Posted by Jay Livingston
Phil Woods was a top jazz man, but his best known solo was as the unnamed sax player on Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” Bud Shank, another jazz reed man, did the anonymous flute solo on The Mamas and the Papas’s huge hit “California Dreamin.’” But the winner in the “widely heard but uncredited performances by jazz musicians” competition goes to Bob Dorough, who died Monday at age 94. He wrote and sang many of the numbers on Schoolhouse Rock – numbers like 8.
This performance is by jazz singer and pianist Blossom Dearie, but Dorough can be heard on other numbers like 3 and the bluesy 9 as well as “Conjunction Junction,” a title I couldn’t help borrowing for my skeptical post on Twersky and Kahneman’s “conjunction fallacy” (here).
His best-known song in the jazz world is “I’m Hip,” probably because of Dave Frishberg’s lyric, which includes the line, “When it was hip to hep I was hep.” Frishberg himself noted how hip the song was – nearly all the main notes in the melody are not in the underlying chord. (You can hear the songwriters performing it here.)
Another unusual but fine Dorough tune is “Nothing Like You,” with lyrics by Fran Landesman. Bassist Esperanza Spalding sings it here, and prefaces it by saying it’s “really fun and really hard.”
Vulture, as a sort of eulogy, has posted this list of his best “Schoolhouse Rock” songs, all more melodically conventional than his jazz tunes.
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