Fred Astaire is one of the great jazz artists of the twentieth century, he is best known for his brilliant dancing in the movie musicals of the 1930s.
Fred Astaire introduced “Night and Day” on stage, and his recording of the song was a #1 hit. He performed it again in the 1934 film version of the show, renamed The Gay Divorcee, and became his signature pieces.
The construction of “Night and Day” is unusual for a hit song of 1930s. Most popular tunes then featured 32-bar choruses, divided into 8-bar section, unusually with an A AABA musical structure, the B section representing the bridge.
The vocal verse is also unusual in that most of the melody consists of single note with inconclusive and unusual harmonies underneath. Repeated notes in the verse is an indication of Astaire’s obsessions
Night and Day;
You are the one;
Only you, beneath the moon, and under the sun
The melody is just the same, one note either played or held for two and one-half measures. All the repeated notes flatten the melody, which transfers the emphasis to the harmonies and Latin beat.
Instrumentation: piano, bass, drums and guitar
Performance style:
Rhythm: The tune begins with a pedal (repeated) dominant with major seventh chord on flattened sixth of the key, which then resolves into dominant seventh in the next bar.
Harmony:
Jazz is genre of music with an emphasis on improvisation, and swung syncopated rhythms. It often utilizes elements of the blues, and often uses standard show tunes as improvisational vehicles. However it goes beyond the blues in both its melodies of its harmonies. Jazz has more swinging beat with a kind of old fashioned sound to it so it is kind of more classical whereas R&B is more modern.
R&B in its original form, is based on the blues, and it contains a few of the same characters, such as the occasional use of shuffle (similar idea to swing), syncopated
Rhythms and wailing blues solos, they are not such integral features as they are in jazz. The harmony is often more simple, and the chord progression are more often than not standard 12 bar blues sequences rarely modulating outside the home key, as is common in jazz.