BirdFeed

Published in 1912, W.C. Handy’s ‘Memphis Blues’ was, according to its composer, ‘the first of all the many published ‘blues’ and it set a new fashion in American popular music and contributed to the rise of jazz, or, if you prefer, swing, and even boogie-woogie.’  (Memphis Blues was published two years before Handy’s better known Saint Louis Blues.) The 1919 version of W.C. Handy’s Memphis Blues by James Reese Europe 369^th Infantry Band follows Handy’s published sheet music fairly closely.   The opening strain of this version exemplifies the connection between ragtime and early, as Handy consciously or subconsciously quotes Scott Joplin’s  The Entertainer twice.  In the six-note phrase at the beginning of the intro to Memphis Blues (C4-D-Eb-E-C5-Bb), the middle four notes (D4-Eb-E-C5) are not only the same melodic pattern as the first four notes of The Entertainer, they are the exact same pitches with which Joplin’s piece opens.   The six note phrase that starts with the last three notes in measure four of Memphis Blues,  which also begins its first twelve-bar strain, features the melodic pattern that opens the second strain of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer (E-F-F#-G-A-G) transposed it up a fourth (A-Ab-B-C-D-C). 

The first strain of The Entertainer would be alluded to many years later in Sonny Rollins’ composition ‘Doxy’, in which the five note phrase that opens the 3^rd and 7^th measures closely resembles the opening five notes in m. 7 of the Entertainer.  The chord progression of Doxy is also the same length and harmonically similar to the first strain of The Entertainer.  

The opening of Thelonious Monk’s Blue Monk can also be heard as a variation on the opening of the first strain of Memphis Blues.  Monk takes the four-note chromatic ascent from the third to the fifth that Handy (quoting Joplin) places on the second sixteenth note of beat two in the fourth full bar of ‘Memphis Blues’ , moves it to the downbeat of the first bar of the blues form.  In typical Monk fashion, this four note motive is one of a two melodic ‘cells’ around which the entire tune is built. 

Starting on beat one of the ninth measure in the second strain of ‘Memphis Blues’, Handy sequences four groups of three sixteenth notes each against the four quarter note pulses of 2/4 time signature.  This pattern is echoed in Euday Bowman’s Twelfth Street Rag, published two years after Memphis Blues in 1914. While Handy in Memphis Blues has a pattern of scale steps 1-2-3 ascending four times in a row, Bowman’s opening phrase in Twelfth Street Rag is an inversion of that shape, with scale steps 1-7-6 descending five times in a row.  In Memphis Blues, a varation of the threes-against-four pattern appears in m. 7-8 and 19-20 of the third strain, with the groups of three sixteenths beginning on the ‘and’ or upbeat of beat one this time. 

In the closing strain of Memphis Blues, the six-note phrase starting on the last two notes of the second measure matches the six notes that follow the three opening notes in the first section of Louis Armstrong’s version of Joe ‘King’ Oliver’s West End Blues, first recorded in 1928.  In his version of Memphis Blues, Armstrong heightens this similarity by changing the pickup notes to the last strain so that they too match the opening of West End Blues.  West End Blues seems in turn to have inspired the opening of ‘Stormy Weather’, published in 1933 by Harold Arlen, a friend and admirer of Armstrong’s. 

The popular song Peg O’My Heart, published the year after Memphis Blues in 1913, features a four-note melodic gesture in its eighth measure that can be heard as a variant on the five-note phrase beginning on the last two notes of m. 4 in the third strain of Handy’s composition.  This gesture also appears in Jelly Roll Morton’s New Orleans Blues, recorded in 1923, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet solo on Hotter Than That, recorded in 1927, and Terry Pollard’s solo on Yusef Lateef’s Oboe Blues, recorded in 1959. 

The improvised breaks Reese’s band members add during the last 24-bar section of the piece are a precursor of the tailor-made features Duke Ellington would create for band members including Cootie Williams, Johnny Hodges and Lawrence Brown.  In 1946, the Ellington Orchestra recorded  a version of Memphis Blues arranged by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn which, true to form, is a showcase for a number of Ellington’s soloists, including Hodges. 

Ellington’s arrangement of Memphis Blues is based on the 1912 sheet music version with lyrics by George Evans that omits the Joplin-influenced opening strain from the instrumental piano version published in 1912.  It is a fine example of Elllington’s gift for creating arrangements that allowed the soloists in the group to be featured in quick succession, each one playing to their strengths.  It begins by moving backwards through the two sections of the 1913 score.  It opens with the first eight measures of last strain of Memphis Blues reimagined as a dialogue between Hodges’ alto saxophone and Ellington’s piano,  followed by the entire opening strain from the 1913 Memphis Blues as a feature for the trombone section.  The interlude between the second and third strains becomes a featured moment for the trumpet section.  The last strain is then revisited as a feature for a trumpet soloist (most likely Cat Anderson or Ray Nance).  This time the solo continues all the way through the twelve bar blues form with harmony updated to include Ellington and Strayhorn’s signature voicings.  This halfway-through rendition of the last strain is followed by a new interlude created by Ellington and/or Strayhorn redolent of the high harmonic sophistication of the late swing era.  The interlude sets up a key change to Ab major, the harmonic location in which the last strain is visited a third time, this time as a clarinet solo (played by either Jimmy Hamilton or Russell Procope) with punchy trombone backgrounds.  The arrangement concludes with two Ellington/Strayhorn signatures: a harmonically adventurous trombone cadence followed by a concluding chime in the high range of Ellington’s piano. 

In his 1954 version of Memphis Blues, Louis Armstrong sings a version of George Evans’s lyrics to the song that removes Evans’s use of racist terms.  Nat King Cole, whose version stays melodically closer to the tune as published, makes a similar revision. Memphis Blues has recently appeared on Jason Moran’s 2023 album From The Dancehall To The Battlefield, a modern tribute to James Reese Europe. 

‘The Missing Voice’ is my original melody line on the changes to ‘Have You Met Miss Jones’ as they are shown in ‘All-Time Standards’ (Vol. 25 of the Aebersold book and playalong series).  Here is a link to a rough recording I made of the tune using the iReal Pro record function.  Charts of the tune are below this paragraph; please note that these include a revision to the last three notes which is more recent than the recording.  Like my lines on the changes from other tunes used in Vermont All State Jazz Ensemble auditions, it includes licks borrowed from other sources (including Charlie Parker’s solo on ‘Now’s The Time’, Denzil Best’s ‘Move’, the old standard ‘Peg O’ My Heart’ and Ornette Coleman’s ‘The Blessing’) and it also works as a countermelody to the original melody.  (As I’ve mentioned in past posts, I learned about the concept of a contrafact which is also an allusive countermelody from Benny Harris’s tunes Ornithology, Crazeology and Reets and I.) Please scroll below the charts for some background on the harmony and history of the tune, including links to some selected jazz versions.

Lorenz Hart’s lyrics for ‘Have You Met Miss Jones’ describe a man being introduced to a woman by a third person (‘Have you met Miss Jones / someone said as we shook hands’.)   The speaker introduces himself to the woman in an odd way, by mentioning his apparent preoccupation with pushing boundaries: ‘Then I said Miss Jones / you’re a girl who understands / I’m a man who must be free’.  There are a number of versions of the song by female jazz singers, including Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O’Day who reverse the gender roles by changing ‘Miss Jones’ to the knightly ‘Sir Jones’ and give a proto-feminist inflection to the line ‘I’m a girl who must be free’ (or ‘a gal who must be free’ in O’Day’s version). The link in the last sentence is to O’Day’s 1958 version from ‘Anita O’Day At Mister Kelly’s’, in which her solo takes after Ella Ftizgerald with the use of quotes from public melodic language (‘Rain, Rain Go Away’, “The Irish Washerwoman’, ‘Shave And A Haircut’). Here is a transcription, by my wife and UVM’s jazz voice teacher Amber deLaurentis, of O’Day’s solo from the version on her 1960 album ‘Anita O’Day and Billy May Swing Rodgers And Hart’.

Although in this version O’Day keeps her paraphrase of the original bridge from the Mister Kelly’s solo, she otherwise seems to largely refrain from obvious quotation. She does end her bridge with piece of lesser-known jazz melodic code, a four-note gesture (D-D-Bb-C) very similar to the one that Stan Getz uses (Db-D-Bb-C) at the end of the bridge during the head statement of his 1953 version (discussed below). Getz’s more chromatic version of the lick, which also appears later in O’Day’s version, appears at the end of at least two other bridges: in Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Satin Doll’ (where it is sung with the lyrics ‘switch-a-rooney’) and in Alston and Tolbert’s ‘Hit That Jive Jack’ as sung by the Nat King Cole Trio, where it’s sung to the lyrics ‘da-di-ah-da’.

The bridge of ‘Miss Jones’ modulates through a series of keys which, like the bridge of ‘All The Things You Are’, is a challenge to any improviser.  It seems that this is what has drawn many generations of jazz players to continue improvising on the tune’s changes.  During the bridge, the speaker describes his reaction to meeting Miss Jones in a way that breaks romantic attraction down to a series of physical and mental sensations: (‘And all at once I lost my breath / and all at once was scared to death / and all at once I owned the earth and sky.’)  It is typical of Rodgers and Hart’s gift for coordinating music and lyrics that this list of three symptoms, which move from mild physical distress to cosmic delusion, is accompanied by a modulation through three keys, Bb major, Gb major and D major, which are increasingly distant from the opening key of F major.   (For another example of ingenious coordination of music and lyrics involving a similar progression, see the verse to the Rodgers and Hart tune ‘Glad To Be Unhappy’. One fine vocal version is this 1987 rendition by Carmen McRae.) 

This bridge is sometimes mentioned as a possible inspiration for the chord progression of John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’.  Indeed, if one takes the chords from the first five bars of the bridge and removes the minor seventh chords – i.e. the Abm7 and Em7 chords – the remaining chords are the iconic first five chords of ‘Giant Steps’, just down a half step from the original key.  (This less chord-laden progression is the way the bridge appears in the original sheet music and in versions by swing era players such as the one by Art Tatum and Ben Webster; the minor seventh chords were added by bop-influenced jazz players in versions such as the ones discussed below.) 

 In keeping with the song’s indirect approach to storytelling, the lyrics to the last eight bars imply that the speaker and Miss Jones strike up an ongoing relationship (‘we’ll keep on meeting till we die / Miss Jones and I’).  As the song opens with a verse including a line that cryptically references marriage (‘the nearest moment that we marry is too late’), it seems that the speaker could mean he and Miss Jones get married, but there is room for multiple interpretations.   (In the musical for which Rodgers and Hart originally wrote the song, I’d Rather Be Right, the couple referenced in the song do eventually get married, but that outcome is still uncertain at the point in the plot when the song is sung.)

The title of ‘The Missing Voice’ alludes to the fact that although we hear in the original lyrics from the protagonist and the unnamed introducer, Miss Jones herself never speaks.  My melodic line, in keeping with bop tradition, is more active and chromatic than the original melody from which it borrows its chord progression. I imagine the lyrics to ‘The Missing Voice’ might be a more verbose counterpoint to the original melody’s long notes, something like Ethel Merman’s counterpoint to Donald O’Connor’s melody in Irving Berlin’s You’re Just In Love, or the bride’s anxious chatter in response to the clueless groom’s long notes in Stephen Sondheim’s Not Getting Married. 

Stan Getz’s version of Have You Met Miss Jones from 1953 is one of the earlier versions to feature a medium swing tempo.  This version also features Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone and John Williams on piano (not the film composer, although he did spend time as a jazz player as well.)  It is worth noting that this version was recorded in 1953, the same year as Tatum and Webster’s version.  With the way that jazz history is often summarized as a progression of cleanly separated eras, it can be easy to miss that while the stylistic differences between swing era players like Tatum and bop-influenced players Getz originated in different eras, they were sometimes practiced concurrently as well. 

Pianist Ellis Marsalis recorded the tune on his 1992 album Heart of Gold.  During the first A section of his second chorus of solo on this version, Marsalis quotes the same fragment of ‘The British Grenadiers’ as Ella Fitzgerald uses in her 1947 ‘Lady Be Good’ solo.  He also quotes Tiny Bradshaw’s ‘Jersey Bounce’ in the second A section of this chorus, Bud Powell’s solo on ‘Un Poco Loco’ in the last A section, and Mercer Ellington’s ‘Things Ain’t What They Used To Be’ in the third chorus.  In his trading fours with drummer Billy HIggins on this version, Ray Brown quotes Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Rain Check’.  (I discuss Ella’s ‘Lady Be Good’ solo in my post Ellavolution and ‘Rain Check’ in my post Emulate, Assimilate, Innovate Part 3.)

In the way I teach piano lessons, the size of the practice workload a student takes on between lessons is the result of an agreement at the end of each lesson between the student and myself.  Following this, I generally send a practice list via email.  I also ask students to handwrite a practice list as I am writing the email; this gives students a list to follow if I don’t send a practice list.  Also, it has been my experience that students can have more clarity on the practice list if they have both their own version of it and mine.  Agreeing to the practice list at the end of the lesson indicates the student is committed to practicing everything on the list. 

Students can also respond to the practice list email to propose adding items to or removing items from the list or making other kinds of changes.  In most cases I approve these changes; in other situations, I may propose a compromise.  In a smaller number of cases I am not able to approve proposals, but in these cases I generally suggest other options.  Changes to the practice list should not be a personal, private decision that the student makes alone, but should rather be the result of communication between the student and I.  Although what is on your practice list can be negotiated from week to week, there is a required minimum amount of music you need to have prepared.  For students taking private piano lessons through UVM, this depends partly on how many lesson credits you are taking.  For all students, the practice list is the most important representation of the minimum amount of work required. 

A key element in making a lesson productive is being prepared to play most or all of the music on your practice list.  If you are having your first or second experience of not being able to practice everything on your list, I encourage you to come to your lesson anyway.  A ‘rebuilding’ lesson, where rather than you playing the music on the list, we work on clarifying and possibly revising the list, discuss practice techniques and do a limited amount of practicing together, can be valuable for a limited number of lessons.  If not practicing everything on your list, or practicing significantly less than everything on the list, or not practicing at all becomes a recurring pattern, it becomes less and less valuable to have a ‘rebuilding’ lesson.  To put it another way, the more ‘rebuilding’ lessons a student has, the less valuable those kinds of lessons become to the student.  This is comparable to the way in which multiple consecutive lessons focusing on only one shorter piece (a situation which I as a teacher work to avoid) can quickly become less and less beneficial.  In these situations, it may be more advisable to cancel a lesson (with advance notice – please see my studio policies) or in some cases, to consider withdrawing from lessons.  In my experience, this kind of situation can be avoided by students taking an active role in building the practice list at the lesson and, when necessary, communicating after the lesson to propose changes to the the practice list.

While finding time and motivation to practice and what to do with your practice time are important challenges that I can help with to some extent, these issues can’t take up the majority of lesson time from week to week.  While I am willing to spend a limited amount of time discussing these challenges, the value of spending lesson time on these issues decreases as more lesson time is spent discussing them.  In my experience, students arrive at better solutions to the puzzle of how to find time and motivation to practice when they engage in that puzzle on their own.  As a student, you know all the ‘pieces’ of that puzzle (what conditions help you focus, how to minimize or avoid distractions and interruptions, what times of day you have available for practicing, etc.) better than I do.  Also, my expertise is in music, not motivation, psychology, personal scheduling, etc.  If we are spending most of the lesson talking about how you can find time and motivation to practice, I am not offering you my best expertise.  If you are ready at the beginning of the lesson to play the music on your practice list to the best of your ability, I’ll be able to give you the kind of help I’m most qualified to offer.   

While a search for musical ideas to inform your own compositions is an important activity for a composer, it can’t be the main goal of piano lessons.  That kind of search is a worthy goal, but it can only be peripheral goal of piano lessons. Composition, theory and music history classes are important sources for those ideas as well. 

The main focus of jazz piano lessons is always on the creative and technical aspects of learning great jazz compositions by great jazz player/composers, with the goal of being able to perform them not just at a proficiency level (the right notes and rhythms at a steady tempo) but also a performance level (which includes attention to important musical parameters like dynamics, phrasing and articulation.) 

Students sometimes reach a point where they ask me something like: ‘I’m finding some [or all] of the music on the practice list is not so interesting for me.  Can I choose my own pieces to practice and work on in lessons?’  Here are some of the ways I respond to that question:

– I will generally advocate replacing some of the pieces on the list with one or two new pieces we agree on rather than abandoning the entire list and coming up with a completely new list

– While I’m not willing to replace pieces on the practice list with pieces chosen by the student on their own (i.e. without consulting me), I am willing to have the practice list be a combination of pieces the student chooses from options that I offer and pieces the student suggests and which they and I agree to add to the practice list.  In both cases, it is important for everything on the practice list to be a challenge appropriate to their ability level and relevant to the goals of lessons.  While it can sometimes be a good idea to postpone or abandon a piece if you find yourself less interested in it or find it challenging in a particular way,  these are not always good reasons to postpone or abandon pieces. 

– In these kinds of situations, I often ask students to share with me a list of pieces they would like to work on in lessons (something I often ask new students as well.)  Rather than proposing one piece at a time, I encourage students to send a range of options (between 5 and 10 pieces) they’d like to propose.  Proposing only one piece, or a list of 20 or 30 or more is generally less helpful as I don’t have time to look through that many pieces.  A short-ish list gives me a chance to go through it and identify pieces that are best suited to the goals of lessons.  As with proposals for revisions to the practice list, I will respond to approve or propose other options.

– Music notation is an important part of how I teach piano.   One crucial element I always need in order to agree to add a piece to the practice list is a version of the piece notated on grand staff (treble and bass clefs) or a lead sheet (single note melody line on treble clef with chord symbols above).  Because of this, it’s helpful if the students can include links to not just recordings but also notated scores for the pieces they propose.  If you propose a piece for which you don’t have a score, we will need to find one in order to work on it in piano lessons.  In some cases, depending on the length and complexity of the piece and my availability, I can also transcribe from recordings, however, this involves an additional fee (at the same rate as lessons) for my additional time.  One of the best sources for notated scores of pop and jazz tunes is musicnotes.com.  I always encourage students to buy the PDF version of the music as well as the version printed with the printer, as this allows for multiple copies.

– Pieces also need to be at an appropriate technical level for the student.  With pop and jazz pieces, for example, it may be possible to ‘scale down’ the technical level of a piece.

Part one of this two-part post uses examples from Shakespeare and Mozart (via Leonard Bernstein) as well as T.S. Eliot and Charlie Parker to introduce the concept of deletion, which I find useful in analyzing Erena Terakubo’s solo on ‘Bird Lives’ by Jackie McLean. It also includes an analysis of Charlie Parker’s solo on Billie’s Bounce, which includes a number of phrases that also appear in Terakubo’s solo. Incidentally, In the analysis below, I highlight patterns used by Terakubo that also appear in melodies and solos by Charlie Parker, Wardell Gray, Benny Harris and Sonny Rollins. In noting the connections that I find between Terakubo’s melodic language and that of other players, I am trying to be careful to not imply that I am certain about what her sources might be. Bebop is a melodic language where a given pattern is used by many players, and while I think it can be fun and instructive to speculate about the origin of a phrase, my understanding is that one can never be exactly sure about such things. Also, in speculating on the origin of some of these phrases, I am not at all intending to imply that this solo lacks originality. On the contrary, I believe this solo is full of evidence of Terakubo’s brilliance, one facet of which is her ability to not only hear historical sources and the musical ideas her bandmates share in the present, but to speak to listeners in her future by reflecting in her improvising a deep comprehension of the musical past and present.

First chorus: a ‘Tenor Madness pattern’ is revealed through deletion and ‘the Jumpin’ fragment’ appears for the first time

‘Bird Lives’ requires the soloist to play the twelve-bar head twice and then play the first two measures yet again at the top of the first chorus of improvised solo. After this prescribed opening, Terakubo begins her solo with a descending tritone (D-Ab in m. 3-4).  This is followed by two seven-note phrases (marked A and A1 on the transcription) that work with the notes of m. 2 from Tenor Madness by Sonny Rollins.  She then plays a phrase that matches the notes and rhythm from the first phrase of ’Tenor Madness’ (B) (which are also the first four notes of Kenny Clarke’s nearly identical tune ‘Royal Roost’ and Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘Oop Bop Sh’bam’ and ‘Oop Pop a Da’, all recorded before Rollins’ tune.) Drawing first two longer phrases and then a shorter phrase from essentially the same pitch collection, as Terakubo does, is very skillful deletion. (See part one of this post for examples of where deletion is used by T.S. Eliot in ‘Ash Wednesday’ and Charlie Parker in his solo on ‘Billie’s Bounce’.) Terakubo demonstrates here that one way to make fresh and original use of standard melodic language is to use it in an altered form first before using it in its original form. (As we will see, she also takes the same approach with her use of what I call ‘The Happening lick’ in the second and fourth choruses.)

Terakubo concludes her first chorus with what could be described as two separate Parker licks: in m. 11, she plays a pitch collection similar to the one that Parker uses to begin two of his most famous solos: ‘Billie’s Bounce’ and the best known version of ‘Now’s The Time’ (marked C on the transcription).  I’ll call the phrase at m. 12 (marked D on the transcription) ‘the Jumpin’ fragment’, as it occurs in one of Parker’s earliest recorded solos, on Jay McShann’s ‘The Jumpin Blues’.  As I mentioned in part one, it also appears three times in Parker’s solo on Billie’s Bounce.  There are at least two other prominent places in Parker’s recorded work where it shows up as well: at the opening of the Now’s The Time solo and at the beginning of the tune ‘Ornithology’, which became his theme song.  (In my post Cracking The Bebop Code, I make the case for why I believe ‘Ornithology’ was composed by Charlie Parker superfan Benny Harris, to whom it is sometimes attributed, rather than Parker, who is more often listed as the composer.)  While Parker used these licks as opening moves in the examples I’ve cited, Terakubo personalizes them by transforming them into closing moves.

Second chorus: ‘the Happenin’ lick’ and ‘the Reets and I lick’ are introduced and ‘the Jumpin’ fragment’ returns

In the opening bar of Terakubo’s second chorus, the last seven notes of m. 13 (marked F) match a fragment from the opening of Parker’s second chorus on ‘Blues for Alice’.   I hear the second half of m. 15 and the first half of m. 16 (marked F) as the first appearance of what I’ll call ‘the Happenin’ lick’, which appears closer to its original form in m. 40 of her solo (F1).  I call it ‘the Happenin’ lick’ as it occurs in the first chorus of Wardell Gray’s solo on ‘Twisted’ (where it has a different rhythm), and in Annie Ross’s vocal version of the solo, she gives it the lyric ‘I knew what was happenin’.   When Terakubo plays ‘the Happenin’ lick’ with its original pitches at m. 40, in the context of this solo, it becomes a shortened version of the phrase from m. 13-14, its impact sharpened through deletion of two notes from that earlier use.  This is the second time the solo that Terakubo uses a borrowed lick in an innovated form before returning to its original form. 

Terakubo makes her first innovative re-use of a phrase at m. 14, where only two measures after her first use of the Jumpin’ fragment, she uses a shortened version of it (marked D1 on the transcription).   Here, besides shortening the fragment, she transforms it in four other ways: by moving it to the second measure of the twelve bar blues form, moving it to beat 3 of the 4/4 measure (rather than beat 1 where it initially appeared in this solo), by embedding it in the middle of a longer phrase where is preceded and followed by descending stepwise motion (rather than being followed by F6 arpeggio) and playing it over a Bb7 chord instead of F7.  Her third use of ‘the Jumpin’ fragment’ is in the fourth chorus at m. 39 (D2), where she keeps the scalar ‘tail’ she added at D1 but once again shifts the lick’s placement in the twelve bar blues form from the second half of the second measure to the first half of the third measure.  These kinds of transformations are all examples of the ‘innovate’ stage of Clark Terry’s ‘emulate, assimilate, innovate’ process, which I illustrate using various Ella Fitzgerald solos in my post Ellavolution. They are also the kind of alterations that Tony Pietricola describes in his ‘TAMPER’ system.

The lick marked ‘G’ on the transcription (m. 16-19) descends an augmented triad from C#5, uses C-Bb with the ‘Charleston’ (dotted quarter-eighth note) rhythm and ends with scale steps 3-4-3-5.  Terakubo’s first re-use of this lick (G1) is in the next chorus at m. 28-31, where she changes the rhythm somewhat and brings the phrase to an earlier end after the 3-4-3-5 move.  After leaving some space (which results from deleting eight notes of the original lick marked G on the transcription)  she deftly varies the end of the phrase (J1), which she plays at m. 32-33 with a more upbeat-oriented rhythm than in her first use of it (J).   Her second re-use of this lick is at m. 52-55 (G2).  This has the highest ending of the three instances of the lick.  Terakubo hits a G5, the kind of quick and effortless move into her powerful upper range that abounds in her solos, and which she seems to deliberately use somewhat less in this solo on of ‘Bird Lives’ than in her earlier version of the tune from ‘Little Girl Power’. 

I’ll call the first six notes of m. 20 (H) the ‘Reets and I lick’, as it can be found in m. 6 of Benny Harris’s tune ‘Reets and I’, first recorded by Bud Powell.  The phrase begun with this lick is concluded with a four note pattern (J) that can be found, in a different harmonic context, in melodies including ‘Peg O’My Heart’ and ‘Memphis Blues’ by W.C. Handy as well as solos including Jelly Roll Morton’s solo on ‘New Orleans Blues’, Louis Armstrong’s solo on ‘Hotter Than That’ and Terry Pollard’s solo on ‘Oboe Blues’.  I’ll call m. 22-24 (letter K on the transcription) ‘the closing phrase’, as Terakubo makes innovative re-uses of it at the ends of her third and fourth choruses.  In its original form at m. 22-24, it ends with an F repeated five times with a rhythm very similar to m. 3-4 of Parker’s ‘Now’s The Time’ solo.  In her re-uses of the lick at the conclusions of her third and fourth choruses (K1 and K2), Terakubo leaves out the last two of the five repeated Fs from m. 22-24, once again innovating through deletion.

Third chorus: a question, an answer and more innovation

Terakubo’s third chorus begins with a four-note lick (L) and a variation on it (L1) back to back.  This bears a similarity to the pair of one-bar phrases I have marked F and G in the second chorus of Parker’s Billie’s Bounce solo.  Both pairs are antecedent-consequent (or question-and-answer) phrases. Terakubo’s pair of phrases begin with the same two pitches (A-F) and end with different pairs of pitches, while Parker’s innovation is to transpose the second phrase down a perfect fifth and add one note, but it is clear Terakubo has thoroughly and creatively adopted Parker’s practice of creating inner dialogue within his improvisations.  This pair of phrases are the only new material in the third chorus; as I discussed earlier, the rest of the chorus is innovative re-uses of previously used phrases (G1, J1 and K1). The pair of question and answer phrases at the beginning of the chorus the stage for one of Terakubo’s most astounding displays of spontaneous creativity in the solo, which occurs in m. 41-45 of the next chorus

Fourth chorus: more innovation on ‘the Jumpin’ fragment’ and ‘the Happenin’ lick’ and the diminished scale appears

As I mentioned earlier, Terakubo makes creative re-use of The Jumpin’ Fragment and The Happenin’ Lick in the third and fourth bars of this chorus (m. 19-20). In m. 42, Terakubo plays a phrase (M) that begins with a partial ascending Bb half-whole diminished scale, followed with minor third leaps and changes of direction.  She follows this with a phrase in m. 43-44 (M1) in which the diminished fragment from m. 41 is transposed a perfect fourth lower, and then the phrase is concluded in m. 44 by a shape that roughly inverts m. 42 (i.e. turns it upside-down).  While inverting melodic shapes is a common hallmark of carefully crafted compositions by J.S. Bach and Arnold Schoenberg, Terakubo achieves the rare feat of making it happen in the context of an improvised solo. 

Within my transcribing work on this blog, Terakubo’s inversion of her own phrase in the fourth chorus recalls Ella Fitzgerald’s retrograde (backwards) echoing of a Stan Getz phrase in one of the trading-fours sections of her epic performance of ‘C Jam Blues’ with the Count Basie Orchestra from ‘Jazz At The Santa Monica Civic 1972’.  (I discuss this solo and have a link to the recording in Ellavolution.)  The difference is that Fitzgerald made her melodic transformation during a musical conversation with a fellow improviser, while Terakubo’s inversion happens in confines of the single-player improvised solo, a more challenging environment for creating dialogue.   

Fifth chorus: ‘Bird blues’ changes and a Billie’s Bounce closing move

In the first four bars of her fifth chorus, Terakubo’s line implies the chord substitutions in the head of Parker’s Blues For Alice (also known as ‘Bird Blues’ changes).  After her second innovation on ‘the closing phrase’ (G2), Terakubo borrows a closing move (N) from the third chorus of Parker’s solo on Billie’s Bounce (this is marked F on the Parker transcription in part one.)

Terakubo is no stranger to trading fours; her solo is followed by some fine trading of full choruses between her, pianist Mayuko Katakura and drummer Shinnosuke Takahashi.  In the trading, she moves outside the vocabulary she uses in the solo, venturing in directions like the Middle Eastern sounding phrase she plays around 3:30, which sounds influenced by the chromaticism in Katukara’s preceding chorus.  With this section of the performance, Terakubo achieves three kinds of conversation within the same performance.  Her use of Charlie Parker motives interspersed with her own ideas is a kind of summoning of Parker from the past for an imagined conversation in the present.  This is similar to the way Ella Fitzgerald in her solo on ‘Flyin’ Home’ alternates between quoting phrases from Ilinois Jacquet’s earlier solo on the same tune and making her own melodic responses to the phrases she quotes (I discuss this in depth in my post Oh, Play That Thing!, which includes a side-by-side comparison of both solos).  The kind of spontaneous and sophisticated transformation that she makes at m. 41, could be thought of as a musical conversation with herself.  Near the end of the performance, these more abstract and isolated conversations are culminated in an exciting collective conversation of her and the members of her band trading full choruses.   

To return to the student I mentioned in part one who shared their fear of running out of ideas, I hope this solo might make them aware that there are many great improvisers like Terakubo who move their musical story forward through revisiting ideas to innovate on and develop them. In my analysis of this solo, I have bracketed and analyzed twenty-four phrases, eleven of which are innovative re-uses of phrases that occurred previously in the solo.  As we have seen, the innovations in the re-used phrases include deleting notes, adding notes, transposing notes and altering the shape of the phrase using techniques like inversion.  I hope that student, and others with similar concerns, can hear in Terakubo’s solo a reminder that you can’t run out of ideas if you know how to innovate. 

©2025 Tom Cleary

To illustrate the concept that great art can include repetition, this post will discuss Leonard Bernstein’s imagining of how a Shakespeare sonnet and a movement of Mozart symphony, both models of brevity, might have begun with longer first drafts.  We will then move on to look at how T.S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday and Charlie Parker’s solo on his tune Billie’s Bounce include both ‘first drafts’ and ‘revisions’ of short phrases.  Both of these pieces use repetition as a way to move a  story forward.  As composer/producer Brian Eno says, ‘repetition is a form of change’.  While Eno is likely referring to the exact or nearly exact repetition in the world music he studies and incorporates into his own music, this thought can apply in a different way to jazz improvisation.  In a poem or a jazz solo, repetition with enough variation can become part of a narrative. 

In his 1973 Harvard lecture on Musical Syntax, Leonard Bernstein quotes the opening line from a Shakespeare sonnet (‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry’).  He demonstrates how it can be elaborated into a longer, more prosaic version: ‘I am tired of life, so many aspects of life, that I would like to die – in fact, I cry for death – because death is restful, and would bring me release from all of life’s woes and injustices’.  This is an example of the linguistic concept of ‘deep structure’.  By comparison with Bernstein’s extended version of Shakespeare’s line, we can the line Shakespeare wrote (‘tired with all these, for restful death I cry’) as a poetic reduction which achieves more concentrated meaning through omitting additional explanation.  Although the first line of this sonnet is a model of brevity, avoiding the kind of repetition shown in Bernstein’s imagined prosaic first draft, the poem itself includes significant repetition, although of a more abstract kind.  The fourth through the sixth lines all follow the same sentence structure (adjective-noun-adverb-verb): ‘And purest faith unhappily forsworn / And gilded honour shamefully misplac’d, / And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted /And right perfection wrongfully disgrac’d.’

Bernstein goes on to explain how the opening of the first movement from Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 in G minor can be understood in a similar way.  After a having the Boston Symphony play the first twenty measures of the movement as Mozart wrote them, Bernstein sets out to ‘invent or discover a deep structure out of which that marvelous surface structure [Mozart’s original version] has been generated’.   Bernstein explains how Mozart’s opening eight bar phrase is a model of symmetry and starts to imagine a version of the piece where the introduction and the music that follows the first phrase mirror that symmetry.  Bernstein then has the group play his own ‘deep structure’ version of the opening, which is more ‘prosaic’, symmetrical, and repetitious.    Bernstein uses this example to demonstrate that part of Mozart’s genius is not just the strength of his ideas but how he deleted repetition that a lesser composer might have included.  When the BSO plays Mozart’s original version in its entirety at the end of the lecture, the listener who has heard the ‘deep structure version’ can now hear the crafty concision of Mozart’s writing.  Even though the original version avoids what Bernstein calls the ‘schoolboy repeats’ of his ‘deep structure’ version, one can see from how often Mozart revisits Eb-D-D motive that more moderate amd skillful repetition is still a prominent feature of the original. 

While Bernstein imagines longer first drafts that Shakespeare and Mozart might have revised,  T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Ash Wednesday’ offers the reader a glimpse of the poet revising his own poem.  The poem begins with three versions of the same line, each with a different length and a different meaning: ‘Because I do not hope to turn again / Because I do not hope/ Because I do not hope to turn.’  The opening ten-syllable line is condensed to the six-syllable second line, which is then expanded to the eight-syllable third line.  In addition to these back-to-back alternates, Eliot continues creating variations on these lines throughout the poem.  The second stanza has two variations on the third line (‘Because I do not hope to turn.’), separated by two intervening lines: ‘Because I do not hope to know’ and ‘Because I know I shall not know’.  Later there are two other variations on the first line: ‘Because I cannot hope to turn again’ in the third stanza and ‘Because I do not hope to turn again’ in the fourth (I added italics to emphasize the altered words.)  By writing his revision process into the poem, Eliot makes the constant journey back and forth between prosaic deep structure and poetic concision part of the story he tells. 

Charlie Parker goes through a similar process in his solo on ‘Billie’s Bounce’.  (In the analysis that follows, please refer to the transcription below where I’ve labeled phrases alphabetically.) The kind of live revision that Eliot uses to open Ash Wednesday can be heard in Parker’s second chorus of solo: it begins with an eight-note pattern (C) which is followed by a four-note pattern (C1) that is a condensed version of the eight-note pattern.  (Parker removes four notes between C and C1, the same number of syllables that Eliot removes between his first two lines.) This is followed by a six-note pattern (D) which is a condensed version of a seven-note lick that opens the solo (A).  Like Eliot, Parker also revisits phrases to expand them.  The six note lick in the fourth bar of the second chorus (E) is followed by a seven note lick (E1) that transposes and expands the preceding lick.  The second chorus ends with a fusillade of sixteenth notes over the ii-V progression (the pattern marked B1 plus ‘The Jumpin’ fragment’) that is an expansion of the eighth note lick at the end of the first chorus over the same progression (the pattern marked B in the third system plus The Jumpin’ fragment). 

In part two of this post, we will look at Erena Terakubo’s solo on the Jackie McLean blues ‘Bird Lives’ to see how a modern player can creatively incorporate Parker’s melodic phrases into their own vocabulary and adopt the musical syntax he uses to organize those phrases in an improvised solo. 

©2025 Tom Cleary

In her solo on her version of Dizzy Gillespie’s minor blues ‘Birk’s Works’ from the album ‘Love’s Holiday’, Dena DeRose sings along with her right hand improvised line.  While a number of well known jazz pianists, including Erroll Garner, Billy Taylor, Oscar Peterson and  Keith Jarrett, can be heard singing distantly ‘off mic’ (and sometimes off key) along with their improvised piano solos, their lower-register vocalizations often sound unrelated to the arc of the melodic line that comes through the piano, except that they match the melodic rhythm of their improvised melodic phrases, or at least stop and start along with their piano phrases.   Jarrett, who has occasionally played wind instruments on his albums, often seems to be vocalizing the breathing that would be involved in playing his piano line on a saxophone.  In his solo on All The Things You Are from Standards Vol. 1, he begins by singing an octave below his piano line, but soon departs into a series of long, low-pitched grunts that sounds like what a one might hear if a saxophonist took their saxophone away in mid-phrase but continued their stream of air.

What makes DeRose’s piano-vocal improvising unusual in the jazz piano world is that she sings along ‘on mic’ with spot-on intonation and inflections that enhance the expressiveness of her improvised line, much like George Benson’s vocal doubling of his guitar solos on hits like 20/20. 

Doubling an improvised vocal line on the piano is not DeRose’s only approach to improvising. In her version of It Could Happen To You from Live At Jazz Standard Volume One, she begins with a rubato, solo piano instrumental statement of the melody.  After a vocal melody statement in tempo with her trio, she improvises a chorus of single-line melody free of chord voicings with voice and piano in unison.  In her in second chorus of solo, she introduces left hand chordal comping while continuing to sing in unison with her right hand.  It is worth noting that her approach to left hand comping is largely dialogic or conversational, i.e. in the breaks of her melodic phrases, rather than what I call ‘paralinear’ comping (simultaneous with melodic phrases).  In the third chorus, she focuses on improvising instrumentally.  In this chorus, rather than switching to a more ‘instrumental’ improvising approach – displays of piano technique like octaves, ‘locked hands’ and perpetual motion, breathless phrases ala Oscar Peterson – she continues to display the same melodic economy and imagination as in her vocal choruses.  

The way DeRose builds in her solos on ‘It Could Happen’ and ‘Birk’s Works’ from a single note melodic line to a conversation between left hand chords and right hand melody is in the tradition of great piano solos like Mary Lou Williams’s solo on her blues Koolbonga.  Her solo on ‘Birk’s Works’ is full of skillful motivic development of the kind that can be heard in Sonny Rollins solos such as Saint Thomas and his solo on the Rolling Stones’ Waiting On A Friend that I discuss in an earlier post. In the first chorus she introduces a four note descending motive at m. 9 which she develops by transposition and rhythmic displacement in m. 10. In m. 11 she plays the motive in its original form, but now over a G7 chord rather than a C minor chord. At the beginning of her second chorus, on the third beat of m. 14, DeRose introduces a piece of bop melodic language that has been used by Louis Armstrong, Clark Terry, Miles Davis and Gabrielle Stravelli, as I discuss in my blog post on Stravelli’s solo on ‘Karma Medley’. She follows this with a development of the motive that changes the shape of the phrase on beat 3 of m. 15. In the third chorus, she develops a three-note motive from the end of the ‘Birk’s Works’ head in m. 31-32, and returns to the four-note motive from the first chorus. I need to also thank Gabrielle for introducing me to DeRose’s work through her interview with Dena on her YouTube show The Early Set.

DeRose follows the head out of ‘Birk’s Works’ with an improvised cadenza that is similar to the cadenza that Wayne Shorter and Danilo Perez improvise on the version of Footprints from the album Footprints Live!.  (The cadenza concludes with Shorter and Perez playing a musical game that could be called ‘Harmonize This Note’, with Perez improvising gorgeous progressions under Shorter’s repeated held notes.)  In DeRose’s cadenza, she plays a ‘solitaire’ version of this game, with her voice and the upper fingers of her right hand providing the held notes and her left hand and other right hand fingers harmonizing. Near the end of the cadenza, she returns to the three-note motive from the end of the ‘Birk’s Works’ head that she uses in her third chorus, and develops it into a six-note motive that John Coltrane uses early in Acknowledgement, the opening section of his album-length piece A Love Supreme. She then transposes it through the circle of fifths a way that recalls Coltrane’s development later in Acknowledgement of the four-note motive that matches the syllables ‘A Love Supreme’.

A few semesters ago, I suggested to my student Rachel Ambaye, a jazz vocal major at UVM who studied jazz piano with me, a project of transcribing some of DeRose’s solo and learning to sing and play it.  The result was a performance of ‘Birk’s Works’ at the UVM Jazz Vocal Showcase (organized by my wife and UVM jazz voice teacher Amber deLaurentis)  in which Rachel improvised a solo using DeRose’s approach.   What follows is Rachel’s comments on this process, followed by a transcription of DeRose’s first three choruses of solo that we did together.

Comments on Dena DeRose solo by Rachel Ambaye

I began learning this transcription a little over a year ago and have found it continues to inform my approach to improvisation, composition, and my piano-voice relationship to this day. Studying only 12 bars has given me enough information to inspire over a year’s worth of practice, exploration, and experimentation.    

I was initially incredibly hesitant to perform this piece. I had been in the habit of viewing piano as simply a tool to aid with voice and composition, rather than something I would ever be showcasing as a part of my musicianship itself. So not only to perform on piano, but to improvise a simultaneous vocal and piano line was pushing me far outside of my comfort zone. I’d frequently heard other jazz pianists playing and squeaking out their notes, seemingly unintentionally, but I did not think I had enough control over my fingers and my voice to do it myself. In experimenting with this relationship though, I found it came much more naturally than anticipated, eventually leading me towards performing with this technique incorporated. I can remember admitting to Tom after taking a solo in my piano lesson that I didn’t know whether my voice knew the pitch before I struck the note on the piano, or if it was instantly adjusting once I had heard it. Looking back though, I’m not sure that mattered, and I’m still unsure if it does. Somehow, in the time since beginning this approach to my piano-voice relationship, my fingers and my voice have started to work together, as if they’ve finally agreed that it’s better for everyone if they join the same team. In doing so, they have also begun to act as teachers to one another. 

Singing while playing drives my piano lines to become more melodic both when improvising and playing written melodies. I need to breathe when I sing, so I allow my fingers to breathe as well. Playing while singing drives me towards new sounds harmonically. There have been countless instances in which my fingers have led me to a place my voice would not have, and the solo or composition develops an entirely new direction. Then, through repetition, this becomes something my voice learns and will lead me towards when performing vocally away from the piano. Over time, approaching my piano-voice relationship in this manner has allowed me to become calmer at the piano. Maybe it is because I feel more in control over my voice or that I approach the instrument with less hesitation, but adding that extra sonic layer puts me more at ease when playing piano, a complete shift from what I was experiencing at this performance less than a year ago.   

What’s more, learning Dena DeRose’s solo has got me thinking about comping during piano solos. Through hearing the sparseness and variety of her voicings—starting without comping, then a couple of choruses of 2-3-note voicings, then eventually 4-note voicings to start the fourth chorus, I’ve noticed that, similarly to the right hand, there is so much freedom and creativity in what the left hand can do, something I have just barely begun experimenting within the year since I’ve learned this.   

Through performing, practicing, and composing with piano and voice aligned, I’ve realized that more than anything I am improving and expanding my ear, and by doing so am building trust in myself as a musician, in the fact that I know what sounds I am creating, and that I know and can create multiple ways to fix any ‘mistake’ I could end up making in performance. For example, last week I played a solo show in which I performed all original music. Some of these compositions include joint piano and vocal melody lines both with lyrics and without. In one lyric-less section, my fingers took me in a direction that my voice was not anticipating and I was forced to continue by improvising. I am certain that less than a year ago, before I began practicing piano in this way, I would not have been able to keep my composure in that scenario. I would have had trouble moving forward from that ‘mistake’ in time, but last week I didn’t even think twice before taking the melody in a new direction with both of my instruments. I adjusted my voice to match my fingers before the non-music section of my brain could even process what was going on. I was able to stay in the moment and maintain an assurance that I knew what I was doing, that both my fingers and my voice were working together to emit messages from my ears into the world. Staying rooted in this fact has been an integral part of my recent growth as both a performing musician and a composer.   

Additionally, in the many months since I’ve learned this solo, I’ve been experimenting with the variety of sounds I can create using voice and piano. Rather than using the piano as just an accompanying instrument to my voice, I’ve been writing lines for voice and piano in unison and harmony, composing for piano with voice as an accompanying instrument, improvising with both voice and piano in unison and harmony, and then there’s the whole bass section of the piano which I am sure can provide me with endless combinations of what to create next once I focus on uncovering it. Experimenting with the different roles I can play with two instruments, has allowed me to dive into the seemingly endless opportunities for sound that I can create as a solo performer, which is now allowing me to dream bigger, and imagine even grander as I am composing and arranging for small group ensembles.   

I think back to this performance with fond memories. While it is certainly not a performance I would highlight as one of my best, or willingly offer the video of it to those who ask me about it, I think of this experience fondly because it has driven me towards unlocking a new approach to my piano and voice relationship, one that has allowed me to start a journey towards, and make strides in becoming more comfortable at the piano.   

This blog post ©2025 Tom Cleary and Rachel Ambaye

(or: From Hellish To Hopeful: the exoneration of the tritone in western music) 

In the late 1970s, a group called Florida Orange Juice Growers sponsored an ad campaign to spread the message that orange juice could be consumed at any time of day, not just in the morning.  The slogan was ‘Orange Juice: It Isn’t Just For Breakfast Anymore’.  A battalion of spokespeople, from celebrities to the average Joe and Jane, were enlisted to make the case in a series of thirty-second TV ads.  In one dizzying spot, ice skater Peggy Fleming (who seems to have trouble keeping a straight face after skating to a glass of orange juice), conductor Arthur Fiedler of the Boston Pops, and a young girl identified as ‘Linda Harris’ all testify to enjoying the beverage at times of day other than breakfast. Another spot that followed the two-celebrities-and-a-kid formula featured testimonials from golfer Arnold Palmer, then-singer Kathie Lee Johnson (later Kathie Lee Gifford), and a nameless boy who inspires envy from the voiceover guy (‘hey, I’d like to try orange juice with a hamburger’.)  Evidently a theory was afoot that a nameless child might be more persuasive than a named one.  Anita Bryant rode ‘aboard a thrilling airboat’ to ‘one of Florida’s fabulous resorts’ to interview mostly grandparent-age guests who proclaim their love of orange juice.  The appropriately named Robert J. Lemons of Fairfield, Illinois tells Bryant: ‘I often drink a glass of orange juice before going to bed’. 

Although the ads threw together oddly chosen celebrities, ordinary adults and children with all the randomness of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float, they were apparently effective.  A 2004 research paper by the Florida Department of Citrus noted that ‘Over the 1967/68 to 1999/2000 period of analysis, FDOC expenditures on orange juice advertising increased the demand for orange juice in each year by an average of 388 million gallons (SSE) and boosted the annual average price of orange juice by $0.23/16 oz’.  Even though this research is from a biased source, if the figures are anywhere near accurate, that is a staggering return on an advertising investment. 

 Ironically, orange juice has become a pariah in the health news of recent years.  In 2016 Business Insider ran an article titled Orange Juice Is Being Called A Massive Scam, which mentioned that orange juice sales had declined by 13% over the previous four years.  While the article was a roundup of other recent articles, not a research or opinion piece, and I can’t attest to the veracity of its sources, it does roughly indicate a trend of thought about orange juice and a certain truth about marketing and media.  The fate of orange juice, like many commodities, rides on an ever-changing tide of public opinion, which can be affected by something as seemingly unpersuasive as celebrities, children and everyday adults appearing in commercials in groups of three.  The ‘not just for breakfast’ campaign was like a marketing version of the Christmas story where different groups of three Magi keep arriving at the cradle of the American consumer, blessing the once and future grocery shopper with the wisdom that they are free to drink orange juice at any time they choose. 

The interval of an augmented fourth or diminished fifth (for example, the interval from F to B in the C major scale, or from Bb to E in the F major scale) was famously termed the ‘diabolus in musica’ (the devil in music) around the time in the Middle Ages that hexachord system was articulated by the music theorist Guido of Arezzo, who lived from around the year 991 to sometime after 1033.  The hexachord is a six-note scale including the first six degrees of the major scale, but excluding the possibility of a tritone by omitting the seventh degree (a tritone would occur if a melody included a leap from the fourth to the seventh).  The sound of this musical system can be heard in the hymn Ut Queant Laxis, probably composed by Guido.  Palisca and Pesce write in Grove Music Online that ‘Although the text of the hymn Ut queant laxis is found in a manuscript of c800 … the melody in question was unknown before Guido’s time and never had any liturgical function. It is probable that Guido invented the melody as a mnemonic device or reworked an existing melody now lost.’  Each line of the text Guido chose begins with one of the syllables in the system of naming notes of the scale that he invented (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la – the precursor of the solfege method used by music teachers today who use the system designed by Zoltan Kodaly.)  One can hear in Ut Queant Laxis the tritone-free sound world that the often anonymous composers of the middle ages considered evocative of holiness and the divine.

 If you can go with me on an admittedly long walk of a comparison, and I hope you can, the tritone in the middle ages had something in common with orange juice in the mid-1970s, before the dawn of the ‘not just for breakfast’ campaign.  It had an image problem, but not one that would not be improved in a few years, like the image of orange juice was in the late 70s.  The image, one might say the typecasting, of the tritone in Western music would improve gradually, over many centuries of musical history.  The tritone would not be exonerated from the judgement passed on it in the middle ages until eleven centuries later, when jazz and jazz-influenced composers would realize its greater potential. 

By the Baroque area, the major scale had expanded to include the seventh degree, and instead of excluding the tritone, composers of church music began to use the interval to evoke pain and evil.  The Chorale ‘O Grosse Lieb’ (O Great Love) from J.S. Bach’s ‘St. John Passion’ expresses the Baroque-era Protestant interpretation of the Gospel narrative: that Jesus’ death and resurrection redeems the sins of individual Christians through all of history following his time on earth.  The choir, who observe the story of Jesus’ death and passion during the piece, address him and say: ‘I lived amongst the world in joy and pleasure, and you must suffer’.  (This English translation by UVM’s own professor emeritus Z. Philip Ambrose, can be seen side by side with the original German on page two of this document.)  On the last two words of the text (‘must suffer’, or ‘must leiden’ in German) sing a descending tritone (C to F#) .  We can observe that in the church music of the middle ages, the tritone represents evil itself, which leads to its being banished from music, while in the Baroque era, the tritone represents the pain caused by evil, and so it can be included as part of a complete musical depiction of the struggle between sin and salvation.  Leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timing in the video where the tritone is sung in the bass part.  Here is a score for the chorale:

Charles Gounod’s opera Faust is based on the story, interpreted by many authors in many eras, of a man by that name who makes a deal with the devil.  When the character Mephistopheles, described by one interpreter as ‘an agent of Lucifer’, makes his entrance, the first two notes he sings (to the word ‘pardon!’) are a descending tritone (Db-G).  These notes initiate a recitative passage that is followed by Mephistopheles leading a boozy crowd in the ‘Song Of The Golden Calf’.  Here is a link to a score for the beginning of the recitative and the song. (Before Mephistopheles’ song, the crowd have recently sung the chorus ‘Wine or Beer’, including the words ‘may my glass be full! Cup upon cup, without shame’.) Mephistopheles’ song references the story from the Hebrew Bible in which the Hebrews worship a false god in the form of a golden calf while they are waiting for Moses to return from the mountain where he receives the tablets with the Ten Commandments. Mephistopheles sings ‘you shall bow to the Golden Calf! / for it holds majestic power…kings and rulers kneel before him, great and humble, young and old / none resist the lure of gold as they slavishly adore him…dancing round his pedestal / Satan leads the merry ball, the merry ball, the merry ball’.  This last line is sung twice, and on both repetitions the second ‘merry’ is also a tritone.  Leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timing in the video where either or both of the tritones are sung (somewhere within the French text ‘Et Satan conduit le bal, conduit le bal, conduit le bal’). 

On the second verse Mephistopheles is joined by the crowd in this refrain, as though they have learned the song from him.  After their earlier ‘Beer Or Wine’ song, which was tritone-free and  comparatively lighthearted, the chorus taking up Mephistopheles’ song with its repeated tritones musically symbolizes his turning them from simply irreverent revelry to true evil.   Gounod is described as ‘a devout Catholic all his life’ who seriously considered becoming a priest.  He was a great admirer of J.S. Bach’s music, most famously composing his ‘Ave Maria’ melody using Bach’s C Major Prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier Book I as an accompaniment.  In ‘Song Of The Golden Calf’ it is perhaps his Catholicism that leads him to see the tritone as the personification of evil, much as his fellow Catholic Guido of Arezzo did.  The ‘Ave Maria’ melody suggests that he may have followed Guido’s prohibition against tritones in his religious music; the melody is tritone-free, although it floats above an accompaniment by his Protestant predecessor that includes a number of beautiful tritones in its perpetual motion.  Leave a comment in the comment section if you can identify any of the timings in this scrolling video  of the Ave Maria score where the tritones occur in the treble clef piano part; please also name the two notes that form the tritone.  In ‘Faust’, Gounod includes the melodic tritone as a storytelling device, much as Bach does in the ‘St John Passion’.  In ‘Faust’, however, the tritone represents an evil that cannot be reformed, while the tritone in Bach’s ‘O Grosse Leib’ represents suffering that redeems sins. 

In the twentieth century, two composers, one from the jazz tradition and one inspired by it, found ways to make melodic use of the tritone that preserved the mystique that led it to be banned by Guido and used by Bach and Gounod as a symbol of pain and evil, but also freed the tritone from a musical world where all sounds are either heavenly or evil.  In Thelonious Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original, Robin D.G. Kelley writes that Monk’s composition ‘Round Midnight’ had two sets of lyrics written to it.  Monk collaborated with lyricist Thelma Murray on an earlier version called ‘I Need You So’.  After Monk changed the title to ‘Round Midnight’, lyricist Bernie Hanighen wrote lyrics that repeated Monk’s title phrase a total of seven times over the tune’s thirty-two bar form.  Both sets of lyrics express the particular loneliness of being separated from a beloved person, which demonstrates that Monk’s composition implies that sentiment even when played instrumentally (as it often is to this day.)

Note: The reference version I have linked to in the last paragraph is by Julie London, who sings the tune with pitches that stay closer to the published melody than most jazz interpretations.  Monk’s own versions, starting with his 1947 recording, all add a great deal of interpretation, i.e. additional melodic motion, to his own published melody line.  Perhaps this was in an effort to distinguish his version from the one by Cootie Williams, whose version preceded Monk’s and stayed close to the published melody. 

Hanighen’s lyrics describe how a time of day can bring on a mood.  One also has to wonder whether Hanighen, who worked as a lyricist and producer, had some awareness of the tritone’s history of being typecast as evil, because his lyrics manage the quietly radical act of transforming Monk’s repeated tritones from ominous omens to hopeful ones.   Here are the lyrics for the first eight bars of the song, with the words accompanied by tritones in the melody in bold:

It begins to tell ‘round midnight, ‘round midnight

I do pretty well till after sundown

Suppertime I’m feeling sad,

But it really gets bad ‘round midnight

Hanighen places the word ‘feeling’ (of the phrase ‘feeling sad’) on the second tritone in Monk’s melody, which descends in contrast to the ascending tritone on ’till after’. The descending tritone on ‘feeling sad’ is a very similar pairing to Bach illuminating the words ‘must suffer’ with a descending tritone in ‘O Grosse Leib’.  While the opening of the song could be about many kinds of loneliness, the cause of this particular heartache is revealed in the second eight-bar phrase: ‘when my heart is still with you / and old midnight knows it too’ (lyric accompanying the tritone in bold).  Hanighen’s lyrics to the bridge continue the story, and incorporate three words from Thelma Murray’s original lyric:

When some quarrel we’ve had needs mending,

Does it mean that our love is ending?

Darling, I need you; lately I find

You’re out of my arms and I’m out of my mind.

In the last eight bars, Hanighen unites Monk’s next to last tritone with an image of the divine (lyrics accompanying the ascending tritone in bold):

Let our love take wing, some midnight, ‘round midnight

Let the angels sing of your returning

Hanighen’s lyrics illuminate the last descending tritone in Monk’s melody with a wish, perhaps a prayer, for a positive resolution to the story: ‘let our love be safe and sound’.  While Bach and Gounod associated the tritone so strongly with pain and evil, Hanighen and Monk lift the curse when their conclusion to ‘Round Midnight’ unites the interval first with the divine (the angels sing a tritone!) and then with healing (‘safe and sound’).   A sign of the power of this concluding section is that when vocalist Samara Joy sang Jon Hendricks’ melancholy yet optimistic alternate lyrics to the song on her Grammy-winning album Linger Awhile, she still incorporated Hanighen’s lyrics to the last eight bars.  Leave a comment in the comment section if you can identify any of the timings in this wordless vocal version by Bobby McFerrin and Herbie Hancock where the tritones in the melody occur, and give the letter names of the notes in each tritone.

‘Round Midnight’ was one of Monk’s earlier compositions, and its repeated and prominent tritones are a hint that the interval will become a defining feature of his melodic style.  Among the many Monk tunes featuring frequent tritones is Five Spot Blues from the 1963 album Monk’s Dream, a slight but significant revision of his earlier ‘Blues Five Spot’ which I discuss in my post How To Write A One Bar Blues.

While it’s not clear how aware composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was of Thelonious Monk’s music, he was certainly ‘jazz curious’, from the evidence of an educational record he made in 1957 called What Is Jazz and the musical West Side Story, which premiered the same year.  The score to this show includes music, particularly the Cool Fugue (the midsection of the song ‘Cool’, discussed below), that demonstrates Bernstein had a serious interest in the bebop melodic language that was becoming the common practice of improvisers at the time.  It also includes at least four songs that not only prominently feature tritones in the melody, but share a leitmotif – a three note phrase that appears in all the songs beginning with a tritone. 

In the opening ‘Jet Song’, the eponymous violent street gang sing ‘we’re drawin’ the line’ with a descending tritone on the last two words.  In this song, the tritone symbolizes their potential for violence, as it does for Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust.  However, in the next song, ‘Something’s Coming’, Tony, the Romeo character and a former Jet who has just been drawn back into the gang, sings the same three note motive to the lyrics ‘could be? / who knows?’, as the prelude to a song expressing a premonition of a positive, transformational event in his life (‘I got a feeling there’s a miracle due, gonna come true, comin’ to me’), recasting the tritone as a symbol of hope, as it is by the end of ‘Round Midnight’. 

Tony’s premonition comes true in a dance that night at the gym where he meets Maria, a recent Puerto Rican immigrant with family ties to the Sharks, a gang who are challenging the Jets for territory.  While the rest of the Jets leave the dance eagerly anticipating the rumble to which they have just challenged the Sharks, Tony leaves reveling in his attraction to Maria, singing her name over and over with different melodic patterns (sometimes augmented by backstage or recorded voices) until he sings it with the three-note, tritone-based leitmotif. (Given that the song’s music was written by a very gifted composer and a lyricist who was also a a gifted composer, it’s only natural that Tony at this point in the song sounds like a composer trying to find the ideal melodic pattern for a three syllable name.) Where the tritone was a descending interval in the first two songs, it is now ascending, a musical gesture that together with Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics expresses how speaking the name of the beloved can hold a spiritual power (‘Maria / say it loud and there’s music playing / say it soft and it’s almost like praying’).  Leave a comment in the comment section if you can identify the phrases other than the word ‘Maria’ where the three-note leitmotif is used, either by lyrics, the timing in the video or both.

In an interview with Rolling Stone quoted in the Wikipedia article on West Side Story, Bernstein mentioned that when the show was in development, the frequency of tritones in the score was one of the reasons its early opponents gave that it could not succeed: “Everyone told us that [West Side Story] was an impossible project … And we were told no one was going to be able to sing augmented fourths, as with “Ma-ri-a”.  One has to wonder whether the opponents of Bernstein’s score were concerned not just with how frequently he used tritones, but with how his music together with Sondheim’s lyrics gave the tritone a non-traditional role, associating it with positive aspects of the story and not just negative ones.

When the Jets take up the ascending-tritone motive in the next song, ‘Cool’, it is in the context of a kind of counseling session where an older Jet (in the 2021 film version, Tony himself) advises a younger one on the mindset of a successful gang member, and the potential rewards of the profession (‘don’t get hot, cause man, you got some high times ahead / take it slow, and Daddy-o, you can live it up and die in bed’).  While the tritone makes its first appearance in West Side Story in its traditional role of symbolizing evil, Bernstein and Sondheim, like Monk and Hanighen, show that the interval is versatile enough to also symbolize possibility, hope and love.  (Besides the ‘Maria/Cool’ theme, another theme of the ‘Cool’ fugue midsection is the first three notes of ‘Somewhere’, a tune discussed in my post Sevenths Reaching For The Heavens.)

To return to television where this essay started, in 1989, composer Danny Elfman began his theme music to the long-running cartoon series The Simpsons with the same three-note leitmotif Leonard Bernstein used in ‘Maria’ and ‘Cool’.  It seems impossible that Elfman wasn’t either consciously or subconsciously inspired by the presence West Side Story and those songs in particular have maintained in American culture during his lifetime (he was born in 1953, four years before the show’s premiere).  The show has been revived on Broadway four times, the film has stayed in circulation in various ways, and versions of the songs have been recorded by artists including Buddy Rich, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Oscar Peterson and The Supremes. 

Each episode of the Simpsons begins with the family’s name being sung with the same three notes that Tony in West Side Story uses to announce his love for Maria, his anticipation of an exciting future with her.  While Tony dies by the end of Act Two in West Side’s tragic story arc, Elfman’s use of the ‘Maria’ motive at the beginning of each ‘Simpsons’ episode has helped television audiences feel a sense of anticipation for the 35 years (and counting) that the show has been on the air and making new episodes. (It is currently television’s longest running scripted series, currently at 781 episodes.)  The theme’s opening continues to make audiences fall in love with the sound of the Simpsons’ name, much as Tony fell in love with the sound of ‘Maria’, and they stay Cool because they know Something’s Coming.  As I have tried to show, it is thanks in part to Thelonious Monk, Bernie Hanighen, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim that when Simpsons viewers, whether they have seen zero episodes or all 781, hear the beginning of the opening theme, their first thought isn’t that they’re in for redemptive suffering or the entrance of a Satanic character (though there is room for both in the vast Simpsons universe).  Their first thought is: ‘Something’s Coming / I don’t know what it is / but it is gonna be great’. 

©2025 Tom Cleary

Chameleon, from Herbie Hancock’s 1973 album Headhunters, is an iconic and frequently played jazz tune in which the first section of the tune is based on just two chords, B flat minor seventh and Eb dominant seventh (aka ‘major-minor seventh’), each of which last for four beats or one measure in the tune’s funk groove.  This is commonly known in jazz theory as a ii-V progression.  Although the original version includes a later section where the progression changes (I have a link to a keyboard video of this section below), most of the live and cover versions I mention below only use the first section.

While Chameleon is probably the best-known jazz tune to use this kind of progression, it was not the first composition in the jazz repertoire to do so.  Tito Puente’s composition Oye Como Va, first recorded in 1962, is based on Am7 moving to D7 with the same harmonic rhythm (i.e. the same chord durations, one chord per bar). The chord progression and comping rhythm of Oye Como Va was borrowed from Chanchullo by Israel Cachao Lopez, who in turn borrowed it from Mambolandia composed by the pianist Peruchin for Julio Gutierrez y Su Orquesta.  I know of two pop tunes from the 1980s that also use this type of progression: Holding Back The Years by the band Simply Red (which like Oye Como Va uses a ii-V progression exclusively), and 20/20 by George Benson, which uses the progression for a guitar solo at the end where Benson’s trademark singing along with his improvised solo is virtuosically doubled by vocalist Patti Griffin, who follows Benson’s line at intervals that alternate between a third and a fourth above.  If you can think of a tune that uses a similarly simple (two to four measure) chord progression, please mention the title in the comment section and add a link to a recording. 

A number of well-known solos on this type of ii-V progressions involve a limited pitch collection (often the Bb minor pentatonic or blues scale, with some Bb dorian scale thrown in) and extensive display of the soloist’s technique and endurance.  In the hands of a great soloist like saxophonist Bennie Maupin on the original Headhunters version of Chameleon, this approach can yield a solo with great melodic invention and a deep sense of groove.  Maupin’s solo also contrasts scalar playing earlier in the solo with playing later in the solo that is more intervallic and motivic,  based on the rhythm of the bassline.  In the hands of less skilled soloists, a one or two scale approach can lead to dull results, and in my experience, this is unfortunately the most frequently imitated approach.   A number of other great solos on this type of progression balance a ‘one scale fits all’ approach with other less frequently imitated approaches, including ‘making the changes’ (i.e. using the improvised melodic line to outline the change from one chord to another) and using bebop-style chromaticism. 

In Hancock’s synthesizer solo from the original version of Chameleon, he works with 16^th note phrases that include bebop chromaticism before moving on to exploiting the tone of the synth (and what sounds like amplifier distortion) with a series of long notes.   (Hancock’s solo on Rhodes piano later in this version, during which the second chord in the progression becomes Abm7/Db, includes bop chromaticism as well as the technique known as ‘planing’ or ‘sideslipping’, which means using one’s chord voicing and/or improvised melodic line to imply a chord which doesn’t match the root, and then returning to the tonal center.)

On his 1994 version of Chameleon, guitarist Stanley Jordan begins in the minor pentatonic scale before making a number uses of F-F#-G, or what Barry Harris called ‘the half step between the fifth and sixth’ of the dorian scale.  On a live version by Hancock’s band the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2010, a short solo fill by bassist Tal Wilkenfeld before Hancock’s solo and a phrase at the end of Hancock’s solo employ bop chromaticism.  On a live version of Oye Como Va the tune from the YouTube show Live At Emmet’s Place, guitarist Dan Wilson’s solo uses what Jerry Coker identifies as the ‘Gone But Not Forgotten’ lick, and makes multiple uses of a lick from Charlie Parker’s Billie’s Bounce solo.  (The vocal solo by Cyrille Aimee that precedes Wilson’s solo is also well worth hearing as an example of effective diatonic and intervallic improvising.) On George Benson and Patti Griffin’s tandem solo at the end of  20/20, just before the fadeout he plays a long phrase that first descends the F# dorian scale and then ascends, incorporating a bebop-style ‘half step’ (E-F-F#) .  In all these solos, the chromaticism provides a kind of relief from diatonic uniformity elsewhere in the solo.  These solos demonstrate that, as Vermont educator Rich Davidian mentioned in an improvisation workshop I recently attended, having multiple strategies for approaching a solo allows one to move to a new strategy when the current one has played out its usefulness.  If you can find exact timings in the linked recordings where the licks mentioned are played, please leave the timings in the comment section.  If you can think of another improvised or composed melodic line that use chromaticism, and/or that use two contrasting approaches at different points in the line, please leave the title, a description of the approaches and (if possible) a link to a recording in the comment section. 

I composed and recorded Boptosaurus as a short, concentrated example of bop chromaticism in a melodic line over a ii-V progression accompanied by a Chameleon-type funk groove.  (Click on the title to hear a recording; a chart is below.) The phrases of the melody are inspired by melodies and solos by Kenny Clarke, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Denzil Best and Billy Strayhorn.  The comping in the acoustic piano and Rhodes parts uses what I call ‘evolutionary voicings’, or an alternation of voicings that create an eight-measure melodic arc over a repeated two-measure chord progression and ‘crossless voice leading’, or voicings that avoid ‘voice overlap’, for example, the lowest voice of a chord moving above the middle voice’s previous note.  The melody also uses ‘dialogic phrasing’, or melodic motion that follows the arrival of a chord, rather than moving simultaneously with it.  I also tried to write a line that ‘makes the changes’, in other words, outlines each chord, rather than moving within a single scale that fits both chords (as the melody of Chameleon does so effectively). 

I started the piece initially by notating it on Sibelius, entering the lines and chords using a USB keyboard.  I then exported a MIDI file of the notation which I opened up in ProTools to create the basic melody, chord, bass and drum tracks.  I used a MIDI keyboard to record ‘live’ comping and soloing tracks and to add fills to the drum part.  Amber recorded vocal tracks doubling the instrumental melody (in the style of the solo section on 20/20) and also taking a improvised vocal solo between the piano and accordion solos.   The solos follow a pattern of ii-V progressions ascending by major thirds.  The V chord in each ii-V becomes the tritone substitution for the V chord leading to the ii chord in the next key.  This was inspired by the progression from the first four measures of John Coltrane’s ‘Countdown’, where a series of V-I progressions outline major keys descending by major thirds.  I encourage you to share a either a link to a recording of an original piece along with a description of the technological and/or compositional process you used to create it, or a link to a piece by another artist with some description of the technology and process used to create it.  

Here’s a link to a recording of my tune ‘Thought of Bud At Midnight’, based on the solo changes to Tadd Dameron’s ‘Lady Bird’ which Miles Davis borrowed for ‘Half Nelson’. It includes licks from the Glossary of Melodic Patterns Based On Root Position Chords as well as licks adapted from Bud Powell, Charlie Parker and Red Garland. A chart is below.

What’s in a quote?  Writers, conversationalists, or jazz improvisers can incorporate quotes from well-known sources into their writing, speaking, or playing for many different reasons, and with many different levels of success. In the lyrics to his song ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare’, Cole Porter suggests that quoting famous authors can impress a potential romantic partner: ‘brush up your Shakespeare/start quoting him now/brush up your Shakespeare/and the women you will wow’.  The song originally appeared in the musical ‘Kiss Me Kate’, where it is improvised by gangsters who are trying to kill time while they are accidentally caught onstage during a performance of a Shakespeare play.  The gangsters mispronounce multiple names of Shakepearean characters, sounding like they are in a desperate bid to impress.   It appears that the gangsters’ knowledge of Shakespeare is limited to a long list of play titles, which they rhyme with all manner of bawdy and ribald thoughts on dating, which in turn display zero knowledge about the contexts of the plays.  As the video from the 2001 Broadway production of Kiss Me Kate demonstrates, when the song is combined with authentic New York City accents and pinstripe suits, the results can be hilarious. 

More substantive uses of quotation can be heard in Amiri Baraka’s in his poem ‘I Love Music’, which begins with three sentences quoted from John Coltrane, and Wardell Gray’s tenor saxophone solo on ‘Twisted’, which begins with a musical quote from Charlie Parker (as I explain in my post The Magic Number.) In both Baraka’s poem and Gray’s solo, the opening quote allows the new material that follows it to be heard as an answer to or meditation on the quote, and elements of the opening quote are incorporated into the new material that follows the quote.  Yet another substantive way of using quotations can be seen in Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s ‘How Long, Not Long’ speech, in which King powerfully incorporates quotes throughout, including from the songs ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing’, ‘Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho’ and ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and from texts including Psalm 13 from Hebrew Scripture (from which King draws the repetition of ‘How Long?’) and a sermon excerpt by the nineteenth-century American Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker. King’s phrase ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’ is his own inspired amalgamation of a number of Parker’s phrases. (I learned this from a sermon by Rev. Tricia Hart during her time as an interim minister at the First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, where I am a member.)  King’s speech is best understood through experiencing both its written and spoken forms.   

Bud Powell is repeatedly described as a pianist and composer who has been influential on all generations of jazz players.  A recent example of this view is the YouTube video Bud Powell: The Pianist Who Influenced A Generation by the guitar teacher and musical commentator Rick Beato.  Powell has been credited with innovations including the ‘shell chord’ style of left hand accompaniment which can also be heard in the playing of his close friends Thelonious Monk and Elmo Hope.  His compositions were recorded by his contemporaries (particularly Miles Davis – see below) and have been periodically rediscovered by jazz players of later generations.  A number of jazz players have devoted entire albums to Powell’s music, including trumpeter Herb Robertson’s  Shades of Bud Powell from 1988, in which Robertson arranged Powell’s tunes for a brass ensemble, Chick Corea’s Remembering Bud Powell from 1997, Ethan Iverson’s Bud Powell In The 21st Century from 2018, and guitarist Pasquale Grasso’s Solo Bud from 2020.  What seems to have been less noted is the influence of the melodic vocabulary in Powell’s compositions and improvised solos on the composing and improvising of other jazz players.  As I will show, very soon after Powell’s recorded solos and compositions were released, the influence of his melodic vocabulary began to show in the recordings of his contemporaries in the form of quotes from of his melodic phrases that they interpolated into their own improvised and composed lines, and this kind of influence has continued to the present.   

For me, finding patterns from Bud Powell’s melodic language recurring in his own playing and that of other players can carry the kind of thrill that I imagine might be felt by cryptanalysts cracking a code.  Oxford Languages defines a cryptanalyst as ‘an expert in deciphering coded messages without prior knowledge of the key’.   Many recent popular novels and films portray fictional stories or dramatizations of true stories about people who break the code in messages sent by one arm of an evil regime to another.  One of the best of these is The Imitation Game, which portrays the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing’s leadership of a team of cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, a code-breaking facility of the English military near London working to decode messages sent by the German military using the Enigma machine.  A turning point in the plot of the film is a scene in which Turing learns that a female cryptanalyst has discovered a repeating pattern in the messages she has been analyzing.   While this may well be a fictionalized simplification of a much more complex process, Benedict Cumberbatch’s portrayal of Turing’s heightened state as he looks for more repeating patterns resonates with my own experience of finding patterns in solos by Bud Powell and in solos where other players emulate, assimilate and innovate on his phrases.   

An important difference in Turing’s experience as portrayed by Cumberbatch and my own experience is that while Turing decoded messages sent by an evil regime and thus contributes to the end of a grisly and tragic world war, I have found repeated and melodically strong patterns that are like ‘messages’ sent to future listeners and players from a genius who had a famously troubled but ultimately triumphant musical career.  The delayed but wide-ranging success of Powell’s career can be seen in how his ‘messages’ have been ‘received’ by both his contemporaries and successive generations, who embedded Powell’s patterns in their solos, and thus ‘relayed’ to new listeners. Powell’s patterns, in both his own solos and those by other players who quote him, are not really ‘encoded’ as the patterns that Turing encountered were. If they have any subtext for those who recognize them, it is simply a reminder that Powell had one of the great melodic vocabularies of any composer or improviser, worthy of revisiting and reimagining many times.  

In this sense Powell’s influence on the jazz melodic language has been like that of Shakespeare on spoken and written English in generations following his own.  A list on Merriam-Webster.com of Shakespeare phrases in common use has a title – ’10 Phrases From Shakespeare’ – and a selection of stock photos that suggests the effort of a pre-internet brand stretching to follow internet trends.  However, it also helpfully cites both the plays in which the phrases appeared and modern contexts in which the phrases have been used.  Within this list of phrases, there are three plays (The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet) that contribute two phrases each to the list.  As I have listened for Bud Powell patterns in the improvising of other jazz players, particularly pianists, I have noticed a similar pattern of particular Powell solos and compositions recurring in quotations by multiple players.  In this post I will be discussing allusions by other improvisers to Powell’s compositions Wail, Dance of The Infidels and Celia and his solos on Celia and Buzzy.  (I have also collected a number of solos that quote Powell’s solos on Un Poco Loco and Tempus Fugit, but will save those for a future post.) If nothing else, I think these quotations by other players suggest that these compositions and solos are good places to start for listeners and musicians looking for a way into Powell’s work.  I hope that this collection of Powell allusions might have the beginnings of useful answers to the question of what the value is in studying a jazz player’s melodic language in more granular detail rather than simply looking at the totality of harmony and melody in a given composition.    

While musicians who effectively quote Bud Powell tunes or solos in their own tunes or solos are creating an overall melodic experience that any listener can enjoy, they are also displaying a level of fandom in which a superfan uses an allusion to a beloved but obscure text or language as a secret signal to other fans.  A concentrated example of how Charlie Parker fans engaged in the same practice  can be heard in tune Then You’ll Be Boppin’ Too by bebop-era vocalist Babs Gonzales, where an 18-year-old Sonny Rollins quotes the same Parker phrase twice during his solo (the first quote is at :40), and in the solo that follows, a 17-year-old Wynton Kelly finds a different way to quote the same phrase yet again.  For me, this is reminiscent of Jim Parsons’ character Sheldon speaking Klingon to a fellow Star Trek fan in The Big Bang theory, or Stephen Colbert speaking Quenya, the Elvish language from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, on late night television.  (Colbert makes typically self-depricating humor out of no one in the audience understanding his reference, but he seems to have faith that at least one fellow Tolkien fan was in the TV-viewing audience, and I was.)  During his tenure as Colbert’s musical director on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which sadly ended in August 2022, jazz pianist Jon Batiste laced Colbert’s opening monologues on current events with musical quotes from jazz standards, often comparatively obscure ones by composers including Charlie Parker and Billy Strayhorn, sending a message which could only be decoded by other jazz listeners who knew the tune and realized the relevance of the title to the topic of the Colbert line he was punctuating. In one commentary on Trump where Colbert mentions syphillis, Batiste quotes the Strayhorn tune ‘U.M.M.G.’, which is titled after the acronym for ‘Upper Manhattan Medical Group’.

‘Wail‘, first recorded in August of 1946 as ‘Fool’s Fancy’, is one of a number of Powell compositions that use some version of the chord progression from George and Ira Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm’, otherwise known as ‘rhythm changes’.  The link in the previous sentence is to Powell’s second version from 1949.  Here is a link to a video of me playing the head to ‘Wail’ with my own chord voicings; a single-staff score of the opening to the tune is below. I have bracketed fragments that I have found other soloists and composers borrowing:

In this version one can hear 18-year-old tenor saxophonist and Charlie Parker superfan Sonny Rollins quoting a cornerstone of the Parker vocabulary, ‘Cool Blues’ lick. (I discuss uses of the ‘Cool Blues’ lick in my post Taking The Fifth.) Only a few months earlier in January of that year, Rollins had quoted the lick verbatim on Babs Gonzalez’ recording of Professor Bop, but in his ‘Wail’ solo he makes a more sophisticated use of it, expanding it by adding new material between Parker’s opening and closing gestures.   Quotation of the melody to ‘Wail’ began as early as a Miles Davis recording session in August of 1947, less than a year after Powell’s recording of ‘Fool’s Fancy’.  In measures 10 and 11 of the melody to his composition ‘Half Nelson’, recorded at the 1947 session, Davis included a phrase that rhythmic and melodically matches the first eight notes of ‘Wail’ (fragment 1 in the chart).

The likelihood that Davis borrowed this phrase consciously or subconsciously from Powell’s tune is supported by a number of historical facts.  First, the original recording of ‘Wail’ under the title ‘Fool’s Fancy’ featured Kenny Dorham on trumpet, a contemporary of Davis’ for whom he had deep respect that sometimes manifested as competitiveness.  In ‘Miles: The Autobiography’, Davis (through his co-writer Quincy Troupe) says that ‘ I liked [Dorham’s] tone and voice. And he was really creative, imaginative, an artist on that horn. He never got all the credit he deserved’.  Davis’s regard for Dorham and his competitive attitude toward him could easily have led Davis to seek out records on which Dorham was a featured sideman and particularly to learn a challenging ‘head’ or melody statement like ‘Fool’s Fancy’/’Wail’, which (like Davis’ ‘Donna Lee’) was a set of melodic hurdles created by a composer/virtuoso for their highly skilled bandmates.   

There is also evidence in Davis’ recording career, both during and after the ‘Half Nelson’ session, that he admired Powell as a composer.  This evidence was mostly disguised by Davis and the record companies who, as Lewis Porter has shown, intervened for their own benefit and assigned composer credits to him for tunes he recorded by other writers. Davis’ composition ‘Sippin’ At Bells’, recorded on the same session as ‘Half Nelson’, uses the uniquely altered twelve bar blues progression from Powell’s ‘Dance of The Infidels’, recorded after ‘Sippin’ At Bells’ in 1949 but likely heard or even learned by Davis before then (Powell biographer Peter Pullman mentions that Powell was teaching it to Sonny Rollins and Jackie McLean well before the recording.)  In 1948, on his iconic album ‘Birth of the Cool’, Davis also recorded an altered version of Powell’s ‘Hallucinations’, which Davis retitled ‘Budo’ and added his name in the composer credits, and in 1953 he recorded Powell’s composition ‘Tempus Fugit’ under its original title (but with a significantly altered bridge).      

The tune ‘Milestones’ (sometimes called ‘Old Milestones’ to distinguish it from a similarly named Davis tune), recorded by Davis on the same session as ‘Half Nelson’, has been credited at various times to Charlie Parker or Miles Davis but is now credited by a number of recent sources to pianist John Lewis. ‘Milestones’ opens with an altered version of the ‘Wail’ opening motive (fragment 1) where the last note is lowered by a half step.  This motive begins first on middle C and is then transposed up a minor third to start on Eb.    

Pianist Sonny Clark was seven years younger than Powell and had an improvisational vocabulary that shows him to be a disciple of Powell’s playing.  Clark’s piano solo on his composition ‘Cool Struttin’, shown fairly accurately in this transcription, uses a lick similar to the opening of ‘Wail’ starting on the fourth note of measure 7 (where he alters the middle of the phrase) and on the sixth note of measure 15 (where he plays the first five notes of ‘Wail’ without alteration).  The way the lick at measure 7 continues to A4 and C5 and the lick at m. 15 continues to A4 is also evocative of the opening of ‘Wail’.  Nine notes in the middle of a phrase at measures 17 and 18 of this solo also match the first nine notes of Powell’s ‘Dance of the Infidels’. (Please note that I mean the first nine notes starting from the first full bar of the melody.) Here is a link to a video of me playing ‘Dance Of The Infidels‘ (along with the intro- note that the melody doesn’t begin until the ninth bar in the video, or :11), and here is a score for the opening of the tune:

The ‘Infidels’ pattern is also prominently featured in the melody of Clark’s composition Junka.  The link in the last sentence is to a version with trumpet and tenor saxophone from 1959.   In the piano trio version of the tune recorded a year later, Clark cleverly disguises the ‘Infidels’ quote by first removing the second note of the phrase, then adding the missing note back in but preceding the phrase with additional melodic motion.   

A chromatic passage in the first two bars of the bridge to Jimmy Rowles’ ‘The Peacocks’, in which minor 3rds descend by half steps through a zig-zag pattern, matches a passage in m. 7-8 of ‘Wail’ (fragment 2 in the chart above) in which major thirds descend by half steps through the same pattern.  (The first link in the last sentence is to the version of ‘The Peacocks’ by vocalist Norma Winstone who wrote the lyrics to the tune; in this version the minor-third pattern is clearer than instrumental versions where it is more ornamented.)  In the interviews I have read, Rowles does not explicitly cite Powell as one of his influences, but he did perform with Charlie Parker and listed Powell-influenced players like Wynton Kelly as among his ‘favorites’, so it follows that he would have been aware of Powell and might even have learned some of his tunes or some of his licks. 

The passage in m. 9-11 of ‘Wail’, in which a chromatic descent from B4 to Ab4 is interspersed with high flourishes between C5 and F5, has had perhaps the longest life of any lick from the tune.  Versions of it appear in Horace Silver’s 1955 piano solo on ‘Doodlin’, alto saxophonist Jackie McLean’s composition Bird Lives from the 1988 album Dynasty, and the head out of ‘Sambale’ from pianist Yuri Storione’s 2021 album ‘This Time The Dream’s On Us’.  All three of these musicians tend to wear their Bud Powell influence on their sleeve.  Silver told interviewer Len Lyons that he ‘used to play a lot of Bud Powell solos off the record’.  In a New York Times article about Powell’s 1964 return to Birdland, Silver is quoted as saying: ‘Bud is one of the great sources.  He says more in five measures than most players say in five minutes’, indicating that Silver listened in granular detail of Powell’s melodic lines. McLean was one of Powell’s students along with Sonny Rollins.  In ‘Wail: The Life of Bud Powell’, Peter Pullman quotes the following conversation between a young McLean and Sonny Rollins when both were between lessons with Powell: ‘Rollins…asked, ‘Hey, I wanna ask you a question.  Who’s the baddest, Bud or Bird?’ [McLean replied:] ‘Get outta here, man.  What do you mean, who’s the baddest?’ [Rollins:] ‘I know you’re gonna say ‘Bird’.’ {McLean:] ‘Well, yeah.’ And Rollins admonished him: ‘You’d better think about that, and you’d better listen…I’ll see you later.’  Storione’s album ‘This Time The Dream’s On Us’ includes a number of other quotes of Powell licks as well as a tune entitled ‘Viva Bud Powell!’   

The melody from the A section of Powell’s tune ‘Celia’, originally recorded between January and February of 1949, is quoted in a solo by pianist Anthony Wonsey on the version of Frank Foster’s ‘Cidade Alta’ from trumpeter Kenyatta Beasley’s 2019 album ‘Frank Foster Songbook’.  On his original version of ‘Celia’, Powell begins the break that opens his solo with a 9-note lick that Chick Corea later used repeatedly in his composition ‘Bud Powell’ from the ‘Remembering Bud Powell’ album.  (The link to the break will take you to a video where the score to ‘Celia’ is linked to the playback of Powell’s version, and link to the 9-note lick will take you to a keyboard video of the head and solo of ‘Celia’). Before it appeared in the ‘Celia’ solo, Powell used this lick in his solo on the J.J. Johnson rhythm changes ‘Jay Bird’, recorded in June of 1946 (just a few months before ‘Fool’s Fancy’). This phrase is immediately preceded by what might be called a ‘coming attraction’ quote of the melody of Fool’s Fancy/Wail, which he would record for the first time only two months later.   The opening of Powell’s ‘Jay Bird’ solo, which is itself an innovative quote of a lick played by J.J. Johnson in the immediately preceding solo, is also quoted in Horace Silver’s solo on his tune ‘Knowledge Box’ from his trio album for Blue Note, recorded in 1952.  

In addition to being quoted in the Sonny Clark solo and tune mentioned above, Dance of the Infidels’, recorded by Powell in August of 1949 , also appears in two solos by Horace Silver. The first is in his solo on the recording of his tune ‘Horoscope’ from the aforementioned trio album (an early version before the title was changed to ‘Horacescope’).  Silver plays two ‘Infidels’ quotes here back-to-back, the first time altering the original end of the phrase, the second time considerably altering the arc of the phrase. The second solo where he quotes ‘Infidels’ is on ‘Silver’s Serenade’ from the album of the same name from 1963.  I discuss this quote in my blog post Conversation Pieces Part Two.  

A smaller fragment of the ‘Dance Of The Infidels’ opening (in the melodic minor scale, steps 2-7-1-2-3) can be heard in the third measure of the bridge of ‘Celia’, in measures 1 and 5 of Charles Mingus’s Self Portrait In Three Colors and measure 5 of Mary Lou Williams’s New Blues, meant to represent the bebop era, from her 1978 album The History Of jazz.  Mingus is the bass player on a live recording of Charlie Parker performing Dance Of The Infidels with Bud Powell (perhaps the only recording of Parker playing a Powell composition) and Mary Lou Williams was closely associated with Powell over a number of years as a female member of what I call the ‘Three Musketeers Collective’ (centered around Powell, Monk and Elmo Hope) and which I describe in my post Musical Neighbors.  While we know Mingus heard ‘Dance Of The Infidels’, it is also likely WIlliams heard it and ‘Celia’.   

Powell’s solo on the Charlie Parker blues Buzzy, from his only studio session with Parker in 1947, is a remarkable feat of grace and responsiveness which I discuss in my post on Bud Powell and Wynton Kelly. Here is my transcription of the first chorus of the solo, which can be found in the post on Powell and Kelly:

Here is a link to a video of me playing the first chorus of the solo. This solo is quoted in two places during Al Haig’s piano solo on the original Wardell Gray recording of Twisted from 1949, as well as during his comping on the bass solo. One of the licks from the ‘Buzzy’ solo is alluded to by Sonny Clark in his solo on his tune Blues Mambo from 1960 with a version that is both condensed and ornamented.  I encourage you to leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timing where these quotes occur in the Haig and Clark solos. In 1986, Gil Evans used the entire first chorus of Powell’s solo to open his composition ‘Bud and Bird’.   

While there is some value in knowing the isolated phrases from Bud Powell’s vocabulary that are quoted  by other great jazz players, I find the greater value in identifying these quotations is that it makes me aware of the compositions and solos by Powell to which these players were most drawn. This sends me back to those tunes and solos to re-learn them in more depth and search for other sections I might find useful and inspiring.  It also makes me aware in a general way of which corners of Powell’s work may have been less explored.  Just as with knowing a commonly quoted phrase from Shakespeare, while one can certainly add the familiar quote to one’s vocabulary, the greater pleasure is in going back to re-experience the original source, hearing the now heightened meaning of the quoted phrase in its original context, and staying tuned for where other less used excerpts may still lie, waiting like old but sturdy tools to be used in the tilling of new garden plots.