The song is the jazz standard, What's New. You can read more about the history of the chart here. In short, it was written by a bassist Bob Haggarty who included a solo for himself. My library contains three recordings of this chart.
My favorite would have to be by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers with Doug Watkins playing bass. This can be found on the CD reissue of At The Cafe Bohemia, Vol. 1 (It is a bonus track that did not appear on the original LP). First of all, it's not often you hear bass solos. Secondly, even rarer is a bass feature heard His playing is very smooth and lyrical for plucked bass and it is backed by wonderful comping from pianist Horace Silver, who does just enough to let you know he's there, but nothing to overwhelm the soloist.An honorable mention, goes to my favorite trumpet player, Clifford Brown. His recording can be found on the With Strings album, which I always hesitated to buy/listen to because I thought it wouldn't be my cup of tea. But with Brown's warm sound and relaxed energy, you can never go wrong.
On a side note, when looking for songs for this new years playlist, I searched my library for "change," since it looks like that will be this year's theme. Oddly enough, only a few results popped up. You can bet there will probably be a lot of songs about change this year. Hopefully there will be some on the jazz size and not just pop music.
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Some music with change:
-Ornette Coleman's "Change of the Century" from Change of the Century, 1960
-"Change the Guard" by Steve Coleman
-Anything from Beck's Sea Change
-"Chicago/We Can Change the World" by CSNY
-"New Morning" by Bob Dylan
And, for Barack Obama, James Brown's "Funky President"
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