Body & Soul . . .

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Body and Soul was written in London for Gertrude Lawrence and was first recorded by Jack Hylton and his orchestra. Rising quickly to popularity, Libby Holman introduced it in the U.S. in the 1930 Broadway revue Three's a Crowd and it was used as the theme to the 1947 film, Body and Soul. Like many pop songs of the time, it became a jazz standard, with hundreds of versions performed and recorded by dozens of artists.
As with many pop standards, there are variations on the lyrics, primarily between renditions by male and female performers. Classic vocal recordings include those of Ella Fitzgerald, Annette Hanshaw, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra.
Among the most famous of these is the take recorded by Coleman Hawkins and His Orchestra on October 11, 1939, at their only recording session for Bluebird, a subsidiary of RCA Victor. The recording is unusual in that the song's melody is never directly stated in the recording; Hawkins' two-choruses of improvisation on the tune's chord progression constitute almost the entire take. In 2004, the Library of Congress entered it into the National Recording Registry. The tune remained popular with jazz musicians throughout the twentieth century, with arrangements recorded by John Coltrane on his "Coltrane's Sound album (1964) and Charles Mingus on "Mingus Plays Piano" (1963), to name a few.

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