Nothing serious here, just a serendipitous thing that came up in my listening today. In about 15 minutes of digging around my files, two tunes came up that sound a lot like the familiar John Coltrane tune, Mr. P.C.— a 12-bar blues, from the album Giant Steps:
Sonny Rollins recorded more or less the same arrangement of the tune in 1952. It seems pretty clear that Mr. P.C., written in 1959, was based on this, adding a blues turnaround to the A section melody.
Here’s Louis Armstrong singing the tune with Benny Goodman in 1939— a kind of spiritual-like set piece. Louis Prima did something similar with it. Most the vocal arrangements of it feature these kind of vaudeville elements; the jazz version is pretty stripped down in comparison.
I then happened upon Separation Blues by Hadley Caliman, from his 1977 record Celebration, with Elvin Jones on drums. This is a blues, and is clearly an homage, following the same basic rhythm format as Mr. P.C., with a more abstract melody.
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