On the Sunny Side

Life can be so sweet

Play the track while you read!

In my gap year I joined a jazz group near me, playing sax. Everyone in the band is at least thirty years older than me, and most of them are in their 70s and 80s. I loved it. We played old jazz standards and big band classics, and had a big front line of several saxes, trumpets and trombones, with a singer, drums, two keyboards, bass and guitar. When the drummer couldn’t make the rehearsals, my dad sometimes stepped in. In every song everyone got a solo. Sometimes we soloed in pairs. Sometimes we experimented with call and response. The guys in the band live for jazz and for them the tunes are pure nostalgia. They collect instruments, are desperate to know what model instrument everyone’s got, and reminisce over the days of Johnny Dankworth and Art Pepper. They live and breathe it. The bandleader regularly changes his ringtone to a different classic. This week, when I returned for a rehearsal, it was Duke Ellington number.

I’m now about to go into my third year of university, and nothing has changed in the band since I first turned up more than three years ago, other than that they’ve got more tight as a group. We started with a Coltrane 12 bar minor blues, ‘Mr PC’. After that, a bossa, ‘Gentle Rain’, to which we added a George Benson-style horn intro. The alto player on my left played maracas he had dug out from his garage.

Next on the crib sheet was a mix of ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ and ‘Shady Side’. The man next to me told me ‘Oh it’s a screamer, this one’. When we started playing it, there was suddenly this great wall of sound, and the men next to me were bobbing their heads and swaying together, lost in it. I had to try not to cry. We were actually playing the Tommy Dorsey orchestra version of Sunny Side, but it’s listening to the Peggy Lee version at the top of this article that most replicates how I felt when the band started playing yesterday. It was a perfect moment; I felt so happy for these men that they were still doing what they loved, and I felt happy that I could be there too, and I felt happy listening to this lovely, optimistic tune, in this quaint little church hall on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

I love jazz. Particularly, I love sleazy blues and gritty, rhythmic funk. I find the latter visceral and earthy. It’s cathartic to play, and almost carnal sometimes. The kind of music that makes you grit your teeth. We do a bit of blues in the band, but it’s mainly old-school swing and the Great American Songbook. Benny Goodman, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter. Instead of gritty, it’s measured and melodic. And it affects you in a very different way.

‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ is an old song. It was written in 1930 by Jimmy McHugh, with lyrics by Dorothy Fields, and it was added to the Broadway musical ‘Lew Leslie’s International Revue.’ It was covered by all the jazz greats. Ted Lewis, Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Doris Day, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra. Look it up on YouTube and you’ll be spoilt for choice.

The Peggy Lee version of ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ was recorded in 1941. One comment on the YouTube video above reads ‘ WW2 While I was hospitalised in Oran, North Africa in 1942 A band played this song and.It lifted my spirits and helped me on the road to recovery. I am 89 now and I’ll always remember this song. Thank you.-Chuck’. The comment sections on the various versions of this song uploaded are full of people reminiscing about how they used to dance to the song on their phonographs and how new music will never replicate that sound.

The song is pure and wholesome, while still being light-hearted. What I like about it most is it sounds old. It sounds like another era. It’s simple, upfront and honest. I imagine couples dancing to it in dancehalls and its lilting melody fluttering out of gramophones as families sit down to dinner. The fact it was a wartime favourite adds a depth to it; this tune would have comforted people in the bleakest times of their lives. It’s not flamboyant, nor over-ambitious. It just gently encourages you to keep going and make the most of the good in the world.

That’s really the point of music for the players in this band. Music isn’t an all-consuming, violent passion. Nor is it a new hobby they’re determined to master. It’s a lifelong friend that remains a comfort and a thrill at the same time. As the front line comes in with the melody, the drums tapping along and the piano tinkling, they are reminded of the past, but also of the fact that though times have changed, the music, and the sunny side of the street, will still be there in the future, too.

Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worries on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
On the sunny side of the street

Can’t you hear that pitter-pat there?
That happy tune is yours now
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street

I used to walk in the shade
With those blues on parade
But I’m not afraid baby
My rover, crossed over

If I never have a cent
I’ll be rich as Rockefeller
With gold dust at my feet
On the sunny side of the street