You're The Top

Cole Porter is believed to have written You're The Top while eating dinner with a friend at a restaurant in Paris. The two of them spent the time amusing themselves with a a word game, "making up a list of superlatives that rhymed". The lyrics are certainly clever and over time, singers have added their own, as we see in our first 'take' on the song.

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You're The Top was introduced in the 1934 musical Anything Goes which has been re-staged many times since then. At the time, the best-selling version was Paul Whiteman's recording on Victor which made the top five (here).

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Our Take Two series aims to bring you two quite different jazz interpretations of a number, and our first take this month is a lovely, slower version of You're The Top by pianist Patricia Barber. Her father, Floyd Barber was a jazz saxophonist who played with Bud Freeman and Glen Miller. Patricia played saxophone and piano from a young age, sang in musicals in high school, and studied piano at the University of Iowa in the early 1970s. From there she went to Chicago and began performing regularly in bars and clubs. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition in March 2003, an unusual accomplishment for someone working in the field of popular songwriting.

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Here she is playing the song at the annual French jazz Victoires du Jazz awards in 2008. The song appears on her album The Cole Porter Mix.