Too Marvelous For Words
Are you familiar with Johnny Mercer? He wrote the lyrics to some of the greatest and most played standards in the history of jazz…Autumn Leaves, Days of Wine and Roses, I’m Old Fashioned and countless more.
Recently I fell in love with a lesser known standard credited to Mercer. It’s called “Too Marvelous for Words”. And although I’ve heard many straight-ahead versions by the likes of Sinatra, Ella, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and others, the two that really caught my ear were by Diana Krall and Eliane Elias. They both recorded it as a bossa! And it works so well that if you didn’t know the tune, you might think Jobim actually wrote it!
Check out my fingerstyle bossa arrangement here. It’s just under 2 minutes!
PDF & AUDIO DOWNLOAD:
The “Too Marvelous For Words” Files can be downloaded for $7.50. Your contribution is much appreciated, as it helps support the site and allows me to keep investing the long hours required to produce these lessons. The download includes: PDFs of the arrangement with both regular notation and TAB, MP3 of the arrangement, a Band in a Box file and a Midi file. The Midi file can be opened with the free notation app, MuseScore which allows you to loop sections, transpose or change tempo when practicing.
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This is the first time that I have heard a Bossa Nova version of Too Marvelous For Words. I guess that I must of missed it in Diana Krall’s work. It is my impression that many, if not most of us in the United States at one time held the incorrect idea that jazz, as it occurred here in the USA, was an isolated, original, and unique musical development that happened only here in our part of North America. I really liked Bossa Nova from the first time that I heard it played over fifty years ago, and I understood why many of the jazz greats played Bossa Nova tunes; however, it took me some time to understand that many, if not most, of the countries in the Caribbean Sea, North America, Central America, and South America have their own unique forms of beautiful music that resulted from human creativity motivated by various mixtures of African, Indigenous, and European influences. Of course, I still love hearing Bossa Nova. Thank you for writing and posting this Bossa Nova version of Johnny Mercer’s work.