The Night Has a Thousand Eyes

The album Coltrane’s Sound begins explosively. There’s a single-note saxophone pickup, and then bang, straight into the full band playing a big, bright latin tune. A few seconds in, the feel changes to swing, then back to latin. Sometimes the chords are pedaled, floating and modal; other times they seem like regular functional circle-of-fifths changes, though those don’t last long. The name of the tune suggests a pop song, not a Coltrane composition, but it’s much too artsy and hip to be a pop song. So what is this? Other than just, awesome? At some point I tried looking up other versions of the tune and was very confused when the first page of Google results pointed me to Bobby Vee’s 1962 hit: You may also have come across the Carpenters’ version: I couldn’t hear any relationship between this tune and the one on Coltrane’s Sound. As it turns out, there is no relationship; Bobby Vee and the Carpenters are doing a completely different tune with the same title. The actual song that…