“Autumn Leaves” is a popular song based on a French song “Les Feuilles mortes” (“The Dead Leaves”) composed by Joseph Kosma in 1945. The original lyrics were written by Jacques Prevert in French, and the English lyrics were by Johnny Mercer. “Autumn Leaves” has become a jazz standard and it is one of the most recorded songs by jazz musicians. More than a thousand commercial recordings are known to have been released by mainstream and jazz musicians.
Kosma was a native of Hungary who was introduced to Prévert in Paris, and they collaborated on the song “Les Feuilles mortes”. The song was legally deposited in 1945, and published in 1947. The song has its in origin in the ballet music written by Kosma for Le Rendez-vous by Roland Petit, performed in Paris at the end of the Second World War. Large parts of the melodies are exactly the same as the ballet music, which was itself partially similar to “Poème d’octobre No. 4” by Jules Massenet. This portion of the tune has also been noted to be near-identical to a passage in Tchaikovsky’s 1888 composition Hamlet Overture-Fantasia, Op. 67.
The most successful commercial recording of “Les Feuilles mortes” was by Yves Montand (Columbia) in 1949, which sold a million copies within 5 years. Cora Vaucaire recorded it (1947 or 1948), as did Juliette Greco who first recorded a version in 1949. In 1950, Johnny Mercer wrote the English lyric and gave it the title “Autumn Leaves”. The English lyrics are significantly shorter than the French version, consisting of only two verses. In the French original, the crucial line “C’est une chanson” starts at the 13th bar, while in English the line “the autumn leaves” starts at bar 1. Mercer was a founder and partner in Capitol Records at the time, and he selected Capitol recording artist Jo Stafford to make the first English-language recording in July, 1950.
Roger Williams was signed by Dave Kapp of Kapp Records. Williams released an album The Boy Next Door, which failed to make an impact, and then the song “Autumn Leaves”. “Autumn Leaves” was recorded at the suggestion of Kapp one Friday, and Williams, who had previously thought that the song was titled “Falling Leaves”, said: “The first thing that came to mind was to play all those runs down the keyboard, I tried to make it sound like falling leaves.” Williams played the tune with descending arpeggios its dominant feature, backed by an orchestra. The first recording was just over 3 minutes long, and Kapp suggested that it be sped up to keep it under 3 minutes, which Williams duly did. The song became No. 1 in the U.S. in 1955, the first piano instrumental to reach number one. It stayed at No. 1 for four weeks in the bestsellers chart. The song is said to have sold two million copies around the world, and it remains the best-selling piano record of all time.
Composer Terry Riley has written a contrafact of the song (1965), using the same principle of small repetitive cells of melody and rhythm first put in use in his breakthrough piece, ‘In C’ (1964). 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.
