I Should Care

Another Cahn collaboration with arrangers Stordahl and Weston, this sophisticated torch song became one of his most jazzed-over standards. The lyric’s cool, detached exterior — “I should care, I should go around weeping” — masks genuine heartache, a trick Cahn pulled off better than almost anyone.

Julie London’s smoky 1955 recording and Thelonious Monk’s solo piano interpretation on Thelonious Himself (1957) show the song’s remarkable range — equally at home as a late-night vocal or a vehicle for pure improvisation. John Lewis’s 1960 reading on The Wonderful World of Jazz brings the cool, spacious approach of the MJQ to bear on it.