Lil’ Darlin’

I finally got around to watching Tár. Early in the movie, Lydia helps her wife Sharon through a panic attack by dancing with her to one of my favorite jazz recordings, Neal Hefti’s tune”Lil’ Darlin'” as recorded by Count Basie. Lydia says, “Let’s bring this down to sixty beats per minute.” Sharon corrects her: “Sixty-four.”

That is incredibly slow! Neal Hefti intended the tune to be played at more of a medium swing tempo, but Basie was right to play it as a ballad. A guy on this trumpet forum thread describes it as “grown folks tempo.” A less skilled jazz ensemble would find it hard to resist the urge to speed up, but the Basie band actually slows down slightly over the course of the performance. That is incredible control.

Here’s a much faster live performance.

Jon Hendricks wrote lyrics, some of which Lydia Tár sings to Sharon.

I wanted to transcribe the Basie recording, but quickly realized that it was going to take me a long time tease apart the dense chord voicings in the horns. Fortunately, Neal Hefti’s original performance score is in circulation. Hefti represents swing with dotted eighth-sixteenth pairs, implying a 75% swing ratio. I wonder how typical that was among jazz arrangers in the 50s. Basie’s swing is wide, but not that wide! Anyway, I adapted a chart from the score. I reduced the horn parts to four notes by dropping doubles and octaves and such. When the recording diverges from score, I follow the recording.

The tune is in and around F major, with lots of secondary dominants and tritone substitutions and tall, dense chord voicings. The tune is creamy smoothness for the most part, but the main melody begins in a strikingly weird way. Freddie Green plays a broken G13 chord, and then the horns come in with the melody on the “and” of one, half a beat later than you’re expecting it. That is the weakest eighth note subdivision in the bar, and the least likely place to put an important rhythmic accent. The tune’s syncopation is otherwise very mild by jazz standards, but that first offbeat sets the tone.

The big difference between the score and the recording is in measure 20 and similar turnaround phrases after that. Neal Hefti wrote a nice little turnaround phrase on Am7 – D7, but for some reason Basie leaves it out. I guess he just liked how the bass sounded by itself there, or with quietly tasteful piano commentary. You do hear the phrase that Hefti wrote at the end of the trumpet solo. That solo is  played by Wendell Culley, and it was through-composed, you can see it in the score. 

I found a way to adapt the tune for guitar. It’s not easy, but it’s slow enough to be within my limited technical abilities. Here’s my tab.

Speaking of guitar: Matt Buttermann wrote his masters thesis about Freddie Green’s comping style. Green played an unamplified archtop guitar, and its strings were high off the fretboard. This was necessary for Green to be audible over the rest of the band. To keep from killing his left hand, Green tended to play chords with only two or three notes, and sometimes only one note. He described himself as wanting to blend in with the drums, effectively playing pitched percussion rather than a chordal instrument. It works!