A Quick Note About This Year's Selection

We're still putting the finishing touches to this year's overview, but we couldn't wait to share some standout tracks that are strong contenders for the final list.

What you'll find here is our working shortlist - songs we've chosen not just because they were popular, but because they truly captured something special about 1957. Some made history, others broke new artistic ground, and a few just perfectly bottled the mood of the times.

Think we've missed an important one? We'd genuinely love to hear from you - just tap the contact button up top to share your suggestions. After all, the best musical conversations are the ones we have together.

Bogart and the Last Toast in Black and White

January 1957 saw Humphrey Bogart take his final bow. He didn't just leave behind that iconic image of a trench coat and cigarette... What faded with him was a whole way of moving through cinema. That farewell marked a shift. The black-and-white glow of old Hollywood had started to dim, and something deeper was disappearing with it — a way of leaving without needing to explain. Casablanca wasn't just a dot on the map anymore. It had become something different — like an echo you can't quite place, a haze that won't lift, a promise nobody got around to keeping.

In Rick's Café, the cigarette smoke did more than hide faces — it made you wonder who was really on whose side. And as As Time Goes By played for the hundredth time that night, every look across the room felt like someone was making their move, every raised glass like someone was calling a bluff. Outside, the war roared on; but within those walls — a world in miniature, on the edge of collapse — things were still decided with words, with silences, with songs. Bogart, host of that sanctuary, embodied the man who had learnt to navigate the shadows: cynical on the outside, wounded underneath, loyal to a code time would soon render obsolete.

And time, indeed, moved on. By the end of the 1960s, the world was no longer split like it had been in the hinge years of the 1930s and 1940s; it had hardened into blocs, into diplomatic smiles that concealed missiles. The Cold War was its own kind of Rick’s — a room full of shadows, where alliances shifted behind closed doors. If Casablanca ended with “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship”, the emerging global order offered a darker variation: friendships built on fear, sealed by fragile treaties and cautious handshakes.

The world that followed — louder, faster, more uncertain — seemed built for other faces. And yet Bogart’s gaze lingered, as if he knew the future would come… but hadn’t arrived just yet. Like Rick, like that version of Hollywood with its shuttered studios and fading stars, Bogart stood as the last pirate of an age when even defeat could carry a certain style.

FORTRAN: The Language That Wrote the Equations of the Future

In 1957, while rock and roll was shaking the loudspeakers with "Jailhouse Rock", science was scripting its own quiet revolution, in capital letters. FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), the first high-level programming language, was introduced to turn mathematical formulas into executable machine instructions. Programmers no longer had to toil in assembly language , that cryptic and unforgiving dialect of early computing.

Now, equations could flow almost as they did on paper yet be executable.

IBM conceived it as a bridge between human abstraction and binary precision. Its name said it all: a translator, an interpreter between two realms. And while early FORTRAN was typed in ALL CAPS (much like Elvis's vocal delivery), it would later embrace the flexibility of lowercase letters… just as music evolved from shouting to the cool hush of cool jazz.

Essential Melodies, Curated by JGC