I Married An Angel - Richard Rogers

[MrJazz]

Does anyone have the chords to I Married an Angel as performed by Nat Adderley?

[Keith88]

I smiled when I saw this request this morning. "I Married An Angel" is a sweet old tune I learned from a favorite fakebook over 50 years ago when I was in high school. I never played it on a gig (the other guys had never heard of it) and have never heard it performed until now.

"I Married An Angel" was a 1938 musical with music composed by Richard Rogers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart. In addition to the song of the same name, the standard "Spring Is Here" came from the same show. The tune is a straightforward 32-bar AABA form in which the A sections are almost identical and the bridge is made of ii-V-I sequences in the dominant and subdominant keys with a iv-V of V-V7 turnaround.

When I listened to the Nat Adderley version on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHvxDBYbSTU), I was struck by the simplicity and utter tastefulness of the playing. As a pianist myself, I wondered who was playing; it turned out to be Hank Jones, with Jerome Richardson on tenor. Jones played the chords straight without a lot of extraneous harmonic motion (I should do this more often) but with subtlety. For example, in the opening A section, he uses a vi chord (in the played key, Cm7) but at the very end of the measure, converts it to V of ii for an instant, leading to the ii chord on the first beat of the next measure. The use of the iv chord in the second measure of the first two A sections is not duplicated in the third A; here the V of ii is used directly to lead into measure 27 of the tune. It is impossible to catch all of Jones's magic on a chord chart, but I've done the best I could to keep it simple.

The fakebook key of "I Married An Angel" is F major, but Adderley and company do it in Eb, and that is the default key of my chord chart. The quintet starts at 65 bpm, but the second chorus is played at 60 bpm (so even the pros slow down sometimes).

It turns out that I have a solo piano gig this Friday. So for the first time, I'll perform "I Married An Angel" on a gig, some 50 years after I learned the tune. Thanks for the suggestion.

I Married An Angel - Richard Rogers