A Night in Tunisia

Dizzy Gillespie wrote this in 1942 and it is the tune most people name when they are asked what bebop sounds like. The A Night in Tunisia chords and the backing track here can be taken at any tempo and moved to any key.

Who wrote "A Night in Tunisia"

Gillespie wrote it in 1942 while he was in Earl Hines's band. Frank Paparelli is credited as co-writer, but Gillespie gave him that share in payment for unrelated transcription work and always said Paparelli had nothing to do with the piece. Jon Hendricks added a lyric later, which is why the tune has words at all. The Gillespie-Pettiford quintet was playing it at the Onyx Club in New York in January 1944, and it was first put on record that December with Sarah Vaughan singing and Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the band. It is still under copyright.

Recordings that made it a standard

• Charlie Parker Septet, Dial single (1946) — recorded on 28 March with Miles Davis on trumpet. The four-bar alto break before Parker's solo is the single most transcribed passage in the music, and students still learn the tune in order to get at it.

• Dizzy Gillespie, RCA Victor single (1946) — the composer's own studio version from February of the same year, later put into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It is the reading that fixed the arrangement.

• Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Jazz at Massey Hall (1953) — the two of them with Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach in Toronto, played very fast and on the edge of coming apart.

• Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, A Night in Tunisia (1960) — with Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter. Blakey turns the vamp into something heavier than bebop, and this is the version most bands copy now.