Jazz Numbers

From Muppet Wiki

A series of animated counting films were used on Sesame Street produced during the first season. From two to ten, for each film, the songs are individually registered as "Jazz #x," where x is the featured number.

The segments, featuring race cars and spies, were shown regularly from 1969 to 1991, with vocals provided by Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane. The first segment, "Jazz #2", debuted in the first test pilot, and was first broadcast in the first episode of the series.

Composer Denny Zeitlin remembers:

John Magnuson of Imagination, Inc. hired me to compose and perform that soundtrack, which is called "1 to 10". I'm playing piano and clavinet on it, with Bobby Natanson on drums, and Mel Graves, bass. Some time after we recorded it, Grace Slick over-dubbed her parts. [1]

Jazz #8 was often followed by an Ernie and Bert sketch, which begins with Ernie watching (and singing along to) the end of the segment on his TV.

The film for #2 was included on Old School: Volume 1, as part of episodes 1 and 536, and in Old School: Volume 2, as part of the test pilot. The film for #10 was included in the Sesame Street Unpaved special. On the Shalom Sesame videos, Hebrew dubbed versions of #4, #6 and #8 appear, respectively, on Show 3: Kibbutz, Show 5: Jerusalem, and Show 6: Chanukah. The Sesame Street Unpaved book features stills of the racecars on the first page of each chapter. The spies from these segments appear on the cover of The Sesame Street Book of Numbers.

Segments

Episode numbers denote first appearance according to the CTW Archives.

• 2 (First: Episode 0001)
• 3 (First: Episode 0002)
• 4 (First: Episode 0006)
• 5 (First: Episode 0007)
• 6 (First: Episode 0011)
• 7 (First: Episode 0012)
• 8 (First: Episode 0016)
• 9 (First: Episode 0016)
• 10 (First: Episode 0021)

Sources

1. ↑ Denny Zeitlin, personal communication with Heather F. (User:Raposofan), May 29, 2007. See talk page for full e-mail.