"A Child Is Born" is a jazz instrumental that was later recorded with lyrics added. It was written in 1969 by the jazz trumpeter Thad Jones with lyrics added independently by Alec Wilder after hearing the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra perform the instrumental.[when?] The instrumental and the song have been recorded by a number of musicians including Tony Bennett, Stanley Turrentine and Bill Evans[1] (also released on Christmas with Sinatra & Friends), Richard Davis, Kenny Burrell, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Hank Jones and Helen Merrill.[2]
Possible contribution of Roland Hanna to A Child Is Born
editJazz historian Mark Stryker, in his book Jazz from Detroit, provides the following account of the writing of "A Child Is Born":
An intriguing twist to [Roland Hanna and Thad Jones'] relationship is that Hanna almost certainly composed “A Child Is Born,” the gentle waltz credited to Jones and his most- covered song. (Alec Wilder even wrote lyrics to it.) The precious melody unfolds in simple quarter notes and dotted half notes and sounds nothing like Jones— there’s no syncopation— and everything like Hanna’s Romanticism. David Berger, who was at the Village Vanguard for most of the band’s gigs in the early years, remembers Hanna developing the song over many weeks during his improvised solo features; Jones showed up one night with a full- band arrangement of what Hanna had been playing. Hanna confirms this story in his Fillius Jazz Archive interview. He doesn’t mention the song by name, but it could only be “A Child Is Born.”
“I said, ‘Thad, isn’t that my tune?’ He said, ‘No, it’s mine.’” Hanna chuckled as he recounted the story. If there were ever any hard feelings, he appears to have let them go. He excuses Jones’ pilfering as akin to Ellington appropriating melodies improvised by his sidemen. “I never faulted [Thad] for that because he was just doing what bandleaders did,” Hanna said. “If you throw an idea out there, he’d take it and write it down.”
Hanna never contested Jones’ authorship publicly, but he told friends privately that he wrote the song. “I gifted it to Thad” is how he put it to pianist Michael Weiss.[3]
Lyrics
editNow, out of the night / New as the dawn / Into the light / This Child / Innocent Child / Soft as a fawn / This Child is born
One small heart / One pair of eyes / One work of art / Here in my arms / Here he lies / Trusting and warm / Blessed this morn / A Child is born
Form
edit"'A Child Is Born' is a 32 bars long song in 3/4 time, and when soloing over it, jazz musicians "usually omit the last two bars", leaving a "30-bar solo form".[4] The original was recorded in B-flat major. It features a slow, lengthy introduction on the piano, lasting over a minute. Bob Yurochko in his book A Short History of Jazz refers to it as a "beautiful ballad" of mainstream jazz.[5]"
References
edit- ^ "A Child Is Born". Allmusic. Retrieved 29 December 2014.
- ^ Classic American Popular Song: The Second Half-Century, 1950-2000 David Jenness, Donald Velsey - 2014 - 1136797459 Even finer is A Child Is Born (1969), music written by jazz musician Thad Jones. It is Wilder's best independent lyric, fitting Iones's exquisite melody perfectly; it's a pity the song is heard most often as an instrumental (Figure 4.11). The crucial notes are the ones, all low in pitch, that start successive long phrases: here D, later E-flat, D, E~natural, F: they occur low in the range, like a cello digging in. The highest tones in each phrase are mostly near'oc~ taves, and sound like a woodwind ...
- ^ Stryker, Mark (2019). Jazz from Detroit. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 79. ISBN 9780472074266.
- ^ Levine, Mark (12 January 2011). The Jazz Theory Book. "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". p. 561. ISBN 978-1-4571-0145-8.
- ^ "Yurochko, Bob (1993). A Short History of Jazz. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 203. ISBN 978-0-8304-1595-3.
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