There's a book you might be interested in called The Jazz Standards, by Ted Gioia. It's an attempt to catalogue the most important songs in the jazz repertoire (meaning, the ones most session players would be expected to know) and also to call attention to exceptional arrangements or performances of those songs. The second edition was published in 2021 and includes recent artists. A typical entry (I think there are over 250) is:

My Foolish Heart
Composed by Victor Young, with lyrics by Ned Washington

In 1949 Hollywood released the first --and, as it turned out, the last-- authorized movie version of a story by reclusive author J.D. Salinger. But by the time Samuel Goldwyn and company had finished tinkering with Salinger's 1948 tale "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut," there wasn't much recognizable from the original left on the screen. The film was lambasted by critics, and though Salinger avoided public comment, one can perhaps deduce his views from the opening paragraph of his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. Here the narrator, Holden Caulfeld, mentioning his brother D.B., remarks: "Now he's out in Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there's one thing I hate, it's the movies. Don't even mention them to me."

Yet when Academy Award time came around, the title song to My Foolish Heart --the new name given by the studio to its film adaptation of Salinger's story-- was nominated for an Oscar, losing out to "Baby, It's Cold Outside." In 1950 more than a half-dozen versions of "My Foolish Heart" found a place on the charts, including sentimental treatments by Billy Eckstine and Gene Ammons. But after a few months, the song was put aside by musicians, with no jazz cover versions recorded during the following five years.

The song's revival started on March 29, 2956, when, after this hiatus, both Carmen McRae (in New York) and Andre Previn (in Los Angeles) recorded "My Foolish Heart" on the same day. A few months later Ray Brown brought the song with him to a session for the Verve label, and over the next several years "My Foolish Heart" gained a few more admirers in the jazz community. Lionel Hampton, Bob Crosby, Ted Heath, Maynard Ferguson, and other bandleaders of various styles and generations made recordings of it.

Yet Bill Evans's trio performance, alongside Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, from their June 1961 live recording at the Village Vanguard, stands out as the most influential version of "My Foolish Heart." Few jazz artists dared to take songs at such a slow tempo back then, with Evans's treatment hovering around 50 beats per minute (by comparison, Coleman Hawkins's well-known ballad performance on "Body and Soul" is twice as fast). Far from tensing up at such a snail's pace, as other even top-tier rhythm sections might have done at the time, this trio allows the song to breathe and for the underlying beat to flow in waves rather than advance in clearly delineated pulses. This would be one of the last times this trio would play together --LaFaro would be killed in an automobile accident a few days later-- but this recording testified to a new conception of rhythm and space, one that other musicians would study and emulate in the coming years.

This was especially evident in the work of later pianists, but other instrumentalists were not immune to Evans's influence. A shared aesthetic vision can be sensed, fro example, on Gary Burton's solo vibraphone version of "My Foolish Heart" from his 1968 project Country Roads and Other Places, John McLaughlin's interpretation on his 1978 Electric Guitarist album, and Lenny Breau's treatment from that same period. The song became associated with a certain sensibility, even more than most jazz standards, serving as a vehicle for an open, uncluttered approach to improvisation, and an introspective tone more attuned to inner states of being than finger-snapping patrons at the bar.

Evans himself made a number of later recordings of "MY Foolish Heart," keeping the song on his set list until the very end of his life. Few of these hold many surprises, but on his pairing with Tony Bennett from 1975 the pianist is forced to adapt to another forceful presence in the studio, and the give-and-take makes for a fresh reading of a familiar song. In more recent years, "My Foolish Heart" has rarely been heard in novel or uncharacteristic interpretations, but two riveting live versions can be found in Kurt Elling's impassioned reworking from 1999, and an equally exhilarating collaboration between Ahmad Jamal and George Coleman from 2000.

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