I Can't Get Started

Bunny Berigan, a trumpeter with Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, started a band in 1937 and chose "I Can't Get Started" as his theme song. He had been performing the song during the previous year at a club in New York City.[3] He made a recording for Vocalion on April 13, 1936[4] but gradually he made subtle changes in the arrangement. After forming his band, he recorded "I Can't Get Started" again, this time for Victor.[5]

Jazz trumpeter Dick Sudhalter noted the changes that had been made since the Vocalion recording. "An introduction—an extended cadenza over four different sustained chords in the key of C—had been added by this time, but otherwise Berigan's routine had not changed since the Vocalion recording. But whereas the Vocalion comes across as a virtuoso performance of a great song, the Victor version presents itself as a kind of concerto, a tour de force for a trumpeter of imagination and daring having impeccable command of his instrument."[6]

The Berigan band's recordings of "I Can't Get Started" and "The Prisoner's Song" were issued together on the twelve-inch Victor record 36208, and were a part of an album of four such records entitled A Symposium of Swing.[7] An edited version was created by Victor on December 4, 1937 and issued as 25728A.[8]

The recording was an immediate hit and reached 10th place on the charts.[9] In 1975, Berigan's 1937 recording of "I Can't Get Started" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.[10]

Berigan's recording and the song itself, however, have continued to be prized by lovers of jazz. Billie Holiday recorded it on September 15, 1938.[11]

• Duke Ellington – Piano in the Foreground (1961)
• Paul Bley Trio – (Paul Bley/Charles Mingus/Art Blakey) – Introducing Paul Bley (1953)[12]
• Hamiet Bluiett with Ted Dunbar – Ballads and Blues (1994)[12]
• Roy Eldridge – Happy Time (1975)[13]
• Ella Fitzgerald – Newport Jazz Festival: Live at Carnegie Hall (1973)[14]
• Stan Getz with Kenny Barron – Anniversary! (1987)[12]
• Dizzy Gillespie – (1945)[12]
• Stéphane Grappelli, Joe Pass, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen – Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen, Denmark (1980)[15]
• Billie Holiday with Lester Young – (1938)[12]
• John Lewis with Percy Heath and Chico Hamilton – Grand Encounter (1956)[12]
• Joe Lovano with Tom Harrell – Live at the Village Vanguard (1994)[12]
• Charles Mingus with John Handy – Jazz Portraits: Mingus in Wonderland (1959)[12]
• Joe Pass - Virtuoso No. 4 (1983, recorded in 1973)[16]
• Oscar Peterson – Soft Sands (1957)[17]
• Sonny Rollins – A Night at the Village Vanguard (1957)[12]
• Lennie Tristano – 1946[12]
• Lester Young with Nat King Cole and Red Callender (1942)[12]
• Lester Young with Oscar Peterson – Lester Young with the Oscar Peterson Trio (1954)[18]