Night and Day

Night and Day is a standard composed by Cole Porter for the 1932 Broadway musical Gay Divorce, where it was introduced by Fred Astaire in his final stage role before departing for Hollywood. The song is distinguished by its hypnotic opening melody, which repeats a single B-flat note 35 times in the verse, a strikingly unconventional device for popular songs of the era. Porter offered conflicting accounts of this motif's inspiration, variously attributing it to Moroccan tom-tom rhythms he heard while traveling, the sound of rainwater dripping from pipes at a Newport estate, or a melody fragment that came to him at the New York Ritz-Carlton. The lyric uses this rhythmic insistence as a form of word painting, evoking ticking clocks, beating drums, and dripping rain to convey obsessive, unrelenting desire. When the 1934 film adaptation The Gay Divorcee was produced, censors required changes to the stage show, but Night and Day was the only song from Porter's original score retained for the picture. The composition became an immediate international sensation, with Porter himself noting it was being played as far afield as Zanzibar by 1935. It has since accumulated well over a thousand recorded jazz versions alone, with landmark interpretations by Art Tatum and Ben Webster, Frank Sinatra across three distinct arrangements, Billie Holiday, and Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 in a bossa nova reimagining.