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Throughout his career as a composer, Thelonious Monk composed a number of tunes that use the twelve-bar blues progression.  Among these are tunes based on one-bar motives or ‘riffs’ which Monk transposes and alters in various ways, which might be called ‘one bar blues’.  While a number of Monk’s better known blues tunes, such as ‘Straight No Chaser’, use more complex ways of developing a short motive, the blues tunes I discuss below are good models for building an effective melody based on the ‘jazz blues’ progression that ‘makes the changes’ (clearly implies the chord progression through a single-note melodic line) using simpler ways of developing a one-bar ‘riff’ or motive.

As far as I know, the riffs in the tunes I describe are original to Monk, so I would say they use the second and third steps in the ‘Emulate, Assimilate, Innovate’ process. This is a series of steps which master trumpeter and composer Clark Terry used to describe how improvisers develop their skills. In my series of blog posts using that title, I described how it can be seen in the work of various composers and improvisers, starting with a post on how Haydn and Mozart may have borrowed from each other, and how Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis borrowed from various pop tunes.  At the end of this post, you’ll find an original tune of mine, ‘Barbara’s New Digs‘, where I’ve tried to use Monk’s approaches to the ‘assimilate’ and ‘innovate’ steps, as well as include the ’emulate’ step (by borrowing riffs from two different sources.)  Please click on the title in the last sentence to hear an audio recording of the tune.

Five Spot Blues, from the 1963 album Monk’s Dream, is based on a six-note riff which outlines a dominant seventh chord in third inversion (in his essential text Jazz Keyboard Harmony, Phil Degreg describes this as a dominant 7th ‘voiced off the seventh’).  (The link in the previous sentence should take you to a recording of the tune. While it is possible to learn the tune by ear and I encourage you to try that first, a chart can be downloaded from musicnotes.com and one can also be found in the highly recommended Thelonious Monk Fakebook.) Following the blues progression as shown in step 1 of the assignment below, Monk introduces the riff in the first measure, and then transposes (or ‘assimilates’) it to the Eb7 chord by transposing it up a perfect fourth.  In measures 3-8 he continues outlining the blues progression using the Bb and Eb versions of the riff.  In measure 9, Monk ‘innovates’ on the riff by changing just the last note of the original pattern to the root of the F chord.  A different kind of innovation can be heard in m. 10, where Monk moves the riff to a different rhythmic location (beat 3 instead of beat 1).  This is one of Monk’s favorite ways of altering a riff; ‘Straight, No Chaser’ is a masterclass in this technique.  Five Spot Blues is a more stripped down version of the earlier Blues Five Spot from the album Misterioso, which includes a nonstandard bVII chord in m. 6 of the progression.

North of the Sunset from the album Solo Monk (1965) is also based on a six-note riff, but here Monk uses more sophisticated methods of motivic development than he does in Five Spot Blues.  (Here is a link to a reasonably priced chart for North of the Sunset on musicnotes.com.) While there is only one place in ‘Five Spot’ where Monk changes a note of the original riff, Monk uses this technique multiple times in ‘North’, at m. 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9 and 10.  In ‘North’, Monk also uses the more sophisticated techniques of extending the initial one-bar motive to a two-bar motive (m. 3-4 and 7-8 – this also occurs at m. 5-6 of ‘Blue Monk’ ), and using the melodic rhythm of the motive with a different melodic shape (at m. 11-12, in a phrase that recalls the opening of ‘Straight, No Chaser’.)  With a running time of just under two minutes, Monk’s recording of ‘North of the Sunset’ is also a short tour de force of jazz piano left hand accompaniment techniques, beginning with two note shell voicings during the head, progressing on to a stride left hand during the solo, and including a short stretch of walking bass. 

Below are some guidelines on how to compose a twelve-bar melody based on the  ‘jazz blues’ progression, using first the ‘assimilate’ process from ‘Five Spot Blues’ and then (if you choose) the ‘assimilate/innovate’ process from ‘North of the Sunset’.

1) Choose a key for your melody.  I suggest using one of the more common keys for blues among jazz players and singers: G, C, F or B flat.  Write out the chord progression of a basic I-IV-V blues in your chosen key on a piece of staff paper, following the progression as shown below (each roman numeral represents the dominant seventh chord beginning on the step of your key’s tonic major scale indicated by the numeral)  :

I / / / | IV / / / | I / / / | / / / / |

IV / / / | / / / / | I / / / | / / / / |

V / / /  | / / / /  | I / / / | V / / / |

2) Compose or adapt a one-measure melodic phrase which outlines a dominant 7th chord, either through arpeggiation (i.e. moving through chord tones in any order, often involving intervallic or ‘skip’ motion) , as in ‘Five Spot Blues’, or through a combination of arpeggiation and stepwise melodic motion (i.e. moving along the mixolydian scale in scale steps), as in ‘North Of The Sunset’.  By ‘adapt’, I mean that if you borrow a short melodic phrase from a source such as an improvised solo, alter something about it to make its source less identifiable. An example of this is Oscar Pettiford’s ‘Swingin’ ‘Til The Girls Come Home’.  My theory about the tune is that Pettiford borrowed the first four notes of the second strain in the Toreador Song from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen. Pettiford adapted the phrase by using only the first four notes (using less than half of the tune’s signature ten-note opening phrase), syncopated the first note by starting it a half beat earlier, and changed the tune’s dotted-eighth-sixteenth rhythm to swing eighth notes.  (Although ‘Swingin’ was first recorded in 1951, the ubiquity of The Toreador Song in the jazz melodic language can be heard in a couple of later solos by a number of Pettiford’s contemporaries:  Kenny Dorham in his 1955 solo on Lady Bird from The Jazz Messengers At The Cafe Bohemia Vol. 1 and Yusef Lateef in his 1958 flute solo on Take the ‘A’ Train from The Sounds of Yusef.)

Keep in mind that in order to outline a dominant 7th chord, a phrase should end on a chord tone.  In a jazz context, all notes of the seventh/mixolydian scale other than the 4th are considered chord tones.  (When a phrase over a dominant 7th chord ends on the 4th, the unresolved sound of the 4th says ‘move me somewhere’.  Resolving the 4th down to the 3rd or up to the 5th by step is one of the easiest ways to avoid the unfinished sound created by ending on the 4th in a phrase over a dominant 7th chord.) 

Sources from which you could borrow a one-bar phrase outlining a dominant 7th include the Glossary of Melodic Patterns Based On Root Position Chords in my blog post on the tune ‘Broken Heart for Sale’, and the licks in my exercise Jody, Donna, Four Brothers and Koko, which imply rootless voicings of dominant seventh chords.  If you borrow a melodic phrase, feel free to adapt it (or ‘innovate’ on it) before incorporating it into your tune by altering it rhythmically as in the Pettiford tune described above, or using any of the ‘innovate’ approaches described in step 4 below.

3) Using ‘Five Spot Blues’ as a model, compose a ‘transpose/assimilate’ draft of your blues by transposing your phrase to the to the mixolydian/seventh scales built on the roots of the I, IV and V chords in blues progression shown in Step 1.  We will take the ‘transposition only’ approach that Monk uses in m. 1-8 of ‘Five Spot’ and extend it into the last four measures as well, to keep this part of the process more straightforward.

As in ‘Five Spot Blues’, In the measures where the chord from the previous measure is repeated (m. 4, 6, 8 and 10), leave a measure of rest in the melody.  (Note that the slightly different ‘Blues Five Spot’, there are melody notes in m. 6, but we will take the simpler approach of ‘Five Spot Blues’ and let the Eb7 chord continue in that measure.)  Also, leave a measure of rest in m. 12.  This follows a common practice in blues melodies and improvised solos by great jazz players of leaving space in the last one or two measures of a chord progression. 

The chord pattern in #1 above shows the V chord in m. 9-10, and we’ll follow Monk’s example by following that pattern in the melody.  However, we will also follow Monk’s example by having chord players, or pianists’ left hands, play the ii chord in m. 9, so the chord progression in the last four bars will be as follows:

ii / / / | V / / / | I / / / | / / / /

The ii chord in m. 9 is one of the key element that makes a ‘jazz blues’ different from how the blues progression is played in other contexts, such as traditional blues by performers and composers such as Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon. 

4) Create a ‘assimilate/innovate’ draft of your blues melody by adding innovations to the melody some of the measures where you repeated or transposed the basic motive exactly in your ’emulate/assimilate’ drafts.  Try using some of the innovations Monk makes during the ‘head in’ to ‘North of the Sunset’ on the basic motive heard in the first measure.  These include

– ending the motive on a different chord tone (as in m. 2, 5, 6, 9 and 10 of the ‘head in’ to North of the Sunset)

– on chord changes that last two measures in the basic progression shown at the beginning of #3, extending the one-bar motive to a two-bar motive by adding a melodic ‘tail’ (as in m. 3-4 and 7-8 of the ‘head in’ to ‘North Of The Sunset’)

– using the melodic rhythm of the basic motive, but with a different notes, and extending the motive by adding a ‘tail’ (as in m. 11-12 of the ‘head in’ and ‘head out’ to ‘North’)

– moving the motive to a different beat of the measure, as in the last measure of ‘Five Spot Blues’

– transposing some of the notes in the phrase up or down an octave, either for variety or to keep the melody in a playable/singable range (as in Swingin’ Till The Girls Come Home).  

In my tune ‘Barbara’s New Digs’, after a short bass intro, the first chorus of the head in uses the ‘transpose/assimilate’ process, and the second chorus adds the ‘innovate’ step.  I also add the ’emulate’ step by borrowing the opening riff from Camille Thurman’s solo on ‘Sassy’s Blues’ (shown in my blog post on that solo) and extending that motive by adding my own rhythmically compressed version of a melodic phrase from ‘Malanga Amarilla’ by Israel Cachao Lopez (which can be found in my Glossary of Melodic Root Position Chord Patterns).  Just above the chart for the tune, you’ll find a simple scale outline of the B flat ‘jazz blues’ progression the tune uses.  Here is a link to a short recording I made of Barbara’s New Digs. I hope you enjoy it!

In two well-known melodies, one from the late 1950s and another from the mid-1960s, the ascending minor seventh interval is used to symbolize reaching for a not-yet-attained goal.  Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Somewhere’, first performed in 1957 as part of the musical ‘West Side Story’, begins with an ascending minor 7th that accompanies the lyric ‘there’s a place for us’.  The lyric of the phrase that follows – ‘somewhere a place for us’ – reveals that the place has not yet been found.  In light of this thought, the ascending minor seventh begins to symbolize a reaching for this goal. The three note motive that opens the song – an ascending minor 7th followed by a descending minor 2nd – appears a number of other parts of the score, including the The Cool Fugue that follows the song ‘Cool’ and the song I Have A Love which is paired with ‘A Boy Like That’. (The version of A Boy Like That/I Have A Love I have linked to features Rita Moreno in 1961, and the version of Somewhere I have linked to is Moreno in 2021.) Leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timing in the videos of Cool/Cool Fugue and A Boy Like That/I Have A Love, or the lyrics in those songs, where the ‘Somewhere’ motive appears.

The vocal melody of Alexander Courage’s theme to the original Star Trek series also begins with an ascending minor 7th.  The voiceover that precedes the theme in the show’s opening introduces the mission statement of the starship Enterprise: ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before’.  Like the singer in ‘Somewhere’ (who in the original stage production was offstage and therefore anonymous), the crew of the starship Enterprise in Star Trek also seeks the unknown.  Gene Roddenberry’s little known and infrequently sung lyrics to the theme refer to a lover who, like the ‘place for us’ in West Side Story, is out of reach for now: ‘beyond the rim of the starlight / my love is wandering in starflight’.  The most musically faithful interpretation of the tune I have found is by Jack Black and Kyle Gass of Tenacious D. In this performance, Black and Gass demonstrate that, as with all great musical humorists, their comedy is built on a foundation of solid musicianship.

On the version of My Favorite Things sung by Mary Martin on the original Broadway cast recording of The Sound Of Music, the tune’s switch from E minor to E major between its second and third verses (at :37) is introduced with a short waltz vamp introducing the new mode.  On his iconic version of My Favorite Things, John Coltrane expands this vamp, making it into a longer modal interlude where he improvises on the newly introduced major mode. While the common practice in jazz at the time, including on Coltrane’s previous albums, was for improvising to take place over a tune’s chord progression (rather than its intro), Coltrane’s version of ‘My Favorite Things’ was groundbreaking in that most of the improvisation by both Coltrane and pianist McCoy Tyner in its thirteen-minute-plus duration occurred on these modal interludes that extended the vamps of the original version. In the parts of the arrangement where Tyner plays tune’s chord progression (considerably altered by bassist Steve Davis playing an E pedal tone rather than the chord roots), Coltrane states the melody with various kinds of rhythmic re-interpretation and ornamentation and saves his development of original melodic ideas for the vamp sections (See my discussion of McCoy Tyner’s solo below for more on the definition of ‘modal’.)  At one point during the first major-key modal interlude (at 1:18), Coltrane begins developing the perfect fifth with which the melody begins, narrowing it to a perfect fourth before expanding it to wider intervals including an ascending minor 7th:

The melody of Coltrane’s composition ‘Naima‘ prominently features an descending minor 7th between its third and fourth notes ; this interval is later balanced by an ascending minor 7th in the bridge. 

Sondheim’s song ‘Anyone Can Whistle‘ also features an early descending minor 7th which he matches with the third word of the title in the lyrics (emulating a common descending whistling pattern.)  The descending minor 7th on ‘whistle’ that symbolizes simplicity (despite being tricky to sing), is followed by an ascending major 7th that accompanies the first two words of the phrase ‘it’s all so simple’.  This interval (on the lyrics ‘it’s all’) contrast this carefree thought in the lyrics with a musical interval that is arguably more strenuous to sing than the one Sondheim chooses for ‘whistle’.  This contrasts suggests that the character singing the song is skeptical of the sentiment he’s repeating to the listener.  A few lines later in the lyrics, the singer reveals in words the perspective that he telegraphed earlier with melody notes: ‘it’s all so simple / relax, let go, let fly / so someone tell me why can’t I?‘ (italics mine). 

Another major 7th sung by a character who is reaching for something is in the song ‘Pure Imagination’, sung by Gene Wilder as the title character in the film Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory.  Although he seems at first to be a carefree Pied Piper, Wonka is also a hardworking and calculating salesman.  Leave a comment in the comment section if you can identify the place where the melody of ‘Pure Imagination’ has an ascending major 7th either by giving the timing in the video and/or mentioning the lyric(s) where the interval occurs.

At one point during his solo over the major-key vamp in My Favorite Things (approximately 4:47),  McCoy Tyner repeats a C sharp in his right hand as his left alternates between root position E major seventh and F sharp minor seventh voicings. (I am calling these ‘voicings’ rather than chords because these note stacks are not functioning the way they would in the chord progression of a jazz standard or bebop tune. What makes this a modal vamp rather than a chord progression is that while the piano alternates between these two voicings, the bass alternates between the root and fifth of only the E major seventh and doesn’t play the root of the F#m7, and the melodic material of both Tyner’s solo and Coltrane’s solos on this vamp stays centered on the E major scale and, like the bass, doesn’t make any moves to specifically reference the F#m7 (whether through an arpeggio or another melodic phrase that outlines that chord.) Tyner is moving voicings along the E major scale rather than moving chords through a progression.) In his right hand solo, Tyner eventually expands the repeated C sharp into a descending perfect fifth (C#-F#), acknowledging but also innovating on Coltrane’s earlier development of the ascending 5th.  He transposes this up a minor 3rd to E-A and then expands into wider intervals, including a ascending an descending major 7th. Leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timing of the place in the transcription below where Tyner plays the ascending and descending major sevenths.

The melody of Thelonious Monk’s blues Misterioso is based entirely on ascending major and minor sixths.  For most of the tune, Monk maintains perpetual motion by building ascending sixths off ascending and descending three-note major and minor scales.  The last phrase is a series of ascending sixths built off the notes of an ascending five-note F major scale.  This two-level ascension, ending on the unstable 7th of the dominant I chord, has the sound of a question.  Monk used Misterioso not only as a ‘head’ or theme to bookend melodic improvisation on its chord progression, but also as a ‘lick’ or motive in his improvised solos, including his solos on the original recording of Straight No Chaser (another of his blues compositions that focuses resolutely on a single melodic concept), a live 1963 version of Misterioso and his solo on Take 1 of Bags’ Groove from the Miles Davis album of the same name.  Leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timings in either of these Monk recordings where Monk quotes the melody of Misterioso in his improvised solo. 

An example of taking Misterioso to the innovate level can be found in Fred Hersch’s solo on the tune from his recent duo version with Enrico Rava.  

Other jazz standards with melodies that prominently feature the ascending major and minor sixth include Billy Strayhorn’s Take The A Train, which opens with ascending and descending major sixths in m. 1-2 that are quickly balanced with consecutive descending and ascending minor sixths in m. 6-7, and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘Surrey With The Fringe On Top’, which builds over its first six measures to an ascending major sixth.  This can be clearly heard in the version by Sonny Rollins from the album Newk’s Time, in which he performs the tune as a duet with drummer Philly Joe Jones.  The ascending sixths in both these tunes have a sense of optimism which is reflected in the lyrics.  In Something To Live For, Walter Van de Leur quotes Strayhorn explaining that the tune’s lyrics – ‘You must take the A Train to get to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem’ – celebrate a subway line that had recently been constructed around the time of the tune’s composition.  Although many vocal versions of ‘A Train’ substantially alter the melody, including those by Ellington singers Joya Sherill and Betty Roche, the version by Ella Fitzgerald with the Ellington Orchestra stays closest to the melody as published and instrumentally played (as usual and as with her versions of many tunes, Fitzgerald is dependably faithful to the composer’s intentions.)  In Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics to ‘Surrey’, a turn-of-the-century cowboy named Curly enthuses to a prospective date, Laurey, about a different mode of transportation: ‘Ducks and chicks and geese better hurry / when I take you out in the Surrey / When I take you out in the Surrey With The Fringe On Top’.

The disappointment felt by the speaker in the lyrics to the 1929 song ‘Mean To Me’ (‘Mean To Me / why must you be Mean To Me / gee, honey, it seems to me / you always leave me cryin’) is reflected in the repeated descending sixths of Fred E. Ahlert’s melody. 

Ahlert’s descending sixths achieve the same effect as the signature descending tritone that punctuated the depressing punchlines of Rachel Dratch’s character Debbie Downer on Saturday Night Live.  Ella Fitzgerald had an interesting history with ‘Mean To Me’ that seems to have begun in 1958 when she quoted an altered version of it as part of her solo on ‘St. Louis Blues’ from Ella in Rome: The Birthday Concert.  The quotation appears in the ninth chorus of her solo, which begins with a quote from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘It Might As Well Be Spring’.  In the ‘Mean To Me’ quotation Fitzgerald transposes the lower notes of Ahlert’s descending sixths up a diatonic third so that the descending sixths becomes descending fourths.  Although it can be challenging to hear an echo of the original in Fitzgerald’s altered quote, Fitzgerald scholar Katchie Cartwright still identifies it as a Mean To Me quote in her article ” ‘Guess These People Wonder What I’m Singing’: Quotation and Reference In Ella’s Fitzgerald’s ‘St. Louis Blues’ “.  To use Clark Terry’s term, Fitzgerald seems to have started her relationship with this tune in the ‘innovate’ stage. 

One could say that Fitzgerald’s ‘assimilate’ stage with Mean To Me came during her iconic version of How High The Moon from the 1960 album Ella In Berlin.  Fitzgerald’s 1960 solo reprises the three choruses of solo from her 1947 version, revises some of that material, and adds five more choruses as well as an extensive coda.  One of the 1960 revisions is a phrase in the third chorus where she begins by quoting Duke Ellington’s Rockin’ In Rhythm as she did in the 1947 solo.  In the earlier version this phrase stays well within the scope of four measures, but in the more athletic 1960 version, Fitzgerald continues this phrase past the fourth bar, ending with what is arguably a three-note quote of Mean To Me.  Leave a comment in the comment section if you can identify the timing in the videos when either of these Mean To Me quotes appear (they are shortly after the timestamp to which the links lead). 

One might say Fitzgerald reached the ’emulate’ stage with ‘Mean To Me’ when she made her first recorded version of the entire tune on Ella Swings Brightly With Nelson Riddle in 1961.  On this version, she incorporates first the original form of the melody she briefly quotes in the 1960 How High The Moon, and shortly after, the alteration from her St. Louis Blues solo.  While the musician’s axiom ‘fake it ’til you make it’ aptly describes Fitzgerald’s famous forgetting of the lyrics to Mack the Knife during her Berlin concert, which became one of her best-known and best-loved recordings, it would rarely if ever apply to her treatment of melodies, as she routinely learned melodies with great accuracy and based her variations on knowledge of the original, rather than improvising out of a need to fill in missing information.   Her history with ‘Mean To Me’, on the other hand, might be summarized with a variation on that axiom: ‘quote it ’til you own it’. 

The ‘Cool Blues’ lick was a phrase Charlie Parker used in multiple improvised solos, including his March 1946 recording of Yardbird Suite and his May 1947 recording of Cheryl.  In February 1947 he recorded an entire composition titled ‘Cool Blues’ which was based on the lick and which gave the lick its title. The jazz blogger Peter Spitzer makes a persuasive case that Parker borrowed the first part of the lick from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen.  One factor that points to Carmen as a likely source is that Parker also quoted from the opera’s most famous aria, ‘L’Amour est un oiseau rebelle’ in solos including one on a big band version of Cole Porter’s ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’  I would argue that the second half of the lick is one of many innovations Parker and other bop players made on the opening motive from Fats Waller’s Honeysuckle Rose.  It is the variant of Honeysuckle Rose that appears in measures 5 and 8 of Parker’s blues ‘Bloomdido’ and the second chorus of Parker disciple Wardell Gray’s solo on his blues ‘Twisted’. The ascending perfect fifth interval figures prominently in the end of the lick as Parker played it, which features the fifth followed by an ascending minor third and a descending perfect fourth.   This last pair of intervals is also the opening of Illinois Jacquet’s ‘Flying Home’, a very well known piece in the time just preceding Parker’s rise to prominence, when he was absorbing the influence of swing era saxophonists, Lester Young in particular, but not only Young. This makes the last two notes of the lick Parker’s only original contribution to the lick (other than his ingenious conscious or sub-conscious amalgamation of these three sources.)

A video by jazz YouTuber Simon Fransman splices together a number of uses of the lick by Parker and his contemporaries including trumpeters Howard McGhee, who uses it on a solo from a live version of the Parker tune ‘Now’s The Time’, and Fats Navarro, who uses it on a live version of ‘Ornithology’ with Parker.  Fransman also includes excerpts from solos by more recent players such as trombonist Conrad Herwig who incorporates the lick into a solo on ‘Georgia On My Mind’.  Fransman’s survey also includes the 1990s rap songs ‘Jazz Thang’ by Gang Starr, which briefly samples the lick, and ‘Southern Comfort’ by Down South, which makes the lick a repeated feature of its groove.  Other solos from around Parker’s time where the ‘Cool Blues’ phrase is used include the solo by saxophonist Sonny Rollins on a recording of the tune ‘Professor Bop’  by vocalist Babs Gonzales (which was the 19-year-old Rollins’ first recorded appearance) and Sammy Davis Junior’s scat solo on a duet with Ella Fitzgerald on the Gershwin tune ‘Swonderful from the Ed Sullivan Show.  I encourage you to listen through one of the original recordings I have linked to in this paragraph (other than Cool Blues and Southern Comfort, where the lick is used repeatedly) and leave a comment in the comment section indicating the timing in the recording where the Cool Blues lick is used.  A further question is: does the soloist use the lick more or less in its original form (i.e. as it appears in ‘Cool Blues’ and the Parker solos linked above), or if not, how many notes from the original lick does the soloist use before finding an innovation that fits the lick into its new context?

Probably the best known recording of the jazz standard Afro Blue, composed by Mongo Santamaria, is the recording by the John Coltrane quartet from Live At Birdland.  In a recent recording by Wayne Wallace and Michael Spiro with La Orquestra Sinfonietta, the arrangement adds an intro to Santamaria’s tune that includes two different Toques (rhythms) and Cantos (songs) from the Cuban Santeria tradition addressed to the deity Obatala, with a piano interlude in between them. The second Canto (starting around 2:07, just after the piano interlude) includes a four-note motive that matches the opening of Afro Blue, and so seems likely to have been the inspiration for the jazz tune.   The section opens with the four-note motive, but it is used once more in that section of the intro. I encourage you to listen to Coltrane’s statement of the melody to Afro Blue, which takes up about the first minute of his recording, and leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timing in the Spiro/Wallace recording where the second use of the four-note motive occurs.

Coincidentally, the same four note phrase that Santamaria quoted in ‘Afro Blue’ also appears near the beginning of the melody in ‘My One And Only Love’, a ballad that Coltrane recorded with vocalist Johnny Hartman on an album released the year before Live at Birdland.  While Coltrane and Hartman’s recording is the authoritative jazz version of the tune, partly because of the way Hartman conversationally interprets the melodic rhythm, the four note phrase that the tune has in common with Afro Blue and the Obatala chant can be heard somewhat more clearly in the recording by Paul McCartney with Diana Krall on piano, particularly in the second A section where the lyrics begin ‘the shadows fall’.  I encourage you to listen once again to Coltrane’s melody statement on Afro Blue, and leave a comment in the comment section if you can find the timing and lyrics in either the Coltrane/Hartman or McCartney recordings of ‘My One And Only Love’ where the four-note Obatala/Afro Blue motive occurs in that melody.  

John Scofield also briefly uses the four-note Afro Blue/Obatala motive in his solo on Herbie Hancock’s arrangement of Scarborough Fair. I encourage you to listen through this interesting arrangement and leave a comment if you can find the timing in the video where Scofield uses this motive.

Having the Obatala/Afro Blue motive firmly in your ‘mind’s ear’ is a good preparation for listening to the epic and iconic solos on the Coltrane ‘Afro Blue’ by McCoy Tyner on piano and Coltrane on soprano saxophone.  While Tyner’s solo follows the basic outline of the tune’s chord progression with much use of the harmonic ‘side-slipping’ (or ‘chromatic planing’) technique that he pioneered and which was a hallmark of his style, Coltrane’s solo is on ‘open F minor’, a prolonged F minor tonality enlivened by Coltrane’s melodic explorations, Tyner’s moving chord voicings within that tonality and drummer Elvin Jones’s explosive and expansive rendering of a swing 6/8 groove. 

The song ‘All of Me’ by Seymour Simons and Gerald Marks is a jazz standard which has been recorded by countless artists. Two versions which show the multiple possibilities the tune contains for improvisers are the studio version by Count Basie and his Orchestra, where Basie’s relaxed, minimalist approach to the melody alternates with aggressively swinging horn passages, and the somewhat faster version by Ella Fitzgerald arranged by Nelson Riddle, which features one of Fitzgerald’s classic quote-riddled scat solos (among the tunes she quotes here are ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’, ‘The Irish Washerwoman’ and ‘Heart of My Heart’). For some thoughts on where the opening chords to ‘All of Me’ may have originated, as well as some later tunes that have similar opening chords (including compositions by Robbie Robertson, Thelonious Monk, and one I wrote for the Mike Gordon band) see the last paragraph of this post.

‘Broken Heart for Sale’ is a tune I composed based on the chord changes to ‘All of Me’, partially inspired by Fitzgerald’s allusive approach to constructing a new melodic line on the tune’s changes.  It uses melodic vocabulary from a ‘Glossary of Melodic Root Position Chord Patterns’  (a.k.a. GOMRoPChoP) that I developed as a tool to help students familiarize themselves with the basic jazz chord types by hearing them in the context of a strong melodic line:

The melody of my original tune is an effort to demonstrate the ‘innovate’ stage of the ’emulate, assimilate, innovate’ process that Clark Terry describes as being integral to the development of improvisers.  While I borrow the opening gesture of ‘I Can’t Get Started‘ in the first measure, I rhythmically recontextualize by starting it on the downbeat of beat three (it originally begins on the ‘and’ of 3).  I also precede it with a 3 note descending pattern.  In m. 5, I borrow a melodic gesture from Israel ‘Cachao’ Lopez’s ‘Malanga Amarilla’, but I transpose the first note down an octave, remove a repeated note, use the flat 9 rather than the original natural 9, and remove the tail of the phrase.  Other melodic phrases from the GOMRoPChoP that I use in ‘Broken Heart for Sale’ include m.5 from ‘I Thought About You‘, Camille Thurman’s solo on ‘Sassy’s Blues’, the ‘crazy music’ lick from ‘Moody’s Mood for Love’ (i.e., James Moody’s solo on ‘I’m In The Mood for Love’), ‘Later For You’ by Elmo Hope and ’26-2′ by John Coltrane.

Here is a link to my keyboard video of ‘Broken Heart For Sale’.  While this is an instrumental version, I also have lyrics to the tune and hope to add a vocal version soon.  After playing the head, which is accompanied with three note root position voicings, I begin my solo with a ‘melody scrabble’ approach, spontaneously reorganizing the pitch collections in each bar of the tune.  In my second chorus of solo, I switch to using rootless voicings, which results in my right hand soloing moving to a higher register.  Here is a link to the playalong I created for the ‘Broken Heart’ video which you can use for practicing the tune, and a link to a recording of a scale outline that models a ‘hand to hand conversation’ approach to coordinating LH ‘chord questions’ and RH melodic ‘answers’. A downloadable chart for the tune with piano voicings is below:

I would recommend learning ‘Broken Heart for Sale’ in the following ways and in this order:

1) learn to play the chord voicings from ‘Broken Heart’ with the melody of All of Me.  I’d recommend first memorizing the melody in your RH from a lead sheet and reading the LH voicings from my chart, and then memorizing both melody and voicings (while noticing how the melody clearly outlines the progression.)  While it is important to learn the melody of All of Me as notated in published charts, it is also crucial to listen to interpretations of the melody by great jazz performers, particularly the versions by Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald mentioned above.

2) learn my composed melody to ‘Broken Heart for Sale’ as an exercise in building a melodic line out of chord-based melodic patterns.  Work on following the melody with a chorus of ‘melody scrabble’ improvising, as I do in my solo. 

‘All of Me’, which was published in 1931, begins with a I-III7-VI7-ii progression – the tonic major chord followed by two dominant chords leading to the minor ii.  Jule Styne seems to have borrowed most of the progression of ‘All of Me’ for his 1942 tune ‘I’ve Heard That Song Before‘, a title which could be a reference to the borrowed progression.  The opening chords of ‘All of Me’ might have been borrowed from two hit songs that preceded it, ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue (Has Anybody Seen My Gal?)‘ by Joe Young, Ray Henderson, and Sam M. Lewis, published in 1925, and ‘Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone‘ by Bee Palmer, Sam Stept and Sidney Clare, published in 1930.  The progressions for these two tunes begin with the same I-III7-VI7 progression heard in ‘All of Me’, but with each chord lasting only one measure rather than the two measure changes heard in ‘All of Me’.  In the two earlier tunes, the first three chords are followed by a dominant 7th II chord; ‘All of Me’ uses a minor ii chord at this point, which is clearly outlined in the melody. While the speaker in the lyrics of ‘Five Foot Two’ describes the features of a missing sweetheart (‘Five foot two / eyes of blue / but oh, what those five foot could do / has anybody seen my gal?’), the lyrics of  ‘Please Don’t Talk About Me’ could be read as telling the other side of the story, giving voice to the thoughts of a departed lover (‘Please don’t talk about me when I’m gone / oh, honey, though our friendship ceases from now on’).  It seems likely that Thelonious Monk borrowed the A section of ‘Five Foot Two’ in 1951 for his tune ‘Four In One‘, the title of which seems to be a reference to ‘Five Foot Two’.  The opening chords of ‘Five Foot Two’ also appear at the beginning of Robbie Robertson’s ‘Ophelia‘, which like ‘Five Foot Two’ describes a missing woman.  I used the ‘Five Foot Two’ / ‘Please Don’t Talk About Me’ chord progression in a tune called ‘I Miss My Mind‘ which I wrote and performed during my time with the Mike Gordon band.  I would occasionally use ‘Four In One’ as an intro to the tune, as on this live version from Pawtucket, RI.

In 1947, the great jazz pianist and composer Bud Powell was sent to Creedmoor State Hospital, ‘one of the largest and most highly populated psychiatric facilities in New York State at the time’, writes Powell biographer Peter Pullman in Wail: The Life of Bud Powell.  A story from that time indicates how challenging it is for any musician, and particularly one of Powell’s caliber, to be involuntarily confined without access to their instrument.  Pullman writes that “a visit, which has been recounted in a number of printed sources, was supposed to have been made by Elmo Hope. The tale has Powell pointing to the wall above his hospital bed, where he had drawn some piano keys. ‘What do you think of this new tune that I’ve written?’ Powell supposedly asked, as his fingers struck the keys on the wall.” 

Two years into his time at Creedmoor, on February 23, 1949, Powell was given a day pass to do his first recording session as a leader.  Although Powell had had little access to a piano at Creedmoor, he had participated in a show performed at the institution by current inmates and community members called “The Rodeo Minstrel Revue of 1949”, an event for which Pullman writes that hospital administrators had ‘held up Powell’s release’.  Pullman also deduces that Powell’s likely found a way to include some of his original tunes in the show, because when he arrived at the recording session he ‘came prepared with four original compositions…he had cleverly used his Minstrel Show rehearsal time to practice his repertoire and work on the improvisations.’  One of those original compositions was ‘Celia‘, dedicated to Powell’s daughter whose birth he was not able to attend, as she was born during his stay at Creedmoor.  Pullman writes that ‘this hopeful, vernal melody had been composed during the previous year’s hellish incarceration.’  It seems likely, then, that ‘Celia’ may have been the tune that Powell silently played for Elmo Hope using the piano keys he drew on the wall of the institution. 

The story of Powell drawing piano keys on the hospital wall and playing them is one of a number of accounts I’ve found of both professional and aspiring pianists drawing silent keyboards as a way of continuing to practice.  A New Yorker article by Demetrius Cunningham describes his practicing on a homemade cardboard piano, which made it possible for him to become the accompanist for a prison choir.  In a BBC profile, pianist Andrew Garrido tells of how practicing along with recordings on a paper piano got him through the first five grades of the Royal Academy of Music piano curriculum and began a career that eventually led him to study piano in a conservatory.  In these times when the occasional need to quarantine is a fact of life, these stories remind us that musicians who find creative solutions through which they can continue practicing can both make the conditions they face a bit more bearable and move their musical progress in new directions.

If you are quarantined without access to a piano or keyboard, but you have access to a printer, you could download and print out the two attached keyboard jpgs that can be found below.  Fold over or cut off with scissors the left-hand 8 and 1/2 inch side of the jpg titled ‘Keys 2’ (the one with F on the left side) and attach it to the right-hand 8 and 1/2 inch side of Keys 1 (the jpg with C on the left side) with scotch tape if possible or masking tape on the upper and lower edges where the pages come together. 

Another option is the Virtual Piano Keyboard at onlinepianist.com. On this keyboard, white keys C3 to E4 on the virtual keyboard correspond with the  keys for letters Q,W,E,R,T,Y,U,I,O,P on the alphabetic keyboard.  On the numeric keys, 2,3,5,6,7,9 and 0 correspond to the black keys for that range.  The middle and lower rows of alphabetic keys correspond to black and white keys from F4 to Bb5.  On Virtual Piano, the ‘sustain pedal’ (usually played with the right foot on an actual piano) is a button above the piano (next to buttons marked Letter Names and Keyboard Marks).  The sustain pedal is automatically ‘on’ when the page loads, so you’ll need to click on this to turn it off (so it goes grey rather than white.)  The sustain on Virtual Piano is an odd effect not really the same as the actual pedal.  I recommend having Google metronome open in another window set to a slow tempo. If you turn on the Letter Names button on Virtual Piano, it will display letter names on the keys, which may be helpful.  Navigating Virtual Piano via the QWERTY keyboard is quite different from navigating the piano keyboard, but it has enough similarities that it creates a useful virtual modeling of the keyboard.  Here’s a video where I played one of the pieces from my beginning piano class on Virtual Piano.

Blue Mercy Line is a tune I composed on a chord progression in the key of A which could be described as A7-D7 or I7-IV7.  I wrote this tune as an exercise in using the melodic language of Charlie Parker, specifically his B flat blues ‘Bloomdido’, as a source of ideas for improvising on the I-IV progression that is often used for solos on Josef Zawinul’s ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’.  This type of progression can also be heard in the middle section of ‘In A Silent Way‘, Miles Davis’s early, extended experiment in electric instrumentation,  Eddie Harris’s solo on Les McCann’s ‘You Got It In Your Soulness’, and the solo section of ‘Jessica’ by The Allman Brothers.  A similar progression also appears near the end of Mike Gordon’s tune ‘Another Door’, which I would often solo on during my years playing in his band (2008-14).  This video of the end of the tune at Chicago’s Park West shows both how much fun I had playing in that band and how much trouble I had being adequately heard over the din of its stage volume. The I-IV progressions in these tunes also bear a resemblance to the imin7 – IV7 progressions heard in Herbie Hancock’s ‘Chameleon’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘Breathe’. 

Cannonball Adderley’s original version of ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ is, along with Duke Ellington’s ‘Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue’ and Ramsey Lewis’ version of ‘The In Crowd’ and ‘Hard Day’s Night’, one of the classic jazz recordings including audience participation.  In the liner notes for a later Adderley album, Michael Cuscuna mentions that ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ was recorded not in a club but in a recording studio with an invited audience and an open bar.  Josef Zawinul’s solo on Wurlitzer electric piano alternates between moving in eighth notes and moving in short bursts of sixteenth notes.  The relaxed groove of the recording derives from the way Zawinul alternates between these two note values just enough to maintain a sense of forward motion in his solo. 

In solos on later versions of the tune, like Tom Scott’s solo on the version of ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’ from the tribute album Cannon Reloaded, longer strings of sixteenth notes become a vehicle for introducing bebop melodic moves, such as ‘enclosing’ or ‘surrounding’ scale steps with chromatic neighbor tones and adding half steps on upbeats between scale steps.  Scott’s solo clearly shows the influence of Charlie Parker; my idea in composing ‘Blue Mercy line’ was to go directly to Scott’s likely source, Parker’s improvising as shown in the transcriptions from the ‘Charlie Parker Omnibook’, for ideas on how to construct a bop-style melodic line on a I-IV vamp.  I studied ways that Parker melodically navigated the change from the I7 to the IV7 chord during the blues progression in ‘Bloomdido’, and integrated them into a new melodic line over a I-IV vamp. 

I originally conceived Blue Mercy Line to be played at the tempo of ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’, and I performed it that way several times.  After my friend bassist Paul Rogalski (of the band Mojomama) posted a bass-and-drum groove on Facebook in the key of A, I realized ‘Blue Mercy’ could also work at this tempo, which is similar the tempo of ‘Another Door’.  The recording posted below features Rogalski’s virtuosic popping and slapping on electric bass. 

Recently I’ve been lucky to have connected with the great pianist and composer Bertha Hope.  She has recorded three stunning albums as a leader, ‘In Search of Hope’ (1990) , ‘Elmo’s Fire’ (1991),  and ‘Nothin’ But Love’ (1999).   Her first husband was the legendary bop pianist Elmo Hope. Hope and his close friends Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell hung out and practiced so often together than they became known as ‘The Three Musketeers’, and while Hope is lesser known than Monk and Powell, his influence is continues to be heard in jazz today. Tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp dedicated a composition to him, and his music has been recorded by vocalist Roberta Gambarini as well as pianists Benny Green, Brad Mehldau and Tigran Hamasyan.  As I mention in my blog post Musical Neighbors, I consider both Elmo and Bertha Hope to be part of the ‘Three Musketeers Collective’ along with Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Mary Lou Williams.  Her second husband was the bassist Walter Booker, who plays bass on all of her albums; he died in 2006.  Since then, Ms. Hope has continued to perform and compose, including a recent concert of Elmo Hope’s music at the Jazz Museum in Harlem. 

I was also fortunate to have Bertha Hope work with my student jazz ensemble at UVM in an online coaching session this past spring. My group performed tunes by Ms. Hope including ‘Gone To See T’ (a tribute to Thelonious Monk), ‘Book’s Bok’ (which she mentioned includes her variation on the changes to Bobby Hebb’s ‘Sunny’, which I discuss in an earlier post) and Elmo Hope’s ‘De-Dah’. Here is a screen shot from the Q&A section of the workshop, taken while Bertha was in the process of answering a question by audience member Irene Choi, ‘What is jazz to you?’ As Irene remembers, Bertha’s answer began: ‘as Duke Ellington put it, ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing’. The picture captures some of the wonderful interaction in the workshop between the students’ inquisitiveness and Ms. Hope’s deep knowledge.

Before Ms. Hope worked with my combo, I transcribed her solo on the title tune from ‘In Search of Hope’, which she co-composed with Walter Booker.  I find it to be a great example of what George Colligan terms ‘hand-to-hand conversation’.  In an interview shortly before the workshop, I had the chance to ask Ms. Hope whether she thought carrying on a conversation between left-hand chordal comping and and right-hand melodic improvising.  Her answers, transcribed below from our conversation, are an elegant demonstration in words of concepts that her solo demonstrates in music, including breathing, listening and taking time to shape phrases deliberately. 

” [Pianist and educator] Ronnie Matthews said to me, ‘contrary to public belief, always let your right hand know what your left hand is doing’.  You know the old saying ‘don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing’? [Perhaps the original source of this saying is the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 3, verses 6 and 5: ‘But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.’]  Musically, that doesn’t work for the piano.  You have to always let one hand inform the other, so that they’re engaged in a conversation.  Sometimes there are blocked chords, you know, you play a chorus of locked hands, or a single line, and it’s kind of an internal conversation that you have with yourself, the two parts of the brain that are handling your fingers and all that information.  And I think that’s what individualizes people’s playing.  I don’t have any really hard and fast rules about it.”

I mentioned that a common challenge for developing and aspiring jazz pianists, particularly right-handed ones, is getting a conversation going between the left and right hands, because it is so easy for the right hand to take over.

Bertha continued,  “And part of that is because they have so much to say!  They’re so intense.  You have to stop and think about breathing when you talk to people.  While you’re listening, you’re breathing.  Even inside of your own conversation, your own delivery, you have to take a breath.  So breathing while you play, into your phrases, is a very important thing to try to get your students to manipulate while they’re learning how to improvise.  Breathe!  What is this next thing you want to say?  Are you delivering run-on sentences that don’t go anywhere?  Do you have something in mind about where you end and where you begin something else?  Are you just so intense about keeping your hands on the keyboard that you play something that doesn’t have any real meaning, that doesn’t satisfy you enough so you keep going, keep going, keep going?  So you have to stop and think about…just the way a singer has to stop and think about a meaningful breath so that the words have continuity.  The instrumentalist has to think the same way.”