Autumn Leaves

"Autumn Leaves" is a popular song based on a French song "Les Feuilles mortes" ("The Dead Leaves") composed by Joseph Kosma in 1945. The original lyrics were written by Jacques Prévert in French, and the English lyrics were by Johnny Mercer. An instrumental version by pianist Roger Williams was a number one best-seller in the US Billboard charts of 1955. "Autumn Leaves" has become a jazz standard and it is one of the most recorded songs by jazz musicians. More than a thousand commercial recordings are known to have been released by mainstream and jazz musicians. Background Kosma was a native of Hungary who was introduced to Prévert in Paris, and they collaborated on the song "Les Feuilles mortes". The song was legally deposited in 1945, and published in 1947. The song has its in origin in the ballet music written by Kosma for Le Rendez-vous by Roland Petit, performed in Paris at the end of the Second World War. Large parts of the melodies are exactly the same as the ballet music, which was itself partially similar to "Poème d'octobre No. 4" by Jules Massenet. This portion of the tune has also been noted to be near-identical to a passage in Tchaikovsky's 1888 composition Hamlet Overture-Fantasia, Op. 67. Marcel Carné used "Les Feuilles mortes" for the 1946 film Les Portes de la nuit (Gates of the Night), where it was sung/hummed in parts by Irène Joachim and Yves Montand. The most successful commercial recording of "Les Feuilles mortes" was by Yves Montand (Columbia) in 1949, which sold a million copies within 5 years. recorded it (1947 or 1948), as did Juliette Gréco who first recorded a version in 1949.