After the songs release in 1966, it was immediately covered by a whole host of artists, including Frank Sinatra.

In 1968 it appeared on Frank Sinatra’s album Francis A. & Edward K. Which featured Duke Ellington and his big band.  Check it out …

This appears to be the recording which added 2 changes that became universally adopted by the music community.

The first was adding in a bvii- chord before the III7 Chord in bar 2 and on every time repeat. This turns that section into a ii-V-I resolving to the C major Chord.

Original: E-7 | G7 | Cmaj7

New: E-7 | Dm7 G7 | Cmaj7|

This is a very common technique in jazz, whenever you have a dominant chord you can add a minor chord a fifth above in front of it. This is called “Two’ing the Five”. A dominant chord is the V chord in the key, and you are adding the ii infront. This is common for improvising single note lines as well as in the harmony/comping parts.

The second key feature of this version is that it is transposed to the key of A minor, something that a lot of jazz musicians were happy about and decided to make the new standard key.

Here are the new changes written out…

One other thing that Franks version did was it actually did a tritone sub on the C9 chords and changed them all for Gb7 chords, however this change wasn’t adopted by everyone else.

Now that we are getting into jazz territory you can also bet that those minor7b5 chords aren’t going to be simplified like before. You’re going to need to be able to play, hear, and improvise over those trickier sounds.

Lets run through some common scale choices in the next section.