* We omit melodies from our charts for copyright reasons.
"Days of Wine and Roses" is worth adding to your standards list for a simple reason: it's a compact 32-bar tune that sneaks in real chromatic voice leading and an actual key-change trick, without the sprawl of something like "Giant Steps." Nobody's going to be intimidated learning this one, and you still come out the other side with vocabulary you'll use on plenty of other tunes.
Henry Mancini wrote the music and Johnny Mercer wrote the lyrics for the title song of the 1962 film Days of Wine and Roses, adapted from J.P. Miller's 1958 "Playhouse 90" teleplay about a couple's descent into alcoholism. The title itself predates the movie by decades. It comes from Ernest Dowson's 1896 poem "Vitae Summa Brevis," which opens, "They are not long, the days of wine and roses."
By Mancini's own account in his autobiography Did They Mention the Music?, the title of the film shaped the melody, and it came together fast. "It just came, it rolled out," he wrote. Mercer moved just as quickly on the lyric. This wasn't the pair's first rodeo either. They'd already won an Oscar the year before for "Moon River," and "Days of Wine and Roses" took home the same award in 1962, plus a Grammy for Song of the Year.
There isn't one "the" jazz version everyone agrees on, which is worth knowing before you go hunting for it. Two recordings do come up again and again, though, and they point in opposite directions.
Oscar Peterson's 1964 trio recording, from the album We Get Requests, is the one most often held up as the definitive swing treatment: a relaxed medium tempo, Ed Thigpen on drums, and a particularly inspired Ray Brown on bass. If you want a model for how the tune sits when you're just walking through it at a comfortable groove, start there.
Bill Evans recorded this tune repeatedly across his career, including a version on 1979's Affinity with harmonica player Toots Thielemans. That one matters for a different reason: on the second half of the tune, the key modulates up a step, commonly noted as a shift to Ab from the home key of F. That modulation isn't in the original sheet music. It's Evans's own arranging choice, and a good one to borrow once you actually know the real changes underneath it.
Beyond those two, plenty of other players have taken very different swings at it. Wes Montgomery turned it into a bossa nova on Boss Guitar, Nancy Wilson sang it straight as a ballad on Hollywood: My Way, and Duke Ellington's orchestra covered it too. Listening to a few of these back to back is a good way to hear how much room one set of changes can leave for interpretation.
The tune sits in F major and unfolds across two 16-bar halves, each built A then B. You'll see the form labeled A-B1-A-B2 in some places and ABAC in others. Both are describing the same thing: it's not a strict AABA form, because the two "B" sections aren't the same.
The A section shares its harmonic skeleton with "East of the Sun," a genuinely useful comparison if you already know that tune. Where Mancini adds his own color is a passing Eb9(#11) and an altered D7 in the third measure, voiced with a flatted ninth and fifth. That's the detail that turns a film-score ballad into something jazz players wanted to get their hands on. If you're working on hearing altered dominants, this is a low-pressure place to find one inside a progression that already feels familiar.
The bridge leans on plain V7-I motion, but players often insert or substitute a half-diminished ii chord (iiø7) in front of the V7, so a straightforward dominant resolution becomes a minor ii-V instead. Small move. But it's the same substitution you'll run into constantly across standards from this era, so it's worth having in your fingers now.
Grab the chord chart that goes with this post and start with the A section slowly, just to get that Eb9(#11) and altered D7 under your fingers. Once that feels comfortable, play the bridge two ways: once with plain V7-I, and once with the iiø7 dropped in front, so you actually hear the difference instead of just reading about it. And if you want a longer project, put the Peterson and Evans recordings back to back. Same tune, same starting key, two completely different ideas about what to do with it.
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