"A Night in Tunisia" is a jazz standard written by Dizzy Gillespie in 1942 while he played with the Benny Carter band. He composed it at the piano at Kelly's Stables in New York, where it was first called "Interlude". Frank Paparelli received co-writer credit from Gillespie as compensation for unrelated transcription work, though he had no part in writing the song. Jon Hendricks wrote the standard lyrics, which were sung by Lambert, Hendricks & Ross and by Ella Fitzgerald.
The piece became one of the signature works of Gillespie's bebop big band. It has a complex ostinato bass line, half-step substitute dominant chord changes, a short introduction, a twelve-bar interlude and a four-bar break, and it is played in D minor in 4/4 with an Afro-Cuban feel. The earliest documented recording is a live performance by the Gillespie-Oscar Pettiford Quintet at the Onyx Club in New York in January 1944. Later versions by Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker and Gillespie, Bud Powell, the Miles Davis Quartet, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey with Lee Morgan are among the notable ones. In 1982 Hendricks wrote "Another Night in Tunisia", which The Manhattan Transfer recorded in 1985.
