Dave Swain runs the II-V-I Orchestra, the big band I play bass with, and I was telling him the other day, "You know, there's 2 kinds of horn players in the world, horn players that are good enough to play in rock bands and horn players that are only good enough to play in big bands, and you know it's true because every time we get a big band arrangement of a rock tune that's in the key of 'E' they always transpose it to the key of 'F' even though there were horn players on the record playing it in 'E'. They were ROCK horn players!!"

And of course transposing to 'F' completely hoses up the bass part. For example, here is the Tower of Power's "What Is Hip?" . It's in 'E'. Here are PDFs of our big band arrangement page 1, page 2, page 3 . This is a fairly accurate representation of the bass line, but it sure is awkward to play in F. As near as I can estimate performance tempo is about 108 beats per minute.

We've got a couple of Steely Dan tunes and it's the same thing. "Josie" in F instead of E. Yuck.