Songs from 1933 to 1939
Jerome Kern
Jerome Kern wrote these four songs between 1933 and 1939: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Yesterdays for the musical Roberta, The Way You Look Tonight for the film Swing Time, and All the Things You Are for a Broadway show that closed within two months. This page follows them from the first dance-band and singers' records to the saxophone, guitar and piano-trio versions that came after.
Through the years
- 1930s
All four songs are written in this decade. Paul Whiteman's orchestra records Smoke Gets in Your Eyes with Bob Lawrence singing, fifteen days before Roberta opens on Broadway in November 1933. Fred Astaire's record of The Way You Look Tonight is number one for six weeks in 1936, and Billie Holiday sings it that October with a Teddy Wilson septet.
- 1940s
Bebop players take up All the Things You Are. Dizzy Gillespie's sextet with Charlie Parker records it in 1945 with an introduction, probably Gillespie's own, that becomes the usual way to start the tune, and Parker's quintet reuses it in 1947 over the song's under a new title. In 1945 tenor saxophonist Don Byas leads a quartet with Erroll Garner through Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.
- 1950s
The songs become small-group material. Bud Powell plays Yesterdays alone in 1950, Oscar Peterson's trio records an album of Kern songs in 1953, and Thelonious Monk's quintet plays Smoke Gets in Your Eyes in 1954. Clifford Brown plays both Smoke and Yesterdays with strings in 1955, and Art Blakey's quintet takes The Way You Look Tonight past ten minutes at Birdland.
Bud Powell Yesterdays · 1950Lee Konitz Sextet featuring Miles Davis Yesterdays · 1951Stan Getz Quintet The Way You Look Tonight · 1952Billie Holiday Yesterdays · 1952Oscar Peterson Trio Smoke Gets in Your Eyes · 1953The Dave Brubeck Quartet The Way You Look Tonight · 1953Thelonious Monk Quintet Smoke Gets in Your Eyes · 1954Art Blakey Quintet The Way You Look Tonight · 19547 more
Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk Quartet The Way You Look Tonight · 1954Clifford Brown with Strings Smoke Gets in Your Eyes · 1955Clifford Brown with Strings Yesterdays · 1955Art Tatum and Ben Webster All the Things You Are · 1956Johnny Griffin The Way You Look Tonight · 1956Sarah Vaughan with the Count Basie Orchestra Smoke Gets in Your Eyes · 1957The Wes Montgomery Trio Yesterdays · 1959 - 1960s
Singers keep the lyrics in front while players open the songs up. Ella Fitzgerald sings All the Things You Are in 1963 for her Song Book series, while Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan play it without a piano in 1962. Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins, both on tenor saxophone, play it in 1963, and in 1967 Bill Evans overdubs a second piano part on Yesterdays.
- 1970s
Joe Pass plays All the Things You Are alone on guitar in 1973, covering bass line, and melody himself. In 1974 Dave Brubeck's album brings in the alto saxophonists Lee Konitz and Anthony Braxton, one in each stereo channel, and Bill Evans and bassist Eddie Gomez play the song as a duo with a melody of Evans's own. Bryan Ferry records Smoke Gets in Your Eyes in London in spring 1974, and it reaches number 17 on the UK singles chart.
- 1980s
Interest in standards returns, led by trios like Keith Jarrett's. His trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette plays The Way You Look Tonight in Paris in July 1985 and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes in Cologne in October 1989. Joe Henderson plays All the Things You Are at the Village Vanguard in 1985 in a trio with no piano.
- 1990s
Players still reshape the songs. Brad Mehldau's trio plays All the Things You Are in 1999 in seven beats to the , treating it as a song everyone knows well enough to bend. Archie Shepp records Smoke Gets in Your Eyes with Horace Parlan in Holland in 1992, and Jackie McLean's quartet records it in New York in 1999.
- 2000s
Keith Jarrett's trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, heard in the 1980s on two of these songs, records Yesterdays in Tokyo in April 2001. ECM releases it in 2009 as the title track of an album.
- 2010s
Tony Bennett, in his late 80s, opens a 2015 album of Kern songs with All the Things You Are, starting with the rarely sung over Bill Charlap's piano alone. The album wins the Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. In 2017 the Ethan Iverson Quartet, with trumpeter Tom Harrell, plays it live at the Village Vanguard.
- 2020s
In 2021 Tigran Hamasyan and Mark Turner play All the Things You Are as a quiet duo for piano and tenor saxophone, on Hamasyan's album of standards. They rework its harmony and keep the mood gentle.