Download with Lead    In 1954, a chap named Bart Howard was working as a piano player in a New York cabaret.  He’d been in the music business twenty years and was still pounding away as an accompaniest for those pesky, ego-inflated cabaret singers who looked down their noses at mere musicians.  They were the real stars of the show, after all.  I feel his pain – I’ve worked with vocalists with just that attitude.  But our Mr. Howard penned a song this particular year that set him up for life.  He called it “In Other Words”.

Kaye Ballard was the first to record “In Other Words”, followed by the likes of Johnny Mathis and Nancy Wilson.  Peggy Lee made it even more popular in 1960 when she sang it on The Ed Sullivan Show and she eventually convinced Bart Howard to change the name of the song to …  you guessed it (if you’ve been listening to my version above)… “Fly Me to the Moon”.  Of course, Sinatra made it huge in ’64, accompanied by the Count Basie Orchestra and arranged by Quincy Jones.  This is one of those songs that improves with age and better musicians.

“Fly Me” was used in numerous television shows and movies.  In the TV series WKRP in Cincinnati, Jennifer’s doorbell played the song.  Tony Bennett performed a parody of it on Sesame Street when “Slimy the Worm” took a trip to the moon (okaaaay).  Sinatra’s version became closely associated with the NASA Apollo space program.  It was the first music heard on the moon when Astronaut Buzz Aldrin broke out his portable cassette player when he first stepped out on the lunar surface.

So if you’re looking for a standard jazz piece to perform onstage, you might want to try our version of “Fly Me to the Moon”.  Singers, you’ll get your key from the two single piano notes at the top  (E octaves).  Subtle, huh?  Pay attention to the playful flute on track 3… very cool, I think.

(Jazz-Swing list)