Cottontail – featuring the Sax Section

About Cottontail

(from AllAboutJazz.com)
Cotton Tail was, at the time, a startlingly modern composition, an example of modern jazz before there was ever such a term. The beboppers of the forties in particular were influenced heavily by the record’s angular melody, tricky structure, and advanced harmonic theory. Cotton Tail emphasizes ninths and flatted fifths, two notes that in the future would be important to the development of the bebop vocabulary and fit in with the maverick rule-breaking of established musical ideas that Parker and Gillespie would make their specialty.

But perhaps more importantly, Cotton Tail represented a new approach to composition that included improvisation as a key element. Ellington developed his melodies not just as songs; he also carved out room to showcase his band members. Cotton Tail is as much of a blowing tune as he ever wrote, and an up-tempo number clearly not intended for dancing. It helped shape a new role for jazz that was beginning to emerge during the Swing Era: jazz didn’t have to be music for jazz dancing, it could exist for its own sake.