BirdFeed

Top: The cover of The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 5 (Blue Note Records, 1959) featuring Powell’s son Earl John Powell / below: Earl John Powell and myself at a screeing of Haeyong Moon’s documentary ‘Bud Lives!’ in November 2025 (photo: Amber deLaurentis)

Please note: there a number of footnotes throughout this post marked by very small numbers that I currently don’t know how to enlarge, so keep an eye out for them! Clicking on the number should take you to the note.

This is the second post I have written on improvised solos that quote Bud Powell.  Since I wrote the first post, The Quotable Bud Powell Part 1, I’ve done some research on the study of quotation in literature and music.  I think this research has been partly motivated by a need to put my own interest in researching Powell quotations in some context, to reassure myself that my interest in researching quotations is not an isolated phenomenon and to try to understand why people research quotations.  I began by looking at a few examples from the fairly common genre of books that list quotable phrases by a specific author, like The Quotable Thoreau, or from a wide variety of sources, like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (originally published in 1855 and still in print today with a 2022 edition).  The word ‘familiar’ in the title of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations implies that the reader might have heard them someplace, but the lack of examples of where the quotes are used implies that the reader is supposed to trust that the editors have chosen quotations that are truly in common use, even though the book doesn’t cite examples of specific uses.  

There are also studies of quotations used in a particular work, like T.S. Eliot’s footnotes on his own quotes in The Waste Land, my UVM colleagues Dennis Mahoney and Wolfgang Meider’s study of quotations or proverbs used in the novel Insect Dreams by the late, great Vermont writer and activist Marc Estrin, and my own study of the quotes Ella Fitzgerald uses in her solo on C Jam Blues with the Count Basie Orchestra from the 1972 album Jazz At The Santa Monica Civic.  This can be found in my blog post Ellavolution, which was commissioned by musicologist Judith Tick and quoted in her recent critical biography Becoming Ella Fitzgerald.  There are also lists of quotes used by a particular creator in multiple works, like this website that catalogs musical quotations in Charlie Parker’s solos. 

Curiously, I found it more challenging to locate studies of where and how a particular creator or work is quoted.  So far, other than my own posts on Powell and Fitzgerald cited above and the posts on Parker to which I link below, the only examples I have found of this kind of study are this article on Shakespeare quotes on the Merriam-Webster website that I linked to in Part One, this blog post and audio lecture on how Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn all used quotations from Handel’s Messiah, and this article detailing two prominent quotes from the Messiah in the U.S. Christmas hymn Joy To The World¹.

There are many collections of phrases Parker uses in his solos that appear to originate from him.  These range in size from this list of 14 Charlie Parker licks at Jazz Guitar Online to the recent encyclopedic Pathways To Parker that runs to more than 900 pages of Parker licks.  Like Barlett’s Quotations and The Quotable Thoreau, Pathways to Parker lists quotable phrases but not examples of where they are quoted. The only source I have found so far that lists examples of improvisers incorporating Parker phrases into their solos is this video on Parker’s ‘Cool Blues’ lick which I expand on in my blog post Taking The Fifth.   My hope in compiling examples of great jazz soloists quoting Bud Powell is that they might form a ‘cloud of witnesses’ testifying to the ongoing relevance of Powell’s melodic language.

There are many recorded examples of great jazz players who are also Parker devotees exchanging quotes from the master in small congregations, like members of a faith community taking turns reading from holy texts.  The 1949 recording of ‘Then You’ll Be Boppin Too’ by the vocalist Babs Gonzales features a young Sonny Rollins and Wynton Kelly quoting the same Parker phrase (which can be heard in the bridge of Parker’s ‘Koko’ solo) in their back-to-back solos (a link to this tune is in Part One of this post).  (Rollins first quotes the phrase at :41 in the recording; leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timing of his second quote of the phrase or Wynton Kelly’s quote of a fragment from the phrase. In all three quotes, the phrase is ‘rhythmically transposed’ to a different point in the 4/4 measure.) Eight years later, on the version of ‘Tune Up’ from Rollins’ album ‘Newk’s Time’, they can both be heard still using the same melodic gesture, but their rhythmic approach to it has evolved.  (Rollins’ first use of the phrase can be heard at :54; leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timing in the video of his doubletimed quote of the phrase or of Wynton Kelly’s differently doubletimed quote of it.) The opening to Charles Mingus’ original recording of his composition ‘Reincarnation of a Lovebird’ from the album ‘The Clown’, the opening is a kind of Parker séance, with all members of the quintet quoting Parker in quick succession.  (The tunes quoted include Relaxin’ At Camarillo, Salt Peanuts and My Little Suede Shoes, as well as at least two other Parker phrases from tunes I can’t identify at the moment. Leave a comment in the comment section if you can identify the timings of any of these quotes. You will need to listen to the original Parker tunes to be able to identify them.). My blog posts on Ornithology and Erena Terakubo’s solo on Bird Lives analyze a composition and a solo that quote Parker frequently.

By contrast, my research suggests that quotes of Bud Powell in recorded solos tend to be less frequent, more isolated and sometimes more encoded.  In the solos that I have found, the referencing of Powell tends to be more solitary than communal.  The only story I have found that comes close to a physical meeting of a Powell fan club is Jackie McLean’s story, quoted in my earlier post, of meeting Sonny Rollins when Rollins was coming from a lesson with Powell and McLean was heading toward his.  Another experience I had recently of a group brought together by common love for Powell’s work was a recent showing in New York City of Haeyong Moon’s remarkable documentary Bud Lives!, in which I make a short appearance.  I watched the film, which I highly recommend, in the company of luminaries including jazz scholar David Berger, pianist Michael Kanan, and Powell’s son Earl John Powell.  Experiencing Moon’s heartfelt, soulful and expertly researched film with these people was a rare moment of reassurance that I am not alone in my desire to work toward a greater understanding of Powell’s genius.  The examples I have assembled here are of Powell quotes by great improvisers encapsulated on recordings and traveling like bottled messages to other Powell fans at the far corners of time and space. 

Time flies, but ‘Tempus Fugit’ recurs – Solos that quote Tempus Fugit

Ethan Iverson counts Powell’s composition ‘Tempus Fugit’, recorded in early 1949 for Verve with Ray Brown and Max Roach, among a group of recordings that are ‘arguably Powell’s greatest studio trio tracks’, adding that ‘students should definitely learn these solos’.  He also theorizes that ‘Tempus’ “might have [been] Powell’s answer to the minor key Gillespie tune, ‘Bebop’”, hinting: ‘compare the similar intros’.  Indeed, where the intro to Gillespie’s tune, first recorded the year before ‘Tempus’ was copyrighted, begins with an minor triad arpeggio ascending over the range of an octave, Powell’s ‘Tempus’ intro decorates the same arpeggio by starting a half step below and approaching the top note from a whole step above, almost as though he were trying to ‘one-up’ Gillespie.

 Iverson’s theory about ‘Tempus’ as a response to ‘Bebop’ is also supported by a passage in In ‘Wail: The Life Of Bud Powell’, where author Peter Pullman mentions that Powell originally wrote Tempus Fugit in 1946 for a small group led by Dizzy Gillespie.  ‘Tempus’ is one of Powell’s most orchestral piano parts, and I think this is likely due to the influence of Gillespie and his arrangers such as Gil Fuller.  While much of Powell’s work as a composer and a soloist is almost obsessively focused on the spinning out of long single-note melodic phrases, ‘Tempus’ features unusually short right hand melodic ‘calls’ and light, single note left hand ‘responses’ in its A sections as well as two-handed counterpoint in its bridge.

The other Gillespie composition that ‘Tempus’ resembles is the iconic ‘A Night In Tunisia’, first recorded as ‘Interlude’ by Sarah Vaughan with Gillespie in 1944, although Powell’s tempo is closer to that of Gillespie’s instrumental version, first recorded in 1946 but performed live the year before.   While the ‘Tempus’ and ‘Bebop’ intros share three notes (the ascending minor triad), the ‘Tempus’ intro and the ‘Tunisia’ A section begin with the same seven-note melodic pattern, albeit in different keys, rhythms and harmonic contexts.  The harmonic progression of the A section in Tempus Fugit also closely resembles the A section of ‘Tunisia’.  In my post Musical Neighbors, I mention how both ‘Tunisia’ and original tunes based on its progression were in the repertoire played and recorded by all members of what I call ‘The Three Muskeeters collective’, which includes Powell, Mary Lou Williams, Thelonious Monk, Elmo Hope and Bertha Hope.

The ’Tempus’ solo was quoted in improvised solos by three great jazz pianists who were younger than Powell but close enough in age to have heard him live as well as on records.  Rather than listing these quotations following the historical order in which the recordings appeared, I will list them following the order in which the quoted phrases appear in Powell’s solo.

Walter Davis was the pianist in Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers during Wayne Shorter’s time with that band.  On the band’s 1961 recording of Shorter’s composition ‘United’ from the album ‘Herbs and Roots’, near the beginning of Davis’ solo, he quotes the opening phrase of the ‘Tempus’ solo in its original key.  This is followed by two transposed variants of the phrase.  In all, Davis quotes Powell’s opening phrase or variants on it eight times during the course of his short solo. 

At the opening of his second chorus of solo on ‘Tempus’, Powell plays a three-beat pattern starting on the third beat of the first bar of the form.  He repeats this pattern six times, and the mathematics of a three-beat pattern repeated in 4/4 time leads the pattern to land on a different beat of the measure each time.  In Horace Silver’s recording of his composition ‘Safari’ from the album Horace Silver Trio, near the beginning of his solo, he uses a variation on Powell’s phrase which he begins (as Powell does) with a triplet including the fifth of the minor scale, but rather than decorating the fifth degree with its chromatic upper neighbor (5-b6-5) as Powell does, Silver approaches it from its chromatic lower neighbor (b5-5-b5).  Silver repeats the pattern four times, two less repetitions than Powell, but given that Silver told interviewer Len Lyons that he ‘used to play a lot of Bud Powell solos off the record’,  the likelihood is high that Silver is directly referencing Powell here (as he does in a number of other places on the same record.). 

At the beginning of the second A section of his second chorus on ‘Tempus’, Powell sequences another descending three-beat pattern over the 4/4 measure which uses the same melodic rhythm as the phrase in the first A but a different melodic shape.  This shape is a variation on a phrase that, as I discuss in my post Emulate, Assimilate, Innovate Part 2, Powell used as a closing gesture in at least two solos and which Wynton Kelly quoted in a number of his solos.  In these solos, the phrase ends with a descending whole step on scale steps 6 and 5, and is played only once. In the ‘Tempus’ solo, Powell alters the phrase so that it ends on the seventh degree of D melodic minor and takes it through the six repetitions that he introduced eight bars earlier.  On a quartet version of ‘Walkin’ with John Coltrane recorded in a TV studio, Wynton Kelly quotes the version of the phrase from Powell’s earlier solos in the tenth chorus of his solo.  He begins it on beat four of the last measure of the blues form and repeats it just three times so that it fits neatly into a phrase over the first four bars of the blues form.  The phrase also includes Kelly’s unique and inspired blend of bop chromaticism and hand-to-hand conversation.   

Still Un Poco Loco After All These Years (70 years of solos that quote ‘Un Poco Loco’)

According to the Bud Powell discography at jazzdisco.org, ‘Un Poco Loco’ was originally recorded and released by Blue Note records as a single in 1951. As we will see in this survey of quotations from the ‘Un Poco Loco’ solo, Powell’s recording had an immediate impact on the musicians who listened to it when it was released as a single in 1951, as four of the recordings I mention that quote Powell’s solo were recorded within four years of the session that produced ‘Un Poco Loco’.  

Before I begin citing examples of other solos that quote Powell’s solo on the master take ‘Un Poco Loco’, it is worth mentioning that, to my ear, the solo itself includes at least three prominent quotations. Early in the solo, it sounds to me like Powell quotes the Vernon Duke/Ira Gershwin ballad ‘I Can’t Get Started’, although he conceals the quote by preceding the first six notes of the tune with a turn and by playing the pattern much faster than it appears in its original ballad context.  A version of the tune from the 1963 album Bud Powell In Paris shows that it could well have been in Powell’s repertoire twelve years earlier when Un Poco Loco was recorded. Shortly after the ‘Started’ quote, whether intentionally or not, he plays a a phrase that is a transposed version of the second bar from Charlie Parker’s 1945 solo on Billie’s Bounce.  (This phrase is a core component of Parker’s melodic vocabulary that includes the gesture I call ‘the Jumpin’ fragment’ in my my post on Erena Terakubo’s ‘Bird Lives’ solo.)  Shortly before the end of the solo, Powell plays a pair of phrases that clearly quote the ‘clip-clop’ accompaniment figure from ‘On The Trail’, a movement from Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite.  (A condensed version of the main melody from this piece became a jazz standard, recorded by many jazz instrumentalists and vocalists, such as Wynton Kelly, who recorded a buoyant version.)

Of the solos quoting the UPL solo by other pianists that I have found, the one that quotes from the earliest point in Powell’s solo is by pianist Gene Rizzo, whose transcription of the UPL solo appears in The Bud Powell Collection published by Hal Leonard.  A little online research reveals that Rizzo was a club date musician the Philadelphia and New Jersey areas who was born only 11 years before the recording of Un Poco Loco and died in 2021.  In a recording of the tune ‘Avalon’ by the Midiri Brothers Orchestra (from a 1998 radio broadcast of an Atlantic City, NJ performance – a band in one Jersey Shore town playing a song about a town a few miles down the coast) Rizzo takes a fine piano solo which near the beginning (at :40) quotes the first seven notes of what I’ll call the first bebop section of the UPL solo², followed quickly (at :42) by a seven-note quote from the tenth bar of that section.  Rizzo also builds another phrase at :47 from the opening of Powell’s first bebop section. 

In the first four bars of Walter Bishop Jr’s solo on the 1952 Charlie Parker version of ‘La Cucaracha’.  Bishop begins by quoting three later phrases from the ‘first bebop section’ of the Un Poco Loco solo in the reverse of the order that Powell uses them.  The first is the phrase I mentioned in the last paragraph where Powell appears to quote Parker’s ‘Billie’s Bounce’ solo. Bishop moves the phrase from beat 1 of a 4/4 bar, where Parker and Powell both place it, to beat 3 of a 4/4 measure.  This might sound on the first hearing like a Parker quote because Bishop is playing with Parker and quoting the phrase in the same key where Parker uses it, however, Bishop follows this four beats later with a five note phrase that matches the bar in Powell’s solo that immediately precedes the phrase with which Bishop began.  This phrase transposes ‘the Jumpin’ fragment’ down a perfect fourth.  The third bar of Bishop’s solo could be described as the first full bar of the ‘first bebop section’ and the first note of the second full bar with one note removed and all of this transposed to the key of F.  Bishop also ends with a quote from the end of the ‘Un Poco Loco’ solo, making his short solo a collection of quotes from Powell’s solo. 

The next section of the Un Poco Loco’ solo that I’ve found quoted elsewhere is what I’ll call the ’b9-b5-triplet licks’³.     They include a 7-note phrase (which I’ll call ‘b9-b5-triplet lick #1’), followed by a 6-note variant, followed by a different 7-note variant (which I’ll call ‘b9-b5-triplet lick #3’)⁴.  (This is one of at least three places in the solo where Powell plays three similar phrases in quick succession.  This is an example of what I call ‘live revision’ in an earlier post, where I discuss how Mozart, T.S. Eliot and Charlie Parker used this process.)

The ‘b9-b5-triplet lick #3’ appears in Benny Harris’s tune ‘Reets and I’, recorded by Powell in August 1953, the first half of the tune concludes with the ‘b9-b5-triplet lick #3’ from ‘Un Poco Loco’.  While not all of Harris’ borrowed licks may have been consciously selected, given that his other tunes ‘Ornithology’ and ‘Crazeology’ (aka Bud’s Bubble, aka Little Benny) are both clearly a superfan’s melodic collage of favorite licks from the lexicons of Powell, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, I would venture to posit that the Powell licks in ‘Reets and I’ are likely conscious borrowings⁵.  The ‘b9-b5-triplet lick #1’ is also quoted by Walter Bishop, Jr. in his intro solo on ‘Stockholm Sweetin’ from The New Oscar Pettiford Sextet, recorded in December 1953.  The minor third interval with which Powell begins the lick, moving from the flat seven to the flat nine of the C major scale, becomes a whole step in Bishop’s quotation.  Like Davis in his ‘United’ solo, Bishop repeats the phrase and then transposes it. 

Shortly after the ’b9-b5-triplet licks’ section of the ‘Un Poco Loco’ solo is a section that begins with what I’ll call the ‘expanded Charge! lick’, where Powell takes the six notes often played by ballpark organists to incite the response ‘Charge!’ from the crowd, changes the rhythm so that the triplet occurs one note later, and expands the lick by one note, bringing it into the realm of the jazz melodic line by adding the sixth degree of the C major scale, implying a C6 harmony.  (Powell alternates throughout the solo between implying a C6 or Cmaj7 chord in his lines at some points and implying a C dominant 7^th chord at other points through repeated use of Bb.).  

The ‘expanded Charge! lick’ is quoted by Herbie Hancock in the fourth chorus of his astonishing solo on ‘Walkin’ from the Miles Davis album ‘Four and More’, recorded live in 1964.  Although Hancock was only 25 years old at the time ‘Four And More’ was recorded, throughout this solo (and particularly in the chorus preceding his Powell quote) he shows a deep knowledge of the playing of Wynton Kelly, one of his predecessors in Davis’ band, through the use of what might be called ‘conversational bebop’ (see the section above on Kelly’s quote of ‘Tempus Fugit’), and through his quotation of a lick Kelly had previously used in his solo on Pfrancing, another F Blues, on the Davis album ‘In Person Friday and Saturday Nights At The Blackhawk’, recorded and released in 1961.  Hancock’s quote from Powell shows that he also understood jazz piano lineage; my post Emulate, Assimilate, Innovate Part 2 gives just a few examples of how Kelly’s melodic language is clearly based on Powell’s.  While Kelly’s quote from the ‘Tempus’ solo is one more example, an exhaustive compilation of Kelly’s Powell quotes could fill a sizeable book.     

Powell closes his ‘Un Poco Loco’ solo with a final group of three phrases that begin with a gesture he had used in 1947 in bar 11 of his first chorus on Charlie Parker’s recording of ‘Buzzy’ (I go into more detail about this, including a transcription of Powell’s ‘Buzzy’ solo, in an earlier post).  I have found two improvised solos and a composed melody that quote parts of this ending phrase.  As I mentioned earlier, Walter Bishop, Jr. quotes an adapted version of Powell’s closing phrase near the end of his ‘La Cucaracha’ solo.  (Bishop’s solo is preceded with one of Benny Harris’s rare recorded trumpet solos, in which he quotes ‘Reets and I’.  Jazz composers quoting their own tunes during improvised solos, such as was a kind of mid-century jazz equivalent of the ubiquitous customer-targeted product suggestions one finds today while shopping online⁶.)

 Pianist Terry Pollard starts her solo on vibraphonist Terry Gibbs’s 1955 recording of his tune Nutty Notes with a phrase beginning on beat two that starts with a lick which adapts the beginning of Powell’s closing gesture to a minor key, moves on to a lick adapting the motive from the ‘b9-b5-triplet licks’ section, and includes the end of Powell’s closing gesture before concluding with another adaptation of the beginning of Powell’s closing gesture.  Pollard’s remarkable gift for melodic summarizing can also be heard in her solo on Yusef Lateef’s Oboe Blues, where she begins her solo with a brilliantly compressed version of the lick Bernard McKinney uses to end his euphonium solo.  (McKinney would later change his name to Kiane Zawadi.)

Powell’s concluding phrase from the ‘Un Poco Loco’ solo is also quoted in the 2021 tune ‘Happy Hour’ by the Italian jazz pianist Yuri Storione.  I discovered this tune, and Storione, on the 2021 album This Time The Dream’s On Us, where he plays in a trio with drummer Jorge Rossy.  The album contains a number of Powell allusions, including a tune called ‘Viva Bud Powell!’.  The melody ‘Happy Hour’, which is credited to Storione and bassist Dominik Schurmann, uses (:48) the same section of Powell’s closing phrase from ‘Un Poco Loco’ as Bishop, but quotes it with less alteration – beginning it on beat one instead of beat four and removing the last two notes of the first phrase.  Storione quotes a number of bop and bop-adjacent motives in his solo, including ‘The Irish Washerwoman’ (I wrote a whole blog post on Ella Fitzgerald’s use of this motive), ‘Reets And I’ and ‘Confirmation’.  If you can find the timing of these quotes, please leave them in a comment in the comments section. 

As a coda to this collection of possible Powell quotes, I have a theory about another Horace Silver solo that may reference an alternate take of ‘Un Poco Loco’.  Silver was quoted in a 1964 New York Times article about Powell’s return to Birdland as saying: ‘Bud is one of the great sources.  He says more in five measures than most players say in five minutes’.  This quote, combined with the one I mentioned earlier where Silver mentions playing Bud Powell solos ‘off the record’, as well as the Powell quotes in Silver solos that I mention earlier in this post and in my posts Bud Powell, Bard Of Bebop and Conversation Pieces, Part Two, establish Silver as an ardent enough superfan of Powell to pay attention to the alternate takes from his recording session.  In April 1956, Blue Note followed its 1952 release of The Amazing Bud Powell, the first full-length album to include ‘Un Poco Loco’ (which followed the single release in 1951) with The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 1.  The expanded playlist of this album included two alternate takes of ‘Un Poco Loco’.  In Un Poco Loco alternate take 1, Powell plays a pair of phrases, the second longer than the first, which together imply the C whole-half diminished scale by traversing six of its eight notes.  In his solo on Senor Blues, Silver plays a series of five phrases which use the exact same notes, although in the context of an E flat minor six-nine chord rather than Powell’s C drone.   Silver plays two shorter phrases with a four-note span which lead to a longer phrase with the same six-note span of Powell’s phrase and a similar melodic shape.  He then transposes the short phrase and the long phrase up a minor third, so that they cover the two missing notes of the scalethat Powell had left unplayed. 

The way that Silver conjures this phrase first partially and then completely from his melodic imagination, steeped as it was in Powell’s language, reminds me of the way he gradually brings forth his quote of Powell’s Dance Of The Infidels in his solo on Silver’s Serenade (see my posts Conversation Pieces Part One and The Quotable Bud Powell Part One for more discussion of this).  The way he transposes Powell’s idea is an example of the ‘Assimilate’ phase of Clark Terry’s ‘Emulate, Assimilate, Innovate’ process (which I discuss in Ellavolution among other places) and reminds me of how Benny Harris emulates and assimilates ideas from Parker in ‘Ornithology’ as I detail in my blog post on the tune), from Powell in ‘Reets and I’ and from Powell and Gillespie in ‘Crazeology’. 

One form of a 19^th century proverb that uses a term often associated with Powell is: ‘imitation is the highest compliment mediocrity pays to genius’⁷. While Powell may have appeared to be a somewhat isolated genius in his time, in the wider lens of jazz history, he has become an essential innovator who is genuinely loved by the generations of jazz players.  One of the more touching sections of Haeyong Moon’s documentary is when she asks a series current jazz luminaries what they would say to Powell if they met him today, and more than one says they would start by giving him a hug.  I hope the examples I have cited show how Powell enabled players who followed him to transcend mediocrity by introducing or passing on musical ideas that they were inspired to not just borrow (emulate), but also transpose to different musical settings (assimilate) and transform (innovate) so they could be integrated into newly imagined surroundings.  In this way they were not just following Powell’s lead as a melodic innovator, but also emulating the ingenious ways (in his quotes of Duke, Parker and Grofe) that he adapted the ideas of others. 

Footnotes

1. As it turns out, this song is deeply American in its patchwork construction. Its author may or may not be the American banker, church musician and crusader against homegrown American sacred music Lowell Mason, but is definitely not Handel, although he is frequently cited as the composer.  Whoever the author is, they brought a preexisiting text together with a new melody that quotes two movements of Handel’s masterwork in the space of twenty measures.) ↩︎
2. In a series of essays about bebop called The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of, the erudite pianist and analyst Ethan Iverson includes ‘Un Poco Loco’ in a list of Powell compositions that he calls ‘not bebop’.  in response to literary critic Harold Bloom’s assertion that UPL is a twentieth-century masterpiece, which to me is an evaluation worth considering.  Iverson writes that ‘it’s wrong to cite a non-bebop example of Powell as the greatest Powell’.  This led me to look for bebop language in Powell’s solo on the UPL master take. I found non-scale tones on upbeats, the kinds of melodic moves called enclosure or surrounding, a preponderance of eighth note and triplet motion, use of standard bop melodic phrases originated by bop players like ‘the Jumpin’ fragment’ and frequently borrowed by bop players like ‘I Can’t Get Started’ (see Cannonball Adderley’s solo on Milestones), a tendency to begin and end phrases on upbeats or beats two and four and end phrases on rhythmically emphasized altered tone (F# or #11).  For me, all these contradict Iverson’s assertion.  ↩︎
3. I initially thought of calling this series of licks the ‘vaguely Middle Eastern sounding licks’, as they sound similar to the attempts made to melodically evoke Middle Eastern music in jazz in tunes like Ellington and Tizol’s Caravan, Victor Young’s Delilah and Roger King Mozian’s Desert Dance, also recorded by Machito and His Orchestra as Cleopatra Rumba.  All these tunes use the flatted ninth, ascending and/or descending minor thirds, and what Klezmer musicians call the ‘freygish mode’, or the fifth mode of the harmonic minor.  I decided that the attempts by US composers to evoke Middle Eastern music in the absence of Middle Eastern musicians need to be addressed by someone with more knowledge of Middle Eastern music than I have.).  ↩︎
4. The opening interval of each of these licks is, to my ear, incorrectly shown in Gene Rizzo’s transcription from ‘The Bud Powell Collection’ published by Hal Leonard, one of very few errors in the transcription.). ↩︎
5. Harris’ compositional process of creating melodies that are ingenious patchworks of borrowed licks is worth delving into briefly here. Harris’s first borrowing from Powell in ‘Reets and I’ is a phrase Bud plays in his solo on ‘All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm’, recorded in 1949 and originally released by Mercury records in 1951.  In this phrase Powell interpolates a lick from his own tune ‘Strictly Confidential’, recorded immediately before ‘All God’s Chillun’ at the same session.  In ‘Reets and I’, Harris kept the chord progression of ‘All God’s Chillun’, followed the phrase from Powell’s solo on the tune with an allusion to the melody of ‘I’ll Keep Loving You’ (an original Powell ballad also recorded at the same session as ‘All God’s Chillun’) and concluded the first half with the ‘b9-b5 triplet lick’.  ↩︎
6. These kinds of ‘product placement’ quotes include Duke Ellington’s quote of ‘I’m Beginning To See The Light’ at the end of his solo on ‘Take The A Train’ from Ellington Uptown and Thelonious Monk’s quote of ‘Misterioso’ at the end of his solo on the original version of ‘Straight No Chaser’. ↩︎
7. Some forms of this aphorism have been attributed to spoken conversation by Oscar Wilde, but a synopsis of its use on quoteexplainer.com suggests it was viral and frequently mutating in printed media.   ↩︎

In the list below, I describe eight techniques for memorizing a jazz tune through reciting or singing various aspects of the tune.  While I am writing about these techniques with jazz tunes in mind,  techniques 5 and 6 could be useful for memorizing a melodic line in other musical styles and genres, techniques 1 through 4 could be used to memorize chord progression in many styles, and techniques 7 and 8 could be useful for songs in many styles with melody, chords and lyrics.  These techniques can (and should) be practiced in at least three ways that do not involve actually playing the tune.  You can use these techniques to recite or sing the tune:

1) away from your instrument and without accompaniment, and/or

2) away from your instrument along with a recording of the tune or a playalong, and/or

3) at your instrument while silently fingering the keys.

The goal of all these approaches is to be able to physically and audibly perform the tune while being guided by an ‘inner monologue’, or what psychology calls ‘self-talk’, that one has developed through the recitation and singing techniques.  The goal of this ‘inner monologue’ is to guide oneself through the various stages of performing a tune that chord players need to be conversant with: the ‘head in’, an improvised solo with chordal comping, a chorus of the kind of comping one uses to accompany another soloist (for pianists, this means some kind of two-handed chord playing technique) and the ‘head out’, which in jazz means a return to the melody with some kind of improvised variation (different rhythms, ornaments, fills, or even melodically altered phrases) that makes it different from the head in.   

This kind of musically methodical self-talk can also be used to counteract performance anxiety, which can often manifest in the form of negative self-talk, a phenomenon that has been discussed often by psychologists in recent years.  Even when one is performing a tune that one has had memorized for a long time, focusing on the nuts and bolts of the music itself leaves one with less time to dwell on potentially anxiety-provoking extraneous factors. 

While the ideas below are numbered and groups of them, or all of them, could be used as a step-by-step process, they are also a collection of ideas that can be used individually and in any order or combination.  A particular approach may work better for a particular learning style.  To use terms from Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, if your strength is in verbal-linguistic intelligence, you may find singing and memorizing letter names of chord roots and melody notes (#1, 3 and 5) more helpful.  If your strength is in logical-mathematical intelligence, memorizing melodies and chord progressions numerically (#2, 4 and 6) may be more helpful.   If your strength is in spatial-visual intelligence, associating melodic and harmonic moves with images in the lyrics (#7 and 8) may be helpful.  You may find that a particular technique works well for you to memorize a particular tune, or that that a particular technique is useful for a particular stage of performing the tune. 

1) recite or sing letter names of chord roots through the chord progression

2) recite or sing chord roots with numbers reflecting either roman numeral analysis of chords or the root’s position and/or the position of each root in the scale of tune’s tonic key or (in passages with harmonic modulations, aka key changes) in the scale of the ‘key of the moment’.

3) recite or sing chord changes with letter names of roots and abbreviated qualities – abbreviate chord names by singing/saying root for a major 7^th or 6/9 chord, root and ‘minor’ for minor 7^th, root and ‘seven’ for dominant seventh.  Abbreviate longer chord names.  For example, for minor seven flat five chords, say root and ‘minor’ and think ‘seven flat five’.  For altered dominants, say root and ‘7’ and think alterations.

4) when typical chord groupings that can be analyzed with roman numerals occur (ii-V, V-I, Ii-V-I, iii-IV-ii-V, etc.), say chord numbers instead of letter names of roots and qualities

5) learn to sing or recite/chant the melody with letter names of notes.  The melody can also be broken down conceptually by speaking its melodic rhythm using rhythm syllables (‘1 and 2 and’, the ta language, scat syllables etc.) or reciting the sequence of notes either by singing or chanting non-melodically.  This singing or chanting can be done without the melodic rhythm and then with it.  These two steps can be combined into speaking or singing note names in rhythm. 

6) learn to sing melody with numbers reflecting chord degree analysis of melody, or scale steps of the tonic of the key of the moment, or solfege

7) learn lyrics to melody – look for connections between the pitch direction, melodic shape, dynamics, etc. of the melody and the what the lyrics are describing at specific points.  For example, the first four notes of the melody to ‘Autumn Leaves’ ascend, but the four-note motive that they introduce is then transposed down twice diatonically and a third time into the melodic minor scale of the relative minor, reflecting the opening lyric (‘The autumn leaves fall by my window’).

8) look for connections between chord progression and lyrics – for example, in Autumn Leaves, major ii-V-I progressions are generally associated with neutral or happy images, thoughts, or actions (leaves falling, kisses, winter’s song) and minor ii-V-I (which occur more frequently than major keys) go with sad or foreboding thoughts or images (red and gold, sunburned hands, days growing long, ‘I miss you’).  In How High The Moon, the minor ii-V-I in m. 10-11 is accompanied by a sad thought in the lyrics (‘love is far away too’) and the major ii-V-I in at the corresponding point in the second half of the tune (m. 26-27) is accompanied by a hopeful thought (‘the darkest night would shine if you would come to me soon’). 

Here are a few techniques that are somewhat more abstract than the ideas on the list but which I have found useful at various times:

If spatial-visual intelligence is your strength (or one of your strengths), the memory palace technique may also be helpful.  This involves locating pieces of information in specific locations within an mentally visualized space (a landscape, a building, etc.).  As the BBC article I linked to mentions, the mentally visualized space one uses for memory palace can be based on a memory of an actual place, or can be generated via computer modeling or one’s own imagination.   The article describes how certain episodes of the BBC series Sherlock.  In my blog post on the bebop tune Ornithology, I explain my theory that this classic bebop tune, which evidence suggests is more likely composed (or mostly composed) by Charlie Parker superfan Benny Harris than by Parker himself, is itself a memory palace for summarizing Parker’s career up to the point when the tune was written.  In the comment section of my post on Wall, paper and cardboard pianos as practice tools, my response to a comment from a piano student includes links to a scene from a TV show that dramatizes the use of an imaginary chessboard for chess practice and a scene from a film that shows the use of an imaginary piano for piano practice.

If your strength is in interpersonal intelligence, finding ways to test or build your memory of a tune with a partner or a group may be helpful.  When I play the bridge of Erroll Garner and Johnny Burke’s ‘Misty’, I often remember a particular change by thinking of a gig a number of years ago where bassist John Lilja reminded me of it when I asked him just in time. 

Bassist Anthony Santor was an anchor of the Vermont jazz scene for something like 25 years, playing with musicians including guitarist Nicholas Cassarino, trumpeter Arthur Brooks and tenor saxophonist John McKenna.    During that time he carried on the unique dual careers of jazz bassist and massage therapist.  A number of the gigs I played with Anthony were in his hometown of Waitsfield, and at least in the establishments where we played, including Villa Tragara (now Michael’s) and American Flatbread,  he knew so many people that he almost seemed to be the unofficial mayor of the town.  Today, Anthony has retired from playing bass but continues as a masseuse, and divides his time between Vermont and Montreal.  I recently discovered John McKenna’s 2020 album Portraits, where he and Anthony collaborate with two jazz legends, drummer Victor Lewis and pianist Bruce Barth.  Portraits is full of amazing McKenna compositions, including Rascal, a blues with shapeshifting time signature changes, and the beautiful Song For Paul, where Anthony’s trademark rich, round sound can be heard on his inspired bass solo.  I had the good fortune to play a number of gigs with Anthony between the late 1990s until around 2019, including at least one gig with John McKenna.  One of the tunes Anthony introduced me to is Rashaan Roland Kirk’s ‘Serenade To A Cuckoo’. 

I describe Kirk as a jazz mystic (in the dictionary page I have linked to, see definition 1 under ‘Noun’ and definitions 2,4,5 and 6 under ‘Adjective’.)  He was a multi-instrumentalist who specialized in tenor saxophone and flute and was known for playing two or three wind instruments at once. Kirk was blind from an early age, but this never inhibited his work, as he was possessed of a supercharged imagination and seemingly ceaseless musical creativity. This video of him strolling through a zoo with a child (presumably one of his daughters) sitting on his shoulders and imitating the sounds of various animals on his flute suggests one way Serenade To A Cuckoo, with its evocation of birdsong, might have come into being.  Kirk’s original recording of the tune appears on his 1965 album I Talk To The Spirits, featuring the great Horace Parlan on piano and Kirk on flute.  The tune’s chord progression could be described as the vamp from Ray Charles’ Hit The Road Jack followed by a compressed version of the first half of the chord progression to Autumn Leaves.  (My tune Paul’s Question is based on that progression). Some variations on the ‘Hit The Road Jack’ progression emerge during the solos.  During his piano solo, instead of a fourth repeat of the two measure Fm7-Eb7-Db7-C7 progression in measures 7 and 8 of the form, Parlan plays a bar of Fm7 followed by a bar of F7.  This relieves the repetitiveness of the F minor vamp and creates harmonic forward motion toward the Bbm7 in bar 9 that starts the ‘Autumn Leaves’ half of the progression. 

My tune Birdfeeder Blues is based on this slightly more elaborate version of the progression.  It also works as a countermelody to Serenade To A Cuckoo.  I would recommend learning Kirk’s tune first.  Here is a link to a video of my melody arrangement of Serenade To A Cuckoo.  Next, learn this scale outline of the progression based on the changes Horace Parlan uses in his solo.  Here is a link to a keyboard video of the scale outline and a notated version of the scale outline:

As one example of how to create a melodic line out of the progression, you could learn my tune Birdfeeder Blues. Here is a link to a keyboard video of Birdfeeder Blues and a chart of the tune:

  In addition, here is a sheet of comping using rootless voicings:

This comping is demonstrated in my audio demo recording of Birdfeeder Blues, which I made using a loop from the DrumGenius app.  Lastly, here is a link to the bass and drum playalong for Birdfeeder Blues that I used in the first two videos.  It plays through the progression four times, which allows you to play Serenade To A Cuckoo as the head in, solo for two choruses or solo for one chorus and comp for one, and return to either Serenade or Birdfeeder Blues.   

Published in 1912, W.C. Handy’s ‘Memphis Blues’ was, according to its composer, ‘the first of all the many published ‘blues’ and it set a new fashion in American popular music and contributed to the rise of jazz, or, if you prefer, swing, and even boogie-woogie.’  (Memphis Blues was published two years before Handy’s better known Saint Louis Blues.)  The opening strain of Memphis Blues exemplifies the connection between ragtime and early jazz, as Handy consciously or subconsciously incorporates two quotes from Scott Joplin’s  The Entertainer.  The sheet music for The Entertainer, published ten years before Memphis Blues, is said to have sold over a million copies in Joplin’s lifetime, so it is likely it would have been known to Handy, who was an active and well-traveled performer by the time The Entertainer was published and starting to be widely played.

In the six-note phrase at the beginning of the intro to Memphis Blues (C4-D-Eb-E-C5-Bb), the middle four notes (D4-Eb-E-C5) are not only the same melodic pattern as the first four notes of The Entertainer, they are the exact same pitches with which Joplin’s piece opens.   The six note phrase that starts with the last three notes in measure four of Memphis Blues, which also begins its first twelve-bar strain, features the melodic pattern that opens the second strain of Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer (E-F-F#-G-A-G) transposed it up a fourth (A-Ab-B-C-D-C). 

There are also examples which suggest that jazz composers from the bebop movement used melodic material from The Entertainer for tunes recorded in the 1950s. In Sonny Rollins’ composition ‘Doxy’, in which the five note phrase that opens the 3^rd and 7^th measures closely resembles the opening five notes in m. 7 of the Entertainer.  The chord progression of Doxy is also the same length and harmonically similar to the first strain of The Entertainer.  The opening of Thelonious Monk’s Blue Monk can also be heard as a variation on Handy’s second Joplin quote.  Monk takes the four-note chromatic ascent from the third to the fifth of a major chord, that Handy and Joplin place on an upbeat (the second sixteenth note of beat two in a measure of 2/4 time) and moves it to the downbeat of the first bar of the blues form.  In typical Monk fashion, this four note motive is one of only two short melodic ‘cells’ around which the entire tune is built. 

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

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

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

Although Handy’s original published versions of Memphis Blues were for solo piano and piano and voice, it had a far-reaching effect on multiple generations of jazz arrangers. The 1919 recording of Memphis Blues by James Reese Europe’s 369^th Infantry Band follows Handy’s published sheet music fairly closely.  The improvised breaks Reese’s band members add during the last 24-bar section of the piece are a precursor of the tailor-made features Duke Ellington would create for band members including Cootie Williams, Johnny Hodges and Lawrence Brown.  In 1946, the Ellington Orchestra recorded  a version of Memphis Blues arranged by Ellington and Billy Strayhorn which, true to form, is a showcase for a number of Ellington’s soloists, including Hodges. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Third chorus: a question, an answer and more innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2025 Tom Cleary

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2025 Tom Cleary

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments on Dena DeRose solo by Rachel Ambaye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This blog post ©2025 Tom Cleary and Rachel Ambaye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It begins to tell ‘round midnight, ‘round midnight

I do pretty well till after sundown

Suppertime I’m feeling sad,

But it really gets bad ‘round midnight

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

When some quarrel we’ve had needs mending,

Does it mean that our love is ending?

Darling, I need you; lately I find

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

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

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

Let the angels sing of your returning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2025 Tom Cleary