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A Night in Tunisia

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For the Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers album see A Night in Tunisia (album)
"A Night in Tunisia" is a musical composition written by Dizzy Gillespie in 1942 while he was playing with the Earl Hines Band. It has become a Jazz standard. It is also known as "Interlude, under which title it was recorded (with lyrics) by Sarah Vaughan. Gillespie himself called the tune, "Night in Tunisia".

"A Night in Tunisia", along with "Manteca", was one of the signature pieces of Gillespie's bebop big band, and he also played it with his small groups. One of its most famous performances is Charlie Parker's recording for Dial (Dial even released a fragmentary take of it simply titled "The Famous Alto Break"); it also became closely identified with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, who often gave showstopping performances of it with extra percussion from the entire horn section.

On the album A Night At Birdland, Volume 1, Blakey introduces the piece with the (probably apocryphal) story of how he was present when Dizzy composed it "on the bottom of a garbage can." The liner notes say, "The Texas department of sanitation can take a low bow."

The complex bass line in the "A section" is notable for avoiding the standard walking bass pattern of straight quarter notes, and the use of oscillating half-step-up/half-step-down chord changes gives the song a unique, mysterious feeling. Like many of Gillespie's tunes, it features a short written introduction and a brief interlude that occurs between solo sections — in this case, a six-bar sequence that dramatically launches the soloist into an unaccompanied cadenza.

It has been covered in various styles by various artists, including Bud Powell, Stan Getz, Maynard Ferguson, Miles Davis, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Sonny Rollins, The Modern Jazz Quartet, Anthony Braxton, Stefano di Battista, Bobby McFerrin, The Turtle Island String Quartet, The Toasters and Chaka_Khan incorporated the tune on her famous tribute album Echoes of an Era.

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Last updated on Monday February 11, 2008 at 20:33:44 PST (GMT -0800)
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