Lush Life (jazz song)

It was performed publicly for the first time by Strayhorn and vocalist Kay Davis with the Duke Ellington Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on November 13, 1948.[1] The lyric describes the author's weariness of the night life after a failed romance, wasting time with "jazz and cocktails" at "come-what-may places" and in the company of girls with "sad and sullen gray faces/with distingué traces".[1] The melody is over relatively complex chord changes, compared with many jazz standards, with chromatic movement and modulations that evoke a dreamlike state and the dissolute spirit characteristic of the "lush life.""[1] During a 1949 interview, Strayhorn spoke of the song’s genesis: “’Lush Life’ wasn’t the first tune of mine Duke [Ellington] heard.I wrote it in 1936 while I was clerking at the Pennfield drugstore on the corner of Washington and Penn in Pittsburgh ….I was writing a song a day then, and I’ve forgotten many of them myself ….One night I remembered it and played it for Duke ….I called it 'Life is Lonely,’ but when anyone wanted me to play it they’d ask for ‘that thing about lush life’.”[2] Nat King Cole recorded "Lush Life" in 1949, while trumpeter Harry James recorded it four times.