Jazz Song of the Day

Up-tempo “Cherokee" has long served as a proving ground for jazzers who claim to have serious chops. In this rendition, soloists Wynton Marsalis, Walter Blanding Jr. and Véronica Swift show definitively how it’s done, each taking several choruses. Long lines of 16th notes, then sixteenth triplets, then squeals spew forth from Marsalis’s trumpet. Blanding (starting at 3:47) keeps up the pace while introducing fresh motifs, yet maintaining his gritty sound. Finally, Swift (at 5:37) resurrects the sound of classic vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O'Day, displaying robust air support, bell-tone vibrato, elastic time and blues-bending notes and some of the best scat vocalization in jazz today.

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