After suggesting that it was ironic to talk about sunny days now that we are deep into October, the greater irony was that out of nowhere, yesterday was the most glorious Autumn day with clear blue skies and warm enought for us to eat lunch outside. So today I turn my thoughts to the season of Autumn in all it’s brilliance.
“Autumn” is the third of the The Four Seasons a group of four violin concertos by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives musical expression to a season of the year. These were composed around 1718−1720, when Vivaldi was the court chapel master in Mantua. They were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, together with eight additional concerti.
“Autumn in New York” is a jazz standard composed by Vernon Duke in Westport, Connecticut in the summer of 1934. It was written without a commission or for a specific show, but was offered by Duke to producer Murray Anderson for his Broadway musical Thumbs Up! which opened in December 1934 (and closed in May 1935) and was performed by J. Harold Murray. Many versions of the song have been recorded over the years by numerous musicians and singers. The only version to achieve chart success as a single in the USA was that by Frank Sinatra which reached No. 27 in 1949.
“Autumn Leaves” is a popular song and jazz standard composed by Joseph Kosma in 1945 with original lyrics by Jacques Prevert in French (original French title: “Les Feuilles mortes” – The Dead Leaves). Kosma was a native of Hungary who was introduced to Prévert in Paris. They collaborated on the song for the 1946 film Les Portes de la Nuit (The Gates of Night) where it was sung by Irene Joachim. The poem was published, after the death of Jacques Prévert, in the book “Soleil de Nuit” in 1980.
Later Johnny Mercer created new lyrics in English and renamed the song to ‘Autumn Leaves’. An instrumental version by pianist Roger Williams was a number one best-seller in the US in 1955. “Autumn Leaves” has accumulated more than a thousand commercial recordings. In 2012, jazz historian Philippe Baudoin called the song “the most important non-American standard” and noted that “it has been recorded about 1400 times by mainstream and modern jazz musicians alone and is the eighth most-recorded tune by jazzmen.”
“Leaves That Are Green” is a track taken from ‘The Paul Simon Songbook’, the first solo studio album by Paul Simon. It was released in the UK in 1965. It was recorded in London. Simon made several trips to England in 1964 and ’65, performing in small clubs and theatres. During 1965 he played in Paris, Haarlem, and Copenhagen, along with London and other locations in the UK.
“Forever Autumn” is a song written by Jeff Wayne, Gary Osborne and Paul Vigrass. The original melody was written by Wayne in 1969 as a jingle for a Lego Commercial. Vigrass and Osborne, the performers of the original jingle, added lyrics to the song and recorded it for inclusion on their 1972 album Queues. Their interpretation was also released as a single and gained moderate commercial success in Japan, selling more than 100,000 copies and becoming a top-20 hit. The best-known version is the recording by Justin Hayward from the album The War of the Worlds. Wayne wanted to include a love song on the album that sounded like “Forever Autumn”, and he decided that the best course of action was to simply use the original song. The song reached No. 5 in the UK in August 1978.
“Autumn Leaves” is a song by Ed Sheeran which was a bonus track on the deluxe edition of his debut studio album + (pronounced plus). It was released in September 2011 by Asylum Records and Atlantic Records. The album is considered Sheeran’s commercial breakthrough. Upon release, + debuted atop of the UK Albums Chart with first-week sales exceeding 102,000 copies.
