BirdFeed

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 from Parker’s melodic language 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 listen deeply to these kinds of historical sources and to the musical ideas her bandmates share in the present, but to reflect in her improvising that she is both listening and thinking about what she’s hearing.

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 it, we can imagine Shakespeare’s original line (‘tired with all these, for restful death I cry’) as a poetic reduction which achieves more concentrated meaning through deleting the additional explanation in Bernstein’s extended version.  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.   

‘The Irish Washerwoman‘ is a lively jig melody which is either Irish or English in origin. It is often played to accompany country dances such as the one seen on the video to which I linked at the beginning of this post. Scholars who claim that this tune is English in origin point to its similarity to ‘The Dargason’, a tune that Gustav Holst used as the basis of the fourth movement from his Second Suite for Band (where he juxtaposes it contrapuntally with ‘Greensleeves’.) Except for a few perfect fourth intervals, the tune is mostly made up of major and minor 2nds and major and minor 3rds.

The Irish Washerwoman was part of the vast vocabulary of melodic phrases that Ella Fitzgerald used to construct her solos. As it happens, Fitzgerald used this quote in three solos, each a year apart, in 1960, ’61 and ’62. Like the solos of many great improvisers, Fitzgerald’s solos were in some cases completely improvised and in other cases made up of a combination of ‘set pieces’ that were premediated to some extent and other sections that were improvised. A case in point is her legendary solo on How High The Moon from the 1960 album Ella In Berlin, in which she begins with the three scat choruses from her 1947 recording of the song and adds an additional four minutes of improvisation. Somewhere in this new material is an Irish Washerwoman quote that emerges gradually. Fitzgerald first quotes only four notes of the tune, and then sixteen bars later quotes a two-measure fragment of the tune which she immediately transposes to another key, resulting in a four-bar phrase derived from the tune. Leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timing in the video where this longer Irish Washerwoman phrase occured.

Fitzgerald’s version of Perdido from the album Twelve Nights In Hollywood,, recorded in 1961, includes a quote of the Irish Washerwoman somewhere near the middle of her solo. Leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timing in the video where this Irish Washerwoman quote is heard.

A third Irish Washerwoman quote is heard in Fitzgerald’s solo on her version of All of Me from the album Ella Swings Gently With Nelson. Leave a comment if you can find the timing of this quote.

In ‘Things Ain’t What They Used To Be’, first recorded in July 1941 by Johnny Hodges and His Orchestra (a subset of the Duke Ellington Orchestra under a different name), Mercer Ellington uses one element clearly modeled on his father Duke Ellington’s earlier music for his band and another element which my research suggests may have been borrowed from his father’s improvisational language on the piano. ‘Things’ was written in early 1941 under great time constraints created by radio stations suddenly banning music published through ASCAP. This prevented Ellington from playing his back catalog of compositions on the radio and led him to ask Mercer Ellington and Billy Strayhorn to write the band a new ‘book’ of tunes in a very short space of time. This makes it understandable why Mercer would have used borrowed elements in composing ‘Things’. (For more on this situation and Strayhorn’s response to it, click on the tiny superscript ‘1’ at the end of this sentence.¹)

In ‘Things’, aside from a short interlude, Mercer Ellington uses the blues progression, a harmonic structure that Ellington had used in many of his previous compositions, such as Creole Love Call and Diminuendo in Blue.  He also uses a melodic figure which is similar to a phrase from the Scottish bagpipe tune ‘The Campbells Are Coming ‘ that Duke Ellington quoted in at least three piano solos on recordings with his band over an eleven-year period.  These include two recordings of ‘C Jam Blues’, one in November or December of 1941 for a RCA ‘soundie’ film and a studio recording in January 1942.  In the ‘soundie’ version, Ellington uses the ‘Campbells’ quote once in his one-chorus solo, and in the studio recording he finds room in the same short space to use it twice; but all three quotations have different placements within the measure and within the blues form. While all Ellington’s uses of ‘Campbells’ are in the later part of his short intro solos on ‘C Jam’, he uses a ‘Campbells’ quote to begin a solo which is an intro to the version of ‘Take The A Train’ from the album 1952 album ‘Ellington Uptown’. It is clear that over the ten-year period between the ‘C Jam’ recordings and the ’52 ‘A Train’, Ellington was going through a process of finding different rhythmic approaches to assimilating this lick into his solos. Click on the tiny superscript ‘2’ at the end of this sentence for more info on Ellington and ‘Campbells’.²  (In my post on Red Garland, I detail what sound to me like Garland’s quotations of ‘Campbells’.)

Although all these recorded ‘Campbells’ quotes come after the first recording of ‘Things’, the fact that this phrase stayed in Duke Ellington’s improvisational vocabulary for over a decade strongly suggests that Mercer Ellington might have heard his father use it before 1941, and that he might have taken the first five notes, changed the rhythm and added one note to form the main motive of ‘Things’.  If this is not the case, Ellington’s ‘Campbells’ quotes could be an example of the son influencing the father, as the discography at Ellingtonia.com shows the Ellington band performed ‘Things’ many times between the ‘C Jam’ and ‘A Train’ recordings.   Ellington’s quotes of ‘Campbells’, in other words, could be the bandleader consciously or unconsciously saying in melodic language, ‘the more I play my son’s tune, the more it reminds me of this old Scottish melody.’ In my view, however, it is more likely that Mercer took his father’s pre-1941 (but unrecorded) uses of the ‘Campbells’ lick to the next level by innovating on it in ‘Things’.

My use of ‘innovate’ and ‘assimilate’ in the last two paragraphs is inspired by Clark Terry’s famous concept of how improvisers develop their language, ‘Emulate, Assimilate, Innovate’. I give my own definitions of these three stages in the second paragraph of my post Ellavolution. I also have a series of posts called ‘Emulate, Assimilate, Innovate’ on how improvisers and composers have engaged in this process using melodic ideas that feature specific intervals. This series can be accessed through the links in the right sidebar of the blog.

Both ‘Things’ and Rudy Stephenson’s ‘Blues On Purpose’, first recorded by the Wynton Kelly trio, share what I would call ‘dialogic phrasing’, melodic phrases that begin after the downbeat of a bar and often function as an ‘answer’ to the ‘question’ posed by the arrival of a new chord.  In ‘Blues on Purpose’, the first two beats of each two-bar phrase are occupied by a chordal comping phrase using ‘Charleston’ rhythm (i.e. a dotted quarter followed by an eighth note in swing rhythm), and the melodic phrases begin on the ‘and’ of 3 in the first bar.  The melodic phrases in ‘Things’ begins earlier, on the ‘and’ of 1, but this still leaves room for a short comping phrase, which Ellington does with single notes on the version from the 1953 trio album Piano Reflections. 

One can hear pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams in a similar process over a similar period of time experimenting with the phrase that eventually forms the basis of her blues ‘Koolbonga‘ from the 1964 album Black Christ of the Andes.  On her 1953 album Mary Lou Wiliams Plays In London the lick appears at the very beginning of the piano part in her blues ‘Kool Bongo‘, but continues in the bass part as the piano breaks off into chordal comping.  In her tune Carioca, recorded later the 1950s with a trio and in a very similar arrangement by the Dizzy Gillespie big band with Williams on piano in 1957, she uses the lick as a midsection.  On Black Christ in 1964, Williams returns to ‘Kool Bongo’ in the similarly titiled ‘Koolbonga’ and doubles the bassline in the piano part throughout the head statement, effectively making the bassline the melody of the tune.  Like ‘Things’ and ‘Blues On Purpose’, ‘Koolbonga’ is based on a two-measure motive. 

While the head of ‘Koolbonga’ is based on minor pentatonic scales built on the roots of the I, IV and V chords in the progression, the improvising that follows the head is on a blues progression that uses dominant seventh chords. Below you will find an assignment to write a blues that ‘makes the changes’ (i.e. melodically outlines the harmony) of a dominant-seventh-based blues progression, so I ask that in following that process, you use the phrasing of ‘Koolbonga’ as a model, but not its note choice. One thing that ‘Koolbonga’ and ‘Blues On Purpose’ have in common is a melody played by either the bass alone or by the bass and another instrument in unison, and that is certainly an option for the assignment.

Compose a ‘two bar blues’, in other words, a melody following the chord progression of the twelve-bar blues as shown below and built from two-measure phrases like the tunes mentioned in this post. Use as your models the dominant-seventh-chord based melodic lines of ‘Things’ and ‘Blues On Purpose’ and the way in which ‘Koolbonga’ outlines all three of the basic I, IV and V chords in the twelve-bar ‘jazz blues’ progression below. Although the melody of ‘Things’ focuses on the major triad and the melody of ‘Blues On Purpose’ focuses on the major pentatonic scales of the I and IV chords, feel free to take one of these approaches and/or use the mixolydian/seventh scale based off of the roots of the I, IV and V. Although the melodic lines of ‘Things’ and ‘Blues On Purpose’ do not outline the V chord, your line should outline the V chord, as the melody/bassline of ‘Koolbonga’ does, however, it should do this using the major triad, major pentatonic scale, or mixolydian scale based off the root of the V chord, not the minor pentatonic as Koolbonga does. This is not an assignment in free composition but rather a both a guided compositional project and a theory exercise using the blues progression below as a vehicle. You are welcome to do a second draft of your blues where you move outside these guidelines. I think that you will find that following the limitations of this project may result in a first draft that inspires revision.

Here are the required elements of the assignment:

1) Borrow, adapt or compose a two bar motive or ‘riff’ that outlines a dominant seventh chord. One option is to borrow or adapt one of the dominant seventh chord phrases from the Glossary of Melodic Patterns based on Root Position Chords shown in the post on my tune Broken Heart for Sale.  Your phrase should fit ‘inside’ two bars, either using ‘Koolbonga’, which goes from beat 1 of the first bar to beat 4 of the second bar, or the ‘dialogic’ phrasing of ‘Things Ain’t What They Used To Be’ which begins on the ‘and’ of 1 in the first bar, and ‘Blues On Purpose’, which begins on the ‘and’ of 3 in the first bar, and.  It should also fulfill these basic elements of melody which can be heard all the example tunes given in this post:

– Instead of being limited to only stepwise or only skip/leap motion, It should have a balance of step and skip/leap motion.

– Rather than being limited to only ascending or only descending motion, it should have a balance of ascending and descending motion.

– Instead of being limited to only one note duration – i.e., only quarter notes or only eighth notes, etc.it should have a balance of longer and shorter note values.  Keep in mind that some sense of eighth-note momentum is an important component of a jazz melodic line, either through using groups of two or more eighth notes or having single eighth notes, for example,  on upbeats preceded by an eighth rest or in a dotted quarter-eighth note combination (single eighth notes on the downbeat followed by rests do not create a sense of eighth note momentum.)

2) transpose your riff so that it outlines I, IV and V chords of a blues progression in G (G7, C7 and D7).  Transpose the riff without altering its phrase length, melodic rhythm or pattern of intervals. 

3) sequence it through this basic three chord blues progression:

G7 / / / | / / / / | / / / / | / / / / |

C7 / / / | / / / / | G7 / / /| / / / /|

D7 / / / | / / / / | G7 / / /| / / / /|

This will result in a tune which departs from the structure of Things Ain’t and Blues on Purpose where they have differing melodic material in m. 9-12, but follows the structure of Koolbonga.

4) Notate your tune as a single-staff lead sheet with one staff of melody in treble or bass clef, chord symbols above, and four measures in each line (as this is easier to read).

5) learn to play your line on your instrument

Here are some optional  elements of the assignment:

1) to include the ‘innovate’ stage of the ’emulate, assimilate, innovate’ process, add alterations to any of the phrases after the first phrase.  Alterations to the pattern can include (but are not limited to):

– adding additional notes, as long as the line stays within the two-measure parameter (as in m. 3-4 of Things Ain’t WTUTB)

– making minor alterations to the shape (i.e. direction) of the line without changing the length of the phrase, as in m. 9-10 of Koolbonga

2) give your line ‘dialogic’ phrasing, as in Things Ain’t and Blues On Purpose (i.e. beginning the phrase somewhere after beat 1, where the bassline tends to state the root and chord instruments place the chord.  If you play a chord instrument, you can incorporate a statement of the chord on or near beat 1 of m. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11 (as in Blues On Purpose).  If you are performing the tune on piano, you could notate the rhythms and voicings of the chords. 

3) change the chord in m. 9 to Am7 so that m. 9-12 form a ii-V-I as is typical in ‘jazz blues’.  A two bar phrase that outlines the V chord will generally sound good over a two-bar ii-V progression. 

My tune After Lunch resulted from following this process and is loosely based on a lick from Paul Asbell’s tune Blue Lunch from Burmese Panther, an album of his fine jazz compositions. (While ‘Blue Lunch’ doesn’t include keyboards, I play organ and piano on other tracks of the album including the title tune, ‘Ambidextrous’, ‘Chillantro’ and ‘Tore Up’.)

This blog post including footnotes copyright 2024 by Tom Cleary

1. On January 1st, 1941, hundreds of radio stations around the country announced that they would no longer broadcast music published through ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers).  This move was in protest of ASCAP having made a 100 percent increase in the royalty payments they charged to radio stations for the right to broadcast the songs they controlled.  For Duke Ellington, who performed regularly with his orchestra on the radio and for whom radio had been ‘instrumental…in gaining him fame and fortune’, this meant that as of January 1st, all the music he had written for the band since he joined ASCAP in 1935 could not be performed on the radio.  Learning of the ban on January 1st created a major crisis for Ellington and his band, as they were scheduled to play a live broadcast from the Casa Manana in Culver City, California on January 3rd.  According to Walter van de Leur in Something To Live For: the music of Billy Strayhorn, ‘in order to gain entry [to ASCAP] a writer had to have published at least five successful songs…Ellington turned to his son Mercer and Strayhorn, both of whom fell short of the ASCAP registration requirements and thus could provide music that steered clear of the ban.’ 
   
   Strayhorn biographer David Hadju writes that over the course of two days spent in a Chicago hotel (where they stayed behind after the band left for California) and on a train to Los Angeles, Mercer Ellington and Strayhorn composed a total of twelve charts that formed a new ‘book’ for the Duke Ellington Orchestra.  While some of the music Strayhorn wrote at this time, such as ‘Chelsea Bridge’, ‘A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing’ and ‘Rain Check’, made major departures from Duke Ellington’s compositional style, at least one tune of Strayhorn’s and one of Mercer Ellington’s showed signs that the composers were building on previous successful Ellington compositions.  The melody of Strayhorn’s ‘Take The ‘A’ Train’ shows the influence of bop melodic concepts, which were not part of the Ellington band’s vocabulary at the time, but the first eight measures of Strayhorn’s chord progression uses the same essential harmonic structure that opens ‘Mood Indigo’ and ‘Solitude’, two iconic Ellington tunes from the period before Strayhorn joined the Ellington organization as a staff composer. (Given the breadth of Strayhorn’s musical knowledge, it seems possible that he was aware the progression of ‘A Train’ had both a likeness to the A sections of the two earlier Ellington tunes and an even greater similarity to the progression of the 1930 Jimmy McHugh/Dorothy Fields song ‘Exactly Like You’.)
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2. The Campbells Are Coming’ has a Scottish version, which seems to have originated sometime in the 1700s, and an American fife-and-drum version which was apparently played during the Civil War by Union troops as they marched toward the battle of Gettysburg.  As all Ellington’s quotations of this tune occur during the intro sections of ‘C Jam Blues’ and ‘A Train’, his use of it to rally his ‘troops’ for the ‘battle’ of the improvised solos shows his awareness of the tune’s origin.  It seems possible that Ellington was also aware that the tune was adopted by Union troops in the Civil War, as in his own way he was a lifelong proponent of civil rights.  The lyrics to ‘Things Ain’t What They Used To Be’ by Ted Persons, written during World War II and sung by Ella Fitzgerald on her album of the same name from the 1970s, have a civil rights theme of sorts, alluding to both the mental ravages of the Jim Crow era (‘got so weary of bein’ nothin’), and the experience of finding less discrimination and more solidarity in the military than in society at large: ‘look at that Army, fightin’ to be free / it doesn’t bar me / shows me how to go with my head up / eyes ain’t lookin low, don’t feel fed up / that’s how come I see a victory / believe me, Things Ain’t What They Used To Be. ↩︎

pictures clockwise from upper left: Wardell Gray, Annie Ross, Bobby Tucker, Hansel and Gretel, Wynton Kelly, Horace Silver

After you read this post, including the section using Freytag’s Pyramid to analyze ‘Twisted’, I encourage you to add a comment in the comment section analyzing the Horace Silver, Wynton Kelly or Bobby Tucker solos, or another improvised solo of your choice, in terms of how the solo either follows the rising action/climax/falling action structure, or reorders those stages somehow, adds other stages, or follows a different narrative structure through its melodic line and musical choices.

When I listen to an improvised solo, particularly a solo that follows a statement of a melody and uses the same chord changes as that melody, or improvise such a solo myself, I sometimes find it helpful to begin by asking, ‘why do they (or I) need to improvise?’  In other words, what is the strategy in this performance for spontaneously creating something different from the melody?  In the case of a tune like ‘Blues By Five’, discussed in an earlier blog post, the simplicity of the melody gives a soloist one goal right away: to improvise something somewhat more elaborate and less repetitive than the head.  After I’ve heard someone improvise once through the progression (or listened to myself doing the same), an important next question is ‘why take a second chorus?’  What would I as a player (or a soloist I’m listening to) like to have happen in a second chorus of solo that didn’t happen in the first chorus?  One can also ask as a listener or a player how a third chorus will contrast with the second, and so on.

A good exercise to practice which can help develop one’s own answers to these questions is to learn a three-chorus blues solo by a great jazz player.  Among the many values of this exercise are that one can incorporate phrases from the solo into one’s own vocabulary, and one can use the storytelling structure of that solo to inform an improvised solo.  (See below for more on how storytelling structure can be found and created in both verbal stories and improvised jazz solos.)  Playing a transcribed and/or improvised three-chorus solo on the twelve bar blues form is also an important exercise for aspiring improvisers as it allows them to create a performance where the amount of either previously or currently improvised material in the solo is either equal to or greater than the amount of composed material in the head (depending on how many times the head is repeated.)  It is an unwritten but important guideline that jazz performers need to be able to give this kind of performance.

The following examples show a number of ways to create a continually evolving melodic ‘story’  in a three chorus solo on the ‘jazz blues’ progression.  As the solos I discuss below demonstrate, among the ways soloists can create contrast within a three chorus solo are by gradually increasing  their use of the higher range of their instrument, by introducing new thematic material in each chorus (in two of the four solos discussed below, this is done through the use of melodic quotation), and by using contrasting playing techniques, such as single note melodic lines and double notes of various intervals. 

‘Twisted’ is a composition by tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray, who recorded his original version in 1949 with a distinctive three-chorus solo. In Gray’s original version, his solo was followed by a two chorus piano solo by Al Haig (which quotes Bud Powell’s Buzzy solo, discussed in an earlier post), a one chorus bass solo and another chorus of tenor before a return to the head.  ‘Twisted’ began its journey toward becoming a vocal jazz standard when vocalist Annie Ross recorded a version with her own lyrics.  In this version, Ross sings the head and the solo in Gray’s original key of Bb, followed by only one chorus of organ comping, which makes Gray’s solo as sung by Ross the sole focus of the performance.  Ross also recorded a version with the trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, in which the key was changed to C and which her partners in the trio, Jon Hendricks and Dave Lambert, added distracting interjections.

Following Ross’ success with the song, it was also covered by following generations of singers with widely varying interpretations.  Two versions were recorded in 1973: Bette Midler (with her then-music director Barry Manilow on piano) made it an overheated theater piece, and Joni Mitchell (with Cheech and Chong doing the interjections) made it a feminist statement, dialing up the coolness in Ross’s female patient responding to a fatalistic male psychologist.   Although Mitchell is more faithful than Midler to Gray’s melody line, a version by jazz singer Jane Monheit in 2000, with a stellar band led by Kenny Barron on piano, is more swinging and more faithful to Gray’s original melody line than either Midler or Mitchell.  The three versions together make ‘Twisted’ perhaps the best-known three chorus solo on the ‘jazz blues’ progression.  My own personal encounter with the tune occurred in the late 1980s/early 1990s, when I was introduced to it by Archie Shepp as a student in his improvisation class.  As filmmaker Abraham Ravett relates, Wardell Gray’s style on the saxophone had a significant influence on Shepp’s playing. I also played ‘Twisted’ on some of the first gigs I had accompanying jazz singers.

An important element in Gray’s solo on ‘Twisted’ are sizeable quotes from composed tunes and improvised solos by Charlie Parker that appeared in the years closely preceding Gray’s recording, as well as a quote from a pop song which Parker himself had quoted. The quotes make sense given that Gray played with Parker in the period preceding ‘Twisted’; he appears on the 1947 Los Angeles studio session that produced Parker’s classic tune ‘Relaxin’ at Camarillo’. The skillful way Gray’s Parker quotes are integrated into a melodic whole in ‘Twisted’ show that during the time he played with Parker, he was studying Parker’s melodic vocabulary in considerable detail. Please click on the tiny superscript ‘1’ at the end of this sentence to see a footnote with more detail on the many places in ‘Twisted’ where Gray quotes Parker.¹

Gray’s solo is anything but a random collection of Parker quotations.  One of the ways he builds the solo is to use one of the highest notes in the solo’s tessitura, Bb5, with increasing frequency as the solo goes on.  Gray uses this note once in the first chorus, four times in the second chorus, and six times in the third chorus.  Gray also saves the solo’s highest note, C5, for the third chorus, which also contains the highest concentration of chromatic bop language.  The first two choruses, although they quote Parker, are diatonic enough that they might pass as a Lester Young solo if they were played in his characteristic tone.  The evolution of Gray’s melodic story, with its movement toward greater use of chromaticism and high notes, makes it possible for Ross’s lyrics to tell a verbal story that parallels the peaks and valleys of Gray’s musical story.  (See below where I analyze these two stories by using a literary analysis tool and making an analogy to a different story with the same structure.) 

Horace Silver’s three chorus solo on his 1955 blues Doodlin’ stays in a more limited range than Gray’s ‘Twisted’ solo, but Silver keeps his musical story moving by  introducing new motives throughout the solo.  Each chorus begins with a different two-bar riff, which always is varied in the third and fourth bars of the form rather than being repeated exactly.  The fifth and sixth measures of Silver’s second chorus contain what sounds to me like a quote of Bud Powell’s ‘Wail’.  The riff which gets developed the furthest is in the third chorus, where he plays essentially same the riff four times with variations on second, third and fourth times.  In another blog post, I describe Silver’s quoting of another Bud Powell tune in his solo on  ‘Silver’s Serenade’.  Lambert, Hendricks and Ross also recorded a vocal version of ‘Doodlin’ which added lyrics to the composed melody and Silver’s solo.  Once again, an evolving melodic story, this time built on evolving motives that stay in a more restricted range than that of ‘Twisted’, inspire an evolving lyrical story, this time about a restaurant patron who is also a compulsive cartoonist. 

Wynton Kelly’s solo on Johnny Griffin’s 1956 recording of his blues Nice And Easy includes more use of left hand comping than Silver’s solo.  Appropriately enough for an album titled ‘Introducing Johnny Griffin’, Griffin introduces himself with a dense, busy solo in which he builds great energy but gives himself little time to breathe.  By contrast, Kelly, who had recorded his first album as a leader five years prior and had also appeared on many recordings as sideman, gives his solo a relaxed opening in which right hand phrases are framed by left hand chords.  Where Griffin is ‘double timing’ or playing 16th notes by the fifth and sixth measures of his opening quotes, Kelly waits until the eighth bar of his first chorus to drop in one brief double-timed phrase. 

One way Kelly creates contrast between his choruses is to vary the amount of double timing he uses in each chorus; he uses a half-measure (two beats) of double timing in the first chorus, three measures of double timing in the second chorus, and two measures of double timing in the last chorus.  Another kind of contrast between the choruses is Kelly’s choices of playing techniques; while he improvises a single-note melodic line in his right hand for most of the first chorus, he opens the second chorus with double notes in the right hand where he elaborates a moving line with the lower voice beneath repeated notes in the top voice. 

I first became aware of Bobby Tucker through his exquisite duet with Billie Holiday on ‘I Thought About You’.  Tucker seems to have been one of those players like Ellis Larkins whose excellence as an accompanist led them to be overlooked by jazz listeners and historians in favor of pianists like Oscar Peterson who, despite being excellent accompanists, were known best for their work as a soloist and bandleader.  ‘Sweetie‘, from Tucker’s only trio album, Too Tough, recorded in 1959, is the only instrumental recordings discussed here which, like Ross’ original ‘Twisted’ and the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross ‘Doodlin’, features a single three-chorus solo as the centerpiece of the performance.  While Tucker’s solo may not be as technically accomplished as Gray’s or Kelly’s, it does follow the arc of Gray’s solo in visiting the higher end of the solo’s tessitura more and more frequently as the solo goes on.  It also contrasts a more blues-based approach in the first and third choruses with a more ‘making the changes’ bebop approach in the second chorus. 

The chord progression of ‘Sweetie’ is a variation on the progression commonly known as ‘Bird Blues’ because it appeared in a number of Parker’s compositions, the best known being Blues for Alice.  In place of the changes Parker uses in bar 7 of Blues for Alice (Am-D7), which becomes the second bar in a three-measure chain of descending half-step ii-V progressions, in bar 7 of ‘Sweetie’ Tucker uses an Ab major sixth chord, which creates a fourth complete major ii-V-I progression within the form (along with the ii-V-I progressions in D minor, Bb major and F major.) 

The structure of a performance where a three-chorus solo is framed by a head in and out, such as Sweetie or the Ross’s versions of Twisted, can be compared to Freytag’s Pyramid, a tool developed in the early 20th century by novelist and critic Gustav Freytag for analyzing story structure.  Particularly in plots of Shakespeare plays such as Romeo and Juliet and short stories like Hansel and Gretel, Freytag finds a five-part structure.  I hear both Gray’s melodic line and Ross’s lyrics in ‘Twisted’ following the pyramid structure

– exposition – an opening section of a story in which the essential situation is introduced that will lead to the action of the story.   In Hansel and Gretel, this is the section where we meet two young children who live with a father who loves them and an abusive stepmother who wants to find a way to leave them stranded in the forest so they won’t be able to return.  In ‘Twisted’, this is the ‘head in’, where Gray’s opening melody is introduced along with the chord progression that will form the basis of the solo, and Ross’s lyrics introduce her conflicts with her analyst. 

– rising action – a section where tension and/or complexity begins to build.  In Hansel and Gretel, this is the part of the story where the two children follow the father and stepmother into the forest, but secretly leave a trail of breadcrumbs in hopes it will help them return.  Although the breadcrumbs are eaten by birds, they find a gingerbread house in the woods which initially looks enticing but turns out to be inhabited by an evil witch.  In ‘Twisted’, this is Gray’s first chorus of solo where he quotes Parker’s literally rising solo opening, and where Ross begins to look back on her childhood and offer her own analysis of it. 

– climax – a section where the rising action leads to a culminating event of some kind.  In Hansel and Gretel, this is the scene where Gretel pushes the witch into the oven that the witch had planned to use to cook Hansel.  In the story, this grisly action allows Hansel and Gretel to escape the house, taking the witch’s collections of ‘pearls and precious stones’ with them.  In a jazz performance, this is where the soloist reaches the peak of the rising action in the solo, which can be a process of rising in pitch, but can also be a peak of another kind; a peak of melodic density, through the use of shorter note values, or a change of playing technique, for example from single note playing to chordal playing on a chord instrument (as in Red Garland’s solo on Traneing In), or a change from solitary, monologue-style playing to a more conversational approach, either between a pianist’s two hands (as in Wynton Kelly’s solo on Four On Six), or between two ranges of a player’s instrument or between two different instruments (as in the second half of Clark Terry’s solo on Blues for Smedley – I discuss the first half in my post Summer Comping Trip), or between two players (as in Sonny Rollins’ solo on Tenor Madness.)  The climax of the story in Ross’s lyrics is in the second chorus when she drinks ‘a fifth of vodka one night’, which leads her to develop an original idea and contradict her psychologist.  The climax of Gray’s solo occurs later, at the beginning of the third chorus, when he unleashes the solo’s longest string of recurring high notes (he plays Bb4 six times in the course of three bars.)

– falling action – a section where, following the turning point of the climax, the fate of threatened characters is reversed, and/or questions may be answered, and healing may begin.  In Hansel and Gretel, this is the children’s journey home, where they cross a body of water that initially seems impassable with the assistance of a duck.  In Gray’s solo, this is the end of his third chorus, where he descends through the series of four Parker quotes described above to the Bb3 where the solo began, and this is the place where Ross’s lyrics describe the theory inspired by her childhood precociousness: that double decker buses are unsafe ‘because they had no driver on the top’. 

– denouement / resolution – a section where the story comes of a place of fulfillment, ties up loose ends, and we may find out something about the ultimate fate of some characters.  In Hansel and Gretel, this is where the children return home, find their father still alive having survived the evil stepmother’s death, and live happily ever after.  In ‘Twisted’, this is the return to the head (or ‘head out’), where Gray returns to the composed melody with which he began, and Ross’ lyrics relate how she turns his analysis back on him (‘my analyst told me that I was right out of my head / but I said dear Doctor, I think that it’s you instead’) and concludes that what he sees as her neurosis, she sees as a superpower (‘instead of one head, I got two / and you know two heads are better than one’). 

Ross’s lyrics have more than one kind of feminist resonance.  They tell the story of a woman debating a male psychologist during psychoanalysis, a field that was still male-dominated in 1970, nearly two decades after Ross first recorded her lyrics to ‘Twisted’. In Ross’s lyrics, a woman’s experience in analysis becomes a journey of self-discovery when she takes control of her own narrative. It’s also notable that while Ross disagrees with her analyst’s diagnosis of her, he does act as a catalyst, because Ross does not dispense with the analyst during the song but rather makes her declaration of self-discovery during her conversation with him (‘but I said dear Doctor / I think that it’s you instead / ’cause I have got a thing that’s unique and new’…)

In the realm of jazz, Ross’ lyrics have also made it possible for many singers who might not have the opportunity otherwise to perform an extended improvisation. Because improvising is a pursuit that singers, and particularly female singers, have largely been excluded or discouraged from through most of jazz history, for many singers ‘Twisted’ may be the first (or even only) improvised solo that they perform.  Ella Fitzgerald’s many adventures in extended improvisation, beginning with ‘Lady Be Good’ and ‘How High The Moon’ and continuing for the rest of her long career, are notable exceptions to this unwritten restriction, and have inspired many other great female improvisers.  One example is Sarah Vaughan’s version of ‘How High’ from the album At Mister Kelly’s which directly references Fitzgerald. While a singer who is performing ‘Twisted’ is not improvising themselves, they are performing a transcription of a great improvised solo, a time-honored exercise in developing improvisational skill going back at least as far as Louis Armstrong’s solo on ‘Dippermouth Blues’.  (In an earlier post, I discussed how Armstrong’s solo on ‘Dippermouth’ incorporated a solo by his employer and idol Joe ‘King’ Oliver.) While ‘Twisted’ has most often been sung by female vocalists, it can also be performed convincingly by singers of other genders, as a terrific version by tenor Thomas Owens demonstrates.

The chord progression of my tune ‘Notes From All Over‘ (please click on the title to see a keyboard video of the piece) is based on Tucker’s variation on the ‘Bird Blues’ progression.  The title, which alludes to a recurring piece of marginalia in the New Yorker magazine, refers to the melody being borrowed from multiple sources, including the tune ‘I Can’t Get Started’, Elmo Hope’s ‘Later For You’, ‘I Thought About You’, Thelonious Monk’s ‘Round Midnight’, Miles Davis’s ‘Donna Lee’, Bud Powell’s ‘Strictly Confidential’, Clifford Brown’s solo on ‘Pent Up House’, and Horace Silver’s ‘The Jody Grind’.  A number of these phrases appear in the Glossary of Melodic Patterns based on Root Position Chords (GoMPabRoPSevCho) introduced in the post with my tune Broken Heart For Sale.  In these borrowings I’m using a technique which is used intermittently in Gray’s ‘Twisted’ solo, and almost constantly in Ella Fitzgerald’s solo on ‘Saint Louis Blues’ from ‘Ella in Rome: The Birthday Concert’, which I would call ‘allusive melody’.   I follow this head with a three-chorus solo in which I attempt to demonstrate some of the concepts I’ve discussed in this post. 

1. Gray opens his solo by quoting the opening phrase from Parker’s solos on ‘Now’s The Time’ and ‘Billie’s Bounce‘, both recorded at the same session in 1945.  This is the phrase that Ross sings on the lyrics ‘they say as a child I appeared a little bit wild’.
    
   He opens his second chorus with a quote from the 1944 Bing Crosby song ‘Swinging On A Star‘ (from the film ‘Going My Way’).  This is the phrase Ross sings with the lyrics ‘they say little children are supposed to sleep tight’.  (Ross’s choice to make children the subject of her lyric here suggests she’s aware the source of Gray’s quote, as ‘Swinging On A Star’ is a song sung by Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley with his parish children’s choir in the film.)   An excerpt from a live Parker solo on a Japanese website devoted to his quotes (albeit after Gray’s time with Parker) shows that this tune was also in Parker’s improvisational vocabulary.
    
   In the ninth and tenth bars of this chorus (which Ross sings with the lyrics ‘do you think I was crazy?/ I may have been only three..’), Gray uses an altered quote from m. 15-16 of Miles Davis’s ‘Donna Lee’ (often credited to Parker), first recorded in May 1947.  The connection to ‘Donna Lee’ makes this passage in ‘Twisted’ part of a chain of influence with four closely related links.  The measures of ‘Donna Lee’ that Gray quotes show Davis making a slightly altered quote from a passage in Fats Navarro’s January 1947 solo on ‘Ice Freezes Red’.  (Davis quotes from a number of other places in this solo as well, enough that Navarro’s solo could be called the template for Davis’ line.)  In this passage, Navarro is in turn quoting the main motive from Fats Waller’s 1929 song ‘Honeysuckle Rose’.  (As I hope to show in a future post, this was a melodic shape frequently reinvented by bop players.)  Gray’s quote of ‘Donna Lee’ inserts space into Davis’s original lick.  Navarro and Gray both use a reversal of the third and fourth notes of the ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ motive that appears in the second bar of Parker’s ‘Cool Blues’ (recorded shortly before ‘Donna Lee’ in February 1947).  (The Parker discography at jazzdisco.com shows Parker performed ‘Cool Blues’ with Navarro in 1950 and Gray in 1951.  Although both these dates are after the recording of ‘Ice Freezes Red’ and ‘Twisted’, it is possible that Navarro and Gray played it with Parker before these dates.  The seventh bar of the head to ‘Twisted’ (where Ross sings ‘I knew all along’) could be also described as a pared-down quote of the first half of the ‘Cool Blues’ riff.  
   
   After opening the third chorus with the longest series of high concert B flats in the solo (five in the course of two measures) and following that up with the solo’s highest note in the eighth bar of the chorus, Gray closes the third chorus with what could be described as four Parker quotes or allusions in the course of four measures.  Measure 9 (where Ross’ lyrics are ‘soldiers let them laugh at me’, misprinted as ‘soldiers used to laugh at me’ in some charts) can be heard as a paraphrase of the eight-note lick from bar 9 of Parker’s ‘Billie’s Bounce’ solo.  Measure 10 begins with the variant of the four-note ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ motive found in measure two of ‘Cool Blues’.  Measure 11 begins with the first four notes and the accompanying melodic rhythm from measure one of  ‘Cool Blues’.  The phrase that begins on the ‘and’ of 1 in m. 12 (‘there was no driver on the top’) is notated in the Sher fake book chart as a note-for-note quote of the first seven notes from Parker’s ‘Scrapple From The Apple’, and it is sung this way by Monheit, who makes it sound very natural.  In Gray’s original solo, the opening note is more ghosted, i.e. played sotto voce in the interest of swing feel, and the fourth to last note is a concert Db rather than a C. The interval Ross sings on ‘there was’ in this phrase is closer a whole step rather than a half step; still, in both cases, the reference back to Parker’s motive is clear to my ear.
   
   Gray was one of a number of jazz composers who anthologized Parker’s phrases in their melodic lines.  He was preceded by Benny Harris, whose tune ‘Ornithology’ (often attributed solely to Parker, but which I argue in another post is more likely Harris’s composition) was recorded by Parker in 1946.  He was followed by composers including Charles Mingus (‘Reincarnation of a Lovebird’), Freddie Hubbard (‘Birdlike’) and Steve Davis (‘Bird Lives’).  In the way the strength of his melodic ideas inspires improvisers and composers to quote and innovate on them, Parker is something like a Shakespeare of jazz.  Although there is an ongoing debate about exactly how many words and phrases Shakespeare contributed to the English language, a recent mention in The Writer’s Almanac credits him with inventing more than 3.000 words, and there are many partial lists like this one by Google Arts & Culture of phrases he is credited with originating.  There are many similar lists of Parker’s phrases, including the website charlieparkerlicks.com that will transpose the lick for you through a sequence of your choice.  A more exhaustive list is in the recent book and app Pathways to Parker, which catalogs more than 2,000 patterns (although some of the ‘patterns’ are only one or two notes). . ↩︎

this post copyright 2024 Thomas G. Cleary