if they’re happening by accident. Actually, I kind of like that aspect of the song. I also really like the poignant harmony underpinning the first syllable of the word “harbor” in the main tune.

3. Fred Astaire – They Can’t Take That Away From Me. Astaire doesn’t enter until halfway through this three-minute tune, with the result that it feels rather abbreviated. Remarkably, there’s a part where someone seems to hit a wrong note: on the line “the bumpy road to love,” Astaire’s melody strongly implies a harmonic change from iii to V/iii, but the strings stay on iii for a few more beats. The effect is really jarring in a style that’s so focused on elegance, especially after hearing the two Astaire songs from 1935 and ’36, which succeed completely at being elegant. As for the arrangement, it’s half pop string orchestra and half sweet big-band jazz, though the two are brought into a much closer relation than they are in “Harbor Lights.” The basic sound comes out a bit old-school Disney.

4. Eddy Duchin and His Orchestra – It’s De-Lovely. Another Cole Porter song, but this time sung by someone else. I don’t know why 1937 seems to be the Year of Incompetence, but Duchin actually screws up the lyrics: in the song’s long list of “de-” words, he sings “delirious” twice when one of them is supposed to be “delicious,” and then he pronounces “deluxe” to rhyme with “kooks” (though now that I think about it, maybe that was an acceptable pronounciation back then (?)). He leaves out “delicious,” my favorite word!! But I like the song anyway, especially the bridge, with its wide-ranging melody and surprising chord changes. And the syncopation gets kind of outrageous in a few places, in a good way, of course.

5. Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra – The Lady is a Tramp. The title doesn’t mean what you think it does! Edythe Wright is back, and she’s basically singing about being kind of a nomad. (According to Google, Ella Fitzgerald’s version of this song actually includes the word “HOBOHEMIA,” which is SOMEWHAT AWESOME.) The other thing is that I thought this was a play on the title The Lady and the Tramp, but Wikipedia tells me that the movie came out in 1955, so unless I’m missing something, its title must be a play on this instead. I wouldn’t have guessed that Disney was raiding swing-era pop songs for movie titles in the 50s. As for the music, it kind of stays unremarkably in the background, chugging along in a way that makes me think of really old cartoons where the characters are always oscillating. (See also: that Family Guy bit about Peter and Brian in “Fixin’ the Shed.”)