This week’s Song of the Week: “Dedicated to You” Notes on the Eight Versions

By Kim Kleinman, Contributing Writer

That descending figure and resolution over a I-IV chord pattern is what grabbed me when pianist Randy Ingram played “Dedicated to You” on a Small’s Live Stream from Mezzrow’s recently. I played Name That Tune with my usual level of success until Ingram announced it afterwards. 

Fritz offered me the chance to pick this week’s song; the choice was easy. Choosing versions was less easy, but more fun.

The first recording of Sammy Cahn’s tune and our starting place is from Andy Kirk and His Twelve Clouds of Joy who made their name in Kansas City. It sets the mood with a concise big band recording from 1936. The middle of the first set includes pianists whom I want to know better: James Williams and John Hicks. Williams recorded “Dedicated to You” on his first solo album as he rose to prominence as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Hicks was everywhere in the 1980s, but my musical attention was being distracted from jazz and I didn’t get to fully appreciate him. His smart trio work here, with Buster Williams, and Louis Hayes, is familiar and right. The first set ends with a lush Sarah Vaughn/Billy Eckstine duet.

If I rediscovered the tune courtesy of a Small’s Live Stream, then it’s fitting to have musicians I see regularly there—Eric Alexander, Jim Rotondi, Steve Davis, David Hazeltine, Peter Washington, and Joe Farnsworth—work out on the tune, performing under the name of One for All. A very young Rachael Price performs what is the title tune to her 2008 album, reminding us that her prowess in Lake Street Dive builds on this serious jazz apprenticeship. “Dedicated to You” is just one luxurious melody Freddie Hubbard dug into on his “The Body and The Soul” albu, and that could be where we could leave things.

But, we wrap up on an even higher level with what, I belatedly remember, is the version I first heard—Johnny Hartman singing with John Coltrane, pushing the tune’s richness to exquisite limits.

After two sets of a beautiful but particularly slow ballad, it seemed like a palate cleanser of Count Basie and the Orchestra doing their rousing anthem “One O’Clock Jump” was in order. This version from Newport in 1957 features soloists Lester Young and Roy Eldridge before Illinois Jacquet rides it out with the throttle fully open. I close out the hour with Billy Childs, joied by the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, taking on Chick Corea’s “Crystal Silence,” another simple, delicate, beautiful tune.