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"Autumn Leaves" is a popular song and jazz standard composed by Joseph Kosma with original lyrics by Jacques Prévert in French (original French title: "Les Feuilles Mortes"), and later by Johnny Mercer in English. An instrumental version by pianist Roger Williams was a number one best-seller in the US Billboard charts of 1955.
As a jazz standard, "Autumn Leaves" has accumulated more than a thousand commercial recordings.The song was recorded steadily throughout the 1950s by leading pop vocalists including Bing Crosby (1950), Nat King Cole (1955), Doris Day (1956), and Frank Sinatra (1957). It was also quickly adopted by instrumental jazz artists including Artie Shaw (1950), Stan Getz (1952), Erroll Garner and Ahmad Jamal (separately in 1955), Duke Ellington (1957), Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis, and Vince Guaraldi (all 1958). Roger Williams made the song a number-one hit in the U.S. in 1955, the first piano instrumental to reach number one.
In 2012, jazz historian Philippe Baudoin called the song "the most important non-American standard" and noted that "it has been recorded about 1400 times by mainstream and modern jazz musicians alone and is the eighth most-recorded tune by jazzmen."
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