The album Sonny Side Up, featuring both Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins, is fire, and Sonny Stitt’s chorus from On the Sunny Side of the Street is hard to beat. I’ve had this whole album on repeat for the last month or so and there’s not a bad track.
Dizzy Gillespie sings on “Sunny” and there’s a video of him playing it with Stitt:
On the recording, Stitt plays a bunch of rapid fire 16th note patterns over the bridge which makes it hard for me to play above 70% speed — good patterns worth incorporating into the practice routine. But the last A section is the high point, especially the emphasis on chromatic progression from the G7 to Am7 near the end. Here’s my transcription.
