BirdFeed

My exercise ‘Jody, Donna, Four Brothers and Koko’ is the second in a series of exercises including licks from ‘Donna Lee’ (the first, ‘Midnight Donna and Reets in Paris’ is in an earlier post.)  Besides ‘Donna Lee’, other sources I used for this exercise include Horace Silver’s The Jody Grind, Jimmy Giuffre’s Four Brothers, and Charlie Parker’s ‘Koko’ (one of his solos on the changes to ‘Cherokee’.)  My intent is to show how the voicings for dominant chords most commonly used by jazz pianists – i.e. those built ‘off the third’ or ‘off the seventh’ – are equally useful as both melodic fragments and as harmonic structures. The exercise uses a harmonic rhythm of one chord per bar, as in the first two bars of ‘jazz blues‘ progressions such as ‘Billie’s Bounce‘ and ‘Tenor Madness’.

Practicing the ‘Jody, Donna, etc.’ exercise will make more sense if you first practice a one bar pattern of seventh scales ascending or descending in eighth notes (i.e. seven up or seven down only) around the circle of ascending fifths/descending fourths in the RH with three note rootless voicings for dominant chords in the LH as shown in Degreg p. 87:

I would then suggest practicing the rootless voicings doubled in both hands (i.e. LH plays treble clef voicings from p. 87 while RH doubles an octave above.)  Once you can play doubled voicings at a moderate, steady tempo, you should be ready to move on to the ‘parallel patterns‘ exercise, where the RH plays patterns derived from the voicings that the LH is playing simultaneously.  Below the parallel patterns exercises I have shown the ways that the two patterns can be combined contrapuntally.  Below the exercise are some reflections on the circle of descending fifths, both in music history as a whole and in jazz tunes.

When the first keyboard instruments with a twelve-note chromatic scale were introduced around the beginning of the 14th century, they entered a world where years had twelve months and days were measured with a twelve-hour clock.  In addition to the number twelve being an important unit of measurement in this era, it also figured prominently in two major wisdom traditions: the Christian tradition, founded on the Gospels and their stories of Jesus’ twelve apostles, and the Zodiac signs, which divide the year up into twelve periods, each named after a different animal or mythical figure and each aligned with a constellation of stars or a planetary movement.  The recurrence of the number twelve in so many foundations of Western culture (including the twelve-bar blues) suggests that while it may occur naturally in some kinds of measurements, scientific, artistic and religious thinkers have also deliberately or subconsciously chosen it in some cases for its association with beauty, symmetry, and truth.

I believe an association between twelve and the pursuit of harmonic symmetry can be heard in C.P.E. Bach’s Solfeggietto, composed at a time in the 18th century when a debate was still raging between different approaches to tuning keyboard instruments.  The approaches to tuning that were prevalent at the time (such as ‘mean-tone temperament’) rendered some intervals and key signatures more consonant and others more dissonant, while a newer approach called ‘equal temperament’ allowed composers greater freedom to modulate through multiple keys within a single piece.  In Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground For the Great Minds of Western Civilization, Stuart Isacoff writes that C.P.E. Bach ‘wanted equal temperament but was confused about how to get it.’  The conclusion of Solfeggietto uses all twelve tones of the chromatic scale in the space of four measures, through a progression of five dominant seventh chords sequenced through the circle of descending fifths followed by a diminished seventh chord.  This passage, which may have tested the limits of a tuning where not all major keys were equally consonant, suggests that Bach’s interest in equal temperament may have been related to an interest in using wide-ranging modulations in his compositions.  C.P.E. Bach’s progressions and melodic shapes, and their relationship to the pop song structures on which bop players based their improvisations and compositions, caught the ear of Bud Powell, who made ‘Solfeggietto‘ the introduction to his remarkable hybrid piece Bud on Bach. The dominant cycle can also be heard in the Mazurka in G Minor Op. 67, No. 2 by Chopin.  Among the bop players who used Chopin’s melodic ideas in their improvising was Charlie Parker, whose use of the Military Polonaise and the Minute Waltz is documented on a fascinating webpage devoted to Bird’s use of quotes.

In many jazz standards from the swing and bop eras, dominant seventh chords moving through the circle of fifths are used in extended harmonic rhythms.  The bridges of ‘Stompin’ At the Savoy’ and ‘I Got Rhythm’ move through a four-chord sequence along the circle of fifths, spending two measures on each chord. and the first half of the progression in ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ moves through a three-chord sequence in the dominant cycle, spending four measures on each chord before resolving to the I chord.  In addition to being often-played jazz standards, the chord progressions of these tunes have been used as the basis for many jazz compositions: Charlie Parker based his  ‘Relaxin’ With Lee’ on ‘Stompin’, and was one of many jazz players to base multiple tunes, including his ‘Anthropology (a.k.a. Thrivin’ On A Riff)’ on the chord progression from ‘I Got Rhythm’.  Monk’s ‘Bright Mississippi’, J.J. Johnson’s ‘Teapot’ and Jackie McLean’s ‘Dig’ are based on ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’.

In contrast to the relatively expansive use that Tin Pan Alley and swing-era composers made of the dominant cycle, composers in the bop era and afterwards used dominant cycles with a more accelerated harmonic rhythm (two beats per change) to reharmonize standard progressions; Thelonious Monk’s ‘Humph’ is a dominant cycle reharmonization of ‘I Got Rhythm’; and the heads of Barry Harris’ ‘Save Some For Later’ and Benny Golson’s ‘Blues March’ use the dominant cycle to reharmonize different phrases of the twelve bar blues progression.  Monk’s tune ‘Skippy‘ is based on his dominant cycle reharmonization of ‘Tea for Two’ (although the ‘Tea for Two’ reharm was not recorded until a number of years after ‘Skippy’).

Jazz composers also have used the dominant cycle as a building block of new progressions, rather than just as a means of reharmonizing existing ones.  Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn deftly interpolated the dominant cycle into a number of ballads, using the tritone substitution on ‘Prelude to A Kiss‘ and using altered dominants on ‘A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing’, and Duke Jordan based the bridge of his tune ‘Jordu’ on the dominant cycle.  (Two lesser known tunes, John Lewis‘ ‘Three Windows‘ and Vince Guaraldi’s ‘Like A Mighty Rose’, also make interesting use of the dominant cycle in their bridges.)  Dominant 7th chords moving through the circle of descending fifths also are used in Blossom Dearie’s intro to her version of ‘I Hear Music’ (which moves all the way around the circle).  McCoy Tyner’s ending to ‘The Days of Wine and Roses‘ and Hank Jones‘ ending to ‘When There is Love‘ (from his album of the same name with Abbey Lincoln) move halfway around the circle.  (Cycles of this type have also found their way into a number of keyboard-driven rock tunes.  In The Doors’ tune ‘Light My Fire‘, Ray Manzarek’s intro includes a sequence of major chords moving around the circle of fifths and far afield of the  tonic key of the chorus (D) .  In some live versions of his tune ‘Such A Night’, Dr. John includes a dominant cycle in his solo piano break.)

As always, I welcome all kinds of comments on this blog entry, but I would be particularly interested in hearing about other culturally significant uses of the number twelve, or in other examples of pieces that include dominant-cycle modulation.  I encourage musicians reading this to try composing a twelve-bar blues melody following the Barry Harris scale outline discussed in an earlier post and incorporating some of the dominant seventh chord patterns from this post.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to friend and piano tuner Justin Rose for the suggestion of Temperament, to Will Burhans for introducing me to ‘Like A Mighty Rose’, to Bruce Sklar for assigning me ‘Donna Lee’ many years ago in a lesson, and to Tom McClung for introducing me to ‘Skippy‘ and its relationship to ‘Tea for Two’.

The word ‘virus’ is most often associated with negative and harmful microbes, from actual diseases like pneumonia and H1N1 to the fictional virus that kills off most of the Earth’s population in the recent Planet of the Apes movies.  The study of ‘good viruses’, however, is also a growing trend in health research, and has moved from identifying individual microbes with positive effects to building a concept of the ‘microbiome’ within each human being, a combination of bacteria in our gut that keeps us healthy.  Those who study how ‘good bacteria‘ help to preserve the body might find a metaphor to support their theories by looking at how the vitality of musical traditions and musical communities is often preserved by ‘viral‘ melodic and rhythmic ideas that find their way into multiple songs produced in the same time period.  What follow are a few examples of how a particular ‘viral rhythm’, a mutated version of a fundamental rhythm from south of the equator, has had a presence in three different eras of American music.

The tune ‘Hello My Baby’ is probably better known today than any other song published in 1899.  Whether it is being belted out by a frog in a Warner Brothers cartoon or Phish, it is immediately recognizable from the repeated syncopation that opens the refrain.

The song originally began not with this catchy syncopation but with a long intro verse that can be seen in the original sheet music.  A few telltale lyrics in the intro verse (‘some other coon will win her and my game is lost’) show that ‘Hello My Baby’ was originally meant to be an entry in the ‘coon song‘ genre, in which songwriters of the late 19th and early 20th century combined syncopated music with lyrics featuring stereotyped African-American characters.  Judging from most versions of the tune currently in circulation, the intro verse and the dialect version of the title (‘Hello! Ma Baby’) – what one might call the harmful part of the virus – have long since been abandoned.  I would argue that while the intention to remove prejudicial overtones is certainly one of the motivations for these alterations, there is also a solid musical reason: the intro verse has almost none of the syncopation that makes the refrain so memorable.

That same memorable syncopation also shows up in the lesser-known piano rag ‘Smoky Mokes‘ by Abe Holzman, published the same year.  In an early example of how the ‘good bacteria’ in the ‘Hello My Baby’ virus was communicated, Holzman in the opening strain of ‘Smoky Mokes’ appears to cleverly graft the entire melodic rhythm from the refrain of ‘Hello My Baby‘ into his tune while substituting a different sequence of notes:

Both tunes can be seen in Denes Agay’s great collection The Joy Of Ragtime, which also features many of the best-known pieces by Scott Joplin (‘Maple Leaf Rag’, ‘The Sycamore’, and of course ‘The Entertainer’, a musical virus if there ever was one: since Marvin Hamlisch’s version on ‘The Sting‘ soundtrack, it has been covered by performers ranging from Milton Berle and the Muppets to Marcus Roberts, who turns in a seriously funky and innovative version on his album ‘The Joy of Joplin’, which is highly recommended for purchase.  A fine cover of Roberts’ arrangement by Matt Tabor can be heard on YouTube.)   Agay’s collection also includes ‘Pleasant Moments’, one of Joplin’s rare waltzes.  To a listener who has ‘Hello My Baby’ deep in their musical subconscious,  measures 9 and 10 in ‘Pleasant Moments’ can look and sound like a truncated, three-beat version of the rhythmic figure from that tune and ‘Smoky Mokes’ (and which I will call the ‘truncated habanera’):

 Some inspection of the South American tango tradition as represented in piano music, however, shows that both Joplin and ‘Hello My Baby‘ were borrowing this rhythm from a much older source.

The rhythm introduced in the first measure of the refrain in ‘Hello My Baby’, used relentlessly and obsessively throughout the song, and employed more subtly in a truncated version by Joplin, is in fact the habanera rhythm, a typical accompaniment figure in Argentinian tango music with roots in Cuban folk music going back to the 18th century.  As the habanera is more of an accompaniment rhythm than a melodic rhythm in tango, it can be seen in its basic form in the left hand of Ernesto Nazareth’s lovely slow ‘Tango Brasiliero’ called ‘Nove de Julho’ (an excerpt follows, but here are links to a complete recording and score):

  Nazareth uses a common elaboration of the pattern in his faster-paced tango ‘Garoto’ (recording, score):.

Nazareth, a Brazilian composer, wrote in a number of dance styles typical in his era; the ‘Tango Brasiliero‘ marking in ‘Nove de Julho‘ seems to refer to the slower, gentler pace of this piece, which contrasts with the faster pace of ‘Garoto’, a piece that features an elaboration of the habanera pattern typical in Argentinian tango.  After listening to and/or reading through ‘Garoto’, it is interesting to examine another Joplin waltz dated 1905, ‘Bethena’ (heard on the score to the film ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’), in which the truncated habanera hinted at in ‘Pleasant Moments’ can be heard even more clearly and repeatedly:

The mark of Joplin’s greatness as a composer can be seen in his juxtaposition of repeated rhythmic and melodic figures with a constantly evolving harmonic progression; where the repetition in ‘Hello My Baby‘ seems obsessive even within the confines of its sixteen-measure form, Joplin uses repetition of the same idea in ‘Bethena‘ to build undulating waves of tension and release that evolve consistently over a form more than twice as long.  (Sheet music for Bethena can be purchased here; Marcus Roberts’ recording of this tune on ‘The Joy of Joplin’ is also highly recommended.)

According to Scott Joplin biographer E.A. Berlin, Joplin claimed that composer Irving Berlin plagiarized the opening strain of his first hit song, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, from one of Joplin’s pieces, ‘A Real Slow Drag’ from his opera ‘Treemonisha’:

Joplin made the claim after Berlin, who worked for a publisher at the time, reviewed Joplin’s score in 1910, decided against publishing it, but proceeded to publish his own song with its tell-tale phrase the next year:

To me, the similarity of Berlin’s phrase to Joplin’s phrase shows that Berlin, far from being a simple plagiarist, was highly skilled at assimilating other composers’ ideas, and was operating with the same level of sophistication as Joplin when he incorporated the habanera pattern into his waltzes.  Once again, however, as with ‘Hello My Baby’, the harmful part of the ‘virus’ – in this case the disputed intro verse – was wisely removed by great communicators such as Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong in their versions of ‘Alexander’.  Fitzgerald and Armstrong may not have been aware of Joplin’s dispute with the intro, but they and their arrangers certainly recognized that the intro verse is less musically strong than the refrain with which the composer followed it.  (From a compositional standpoint it is interesting to note that although both Howard and Berlin’s creative impetus seems to have come from the instinct to imitate – Howard imitates the ‘coon song’ genre, Berlin imitates Joplin’s score – it was not the most culturally or musically imitative section that produced the strongest music.  The most memorable sections of both tunes came after a section mimicking a current trend, and the versions of these songs that have endured are those shorn of their original mimickry.  Joplin’s genius in ‘Bethena’ and ‘Pleasant Moments’, on the other hand, was to incorporate a germ of an idea from an external source and make it part of an utterly original, memorable and musically enduring whole.)

I believe Berlin’s skill at assimilation can also be heard in ‘Puttin’ On The Ritz’, a tune copyrighted in 1928 that uses the truncated habanera rhythm twice in its first four measures:

As the ‘Alexander’s’ story establishes that Berlin was a student of Joplin’s innovations, it seems at least possible that, even though the habanera was everywhere at the time, Berlin’s knowledge of this rhythm may have come from Joplin’s waltz.  More evidence that the truncated habanera rhythm was ‘going viral’ in the world of popular song around this time is in Duke Ellington’s 1932 tune ‘It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’ , which uses the rhythm four times in a row in the second phrase of (as well as many more times in the coda of the tune’s first recorded version):

Cole Porter used the truncated habanera three times in a row in the first phrase of the tune ‘Anything Goes’ (from the 1934 musical of the same name), (as well as five times in its bridge):

(Although I have arranged these examples and the ones that follow in chronological order, my point is not to prove conclusively that any one song directly influenced the other, but rather to illustrate how each tune takes the truncated habanera and uses it in a different way.  A number of these tunes are standard literature in the jazz tradition, and their uses of the truncated habanera are among the more sophisticated and technically challenging elements of the melodies for performers.  If one can grasp the commonality between these tunes, it can be an aid to mastering one of their complexities.)

It sounds to me like the truncated habanera also went viral in the bebop era of jazz, as it shows up in an ornamented form the melody of one of Charlie Parker’s best-known compositions, ‘Billie’s Bounce’ (first recorded in 1945).  Parker, like Berlin in ‘Puttin’ On The Ritz’, begins the truncated habanera on the fourth beat of his tune’s first measure, but unlike Berlin he repeats the pattern three times, although he replaces the pattern’s first note with a rest on the second and third repetitions.  

The same subtractive use of the pattern was also made by Sonny Rollins in his tune ‘Oleo’ (first recorded in 1954 for the Miles Davis album ‘Bags’ Groove’).  In the way the tune is most often notated and played, Rollins’ use of the truncated habanera is most noticeable in m. 1, 3, 4 and 6: 

On Bill Evans’ version of Oleo (from ‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’, recorded in 1958) Philly Joe Jones’ three-against-four hi-hat pattern in the second A makes the tune’s first two measures sound like two repetitions in a row of the truncated habanera, filling in the missing first note of the pattern for its first two repetitions, and making the listener hear two three-beat phrases:.

Thelonious Monk, in his tune ‘Rhythm-A-Ning’ (first recorded in 1957), begins with what has often been identified as a four-measure quote from the Mary Lou Williams composition ‘Walkin’ and Swingin’ (see 1:22 of the linked recording by the Vermont All State Jazz Ensemble for the phrase in question.)  Monk follows this phrase with a melodic phrase that uses the full four-beat habanera pattern (with an added pickup) in measure 5.  This is the pattern we heard in the melody ‘Hello My Baby’ and the left hand of ‘Garoto’.  In typical Monk fashion, this second semi-quoted element is then transformed by being stated on a different beat of the measure in bar 6.
(Monk investigates this process further in ‘Straight, No Chaser’, where a rhythmic figure introduced initially on the pickup to beat 1 in measure 1 is then begun on beats 2, 3 and 4 of various measures over course of the first eight measure phrase.)

I have discovered the connections I’m discussing here over years of playing jazz gigs, teaching piano lessons and improvisation classes, and directing pit orchestras, but my awareness of them was reawakened during a great performance I saw earlier this year by Arturo O’Farrill and The Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra at the Flynn Center.  One of the concert’s standout pieces was O’Farrill’s composition ‘On The Corner of Malecon and Bourbon’ from their recent album ‘The Offense of The Drum’.  In the YouTube video of this piece, after solos by O’Farrill on piano, Bobby Porcelli on alto sax (who references Cannonball Adderly’s ‘So What’ solo), Jim Seeley on trumpet (who references ‘West End Blues’ and ‘Struttin’ With Some Barbeque’ among other tunes),  Jason Marshall on baritone sax (who picks up and develops the ‘Struttin’ lick) and Gregg August on bass, the band settles into a section in which the accompaniment and melody are both strongly reminiscent of the opening strain of Scott Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag’. In both the YouTube video and the Burlington performance, O’Farrill mentioned in his spoken intro that the piece is about the common roots of jazz and Latin music, but in Burlington he also added a highly instructive piece of stagecraft.  In a tone of voice that conveyed believable honesty, O’Farrill claimed that he wasn’t too sure about the ending – a statement which, if he really meant it, would be shocking for someone of O’Farrill’s stature and virtuosity.   Although this seemed at first to be a sincere confession, it was actually a shrewd piece of acting that set the audience up for a bit that O’Farrill engages in during an unaccompanied piano solo in the middle of the piece.  The band drops out for what seems like a piano cadenza, and O’Farrill first plays in a ragtime piano style with a left hand stride pattern and syncopated melody, but he then slows down as though his mind is stuck on some detail of the music.  After an awkward pause, he turns the chart on his music rack upside down and plays an inverted version of the syncopated melody.  Here again he slows down and repeats a bar as though analyzing the syncopation, after which he turns the music right side up again and transforms the syncopated melody into one of its close musical relatives: the rhythmic pattern called montuno or guajeo which the piano plays son clave accompaniment style derived from Cuban folk music and common through mambo, salsa and Latin jazz contexts.  O’Farrill’s band responds by accompanying the montuno pattern with its typical rhythmic counterpoints in the percussion and bass parts, and the piece concludes in a smoking 2-3 son clave feel.

O’Farrill’s piece brilliantly illustrates that, although videos that ‘go viral‘ on the internet are a fairly recent phenomenon (such as the Pharell Williams tune ‘Happy’, where the original version was quickly followed with remakes by groups from the Miss USA contestants to a grade school class), in the intertwined evolution of tango, ragtime, jazz and popular song, rhythms ‘went viral’ for many decades before the internet with only the ears, eyes and memories of composers to communicate them.  Having recently fought off pnuemonia myself, I certainly wouldn’t wish a medical virus on anyone.  However, as the word ‘viral’ has taken on a positive meaning in the world of the internet, perhaps someday as studies of medicine and music continue to intertwine, ‘viral’ can take on a positive meaning in the study of music, as a way of explaining the sometimes peculiar and always fascinating ways that musical ideas are leaked and communicated between cultures and eras.

Ian Crane, one of my piano students who is also a student at UVM College of Medicine, wrote an email  response to an earlier version of this blog which confirms my sense that the ‘good virus’ metaphor works to illustrate how indirect influence in music can be just as powerful as direct influence.  Ian explains it better than I could, so I’ll give him the last word: “I think one way in which viruses work  similar to musical ideas is the ‘lysogenic life cycle’. Certain viruses actually travel in between cells and incorporate their genetic code (which is all a virus really is: a traveling piece of DNA or RNA) into the genetic code of a cell. There they lie dormant and are replicated with that cell’s DNA, from that point on effectively changing the genetic code of that cell and all of its progeny…I think music is really similar to this aspect of the viral life cycle in the sense that it can permanently change our musical code, or our set of musical ideas, becoming a part of us.”

This post starts with an exercise showing how typical jazz piano chord voicings for the one-bar ii-V progression are also expressed ‘horizontally’ in melodic patterns from classic bebop lines.   Below the exercise are some thoughts on how the use of melodic patterns based on chord voicings in bebop lines seems related to the interest of many great jazz players in respellings of words (such as backwards spellings and anagrams), particularly in their tune titles.

The exercise below is based on licks which I associate with classic bop lines; however, as the links in this paragraph show, the usefulness of these licks can be seen in how widely they were borrowed, and continue to be borrowed, in the jazz community.   The lick sequenced in m. 1-8 is based on measure 3 of Thelonious Monk’s Round Midnight.  (This lick can also be heard in the intro to the 1954 pop hit ‘Mr. Sandman’, and in expanded versions on the bridge of John Coltrane’s ’26-2′ and near the beginning of Esperanza Spalding’s ‘Earth to Heaven’.)  The lick in m. 9-16 is from the third to last bar of ‘Donna Lee’ (an example of a ‘convex’ one-bar ii-V pattern), which I see as based on an ‘off the 3rd’ voicing of the B flat minor 7th chord  (or what Phil Degreg calls the ‘B voicing’.)   Measures 17 to 24 show a pattern which appears in the Benny Harris tune ‘Reets and I’, played by Bud Powell on ‘The Amazing Bud Powell Volume 2.’  (Similar but more diatonic versions of the lick appear in two earlier tunes, Powell’s  Strictly Confidential and in the bridge of Jimmy Giuffre’s Four Brothers.)  Measures 25 to 30 show a pattern adapted from the John Lewis tune ‘Afternoon in Paris’.  (This tune was first recorded by Lewis with Sonny Stitt and J.J. Johnson in 1949, and the lick seems to have originated from an earlier tune, Charlie Parker’s Marmaduke, which Parker recorded with Lewis on piano.)  Each lick is transposed down by whole steps through six keys.   The title of the exercise, ‘Midnight Donna and Reets in Paris’, is a way to remember the order of the licks in the exercise.

This exercise can also be played as a two-part canon by two hands on the piano (two hands of a single player, or two players each playing one hand of a duet), or by any pair of instruments or voices, particularly those which include one of higher register and one of lower register.  The canon is written for the higher instrument to start and the lower instrument to follow, but as I mention in the instructions on the sheet, the parts can also be reversed so that the lower instrument starts.  Pianists who find it challenging to coordinate right hand lines and left hand chords should concentrate on the first exercise, as this is a more basic jazz piano skill.   The second exercise may be more appropriate for pianists with some experience at other contrapuntal pieces, such as J.S. Bach’s two-part inventions and Charlie Parker’s ‘Ah-Leu-Cha’ and ‘Chasin’ The Bird’.  Composed contrapuntal lines like these Parker heads, and contrapuntal improvisation such as that heard near the end of Louis Armstrong’s rendition of ‘When The Red, Red Robin’ is a subgenre within jazz, much less common than the typical situation of a single melodic line with chordal accompaniment .  A more recent development is jazz pianists who improvise two contrapuntal lines, one in each hand, such as in Brad Mehldau’s rendition of ‘Martha My Dear’ and Fred Hersch’s version of ‘Whisper Not’ from his solo album ‘Open Book’.

In the 2010 thriller movie ‘Shutter Island’, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Edward Daniels, a U.S. Marshal who is plagued by nightmares about an arsonist named Andrew Laeddis,  Later in the movie, it is revealed that the names ‘Edward Daniels‘ and  ‘Andrew Leaddis‘ are anagrams of each other, created by a mysterious mastermind.  In other words, the two proper name/surname pairs share the same group of letters, and one was created by rearranging the letters of the other.  (To find out which name came first, watch the movie, or in a pinch, read the Wikipedia entry.) Anagrams were a common interest among at least three great jazz piano masterminds: Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver and Bill Evans.

According to Robin D.G. Kelley’s biography  ‘Thelonious Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original’, the title of the tune ‘Eronel’, usually attributed to Monk, is a reverse spelling of ‘Lenore’, the one-time girlfriend of one of the tune’s principal authors, the pianist Sadik Hakim.  (By Kelley’s account, Hakim wrote the melody with Idrees Sulieman and Monk later added some characteristic touches.)  Kelley also mentions Monk had a black onyx ring inscribed with the word ‘MONK’, which he liked to point out could be read as ‘KNOW’ when viewed upside down.  Horace Silver titled one of his compositions, ‘Ecaroh’, with a reverse spelling of his name, and also used the same word to name his publishing company.  Bill Evans named two modal tunes with anagrams of friends’ names: ‘Re: Person I Knew’ (Orrin Keepnews) and ‘N.Y.C.’s No Lark’ (an elegy for Sonny Clark).  Sonny Rollins encoded the word ‘Nigeria’ by spelling it backwards in the title of his composition Airegin, and Barry Harris created an African-sounding word by spelling Art Tatum’s name backwards in the title of ‘Mutattra’ (from Listen To Barry Harris.)  Wordplay also continues to be a common form of humor among rank-and-file working jazz musicians (sometimes called ‘club date musicians’); it is not uncommon for ‘In A Sentimental Mood‘ to be referred to as ‘In A Semi-Mental Mood’.

It is only natural that these player/composers would title their songs with coded words, given that the musical language in which they composed and improvised, called ‘Bebop’ after the Dizzy Gillespie tune of the same name, was originally conceived as a kind of musical code, a private language which could only be spoken by those in the know.  In bebop, often the tunes themselves were musical puzzles, concentration exercises designed to separate the hip from the square.  In his biography Wail: the Life of Bud Powell, Peter Pullman notes that at Minton’s Playhouse, one of the venues where bebop was developed, the tune ‘Epistrophy’ (another Monk collaboration, this time with Kenny Clarke and Charlie Christian) ‘was one of the pieces used to keep the uninitiated off the bandstand’. (In this tune, Monk works a mind-bending variation on the 32 bar song form. Where most tunes of this length open with two identical, similar or contrasting eight-bar phrases, the first 16 measures of Epistrophy contain four-bar phrases arranged palindromically – A,B,B,A – which forces the improviser to ascend and descend a symmetrical harmonic ‘hill’ at the beginning of each chorus before they can reach the more traditional bridge and last A.) There is a parallel between the way that bop players (or those influenced by bop) were sometimes inclined to build song titles out of alternate spellings of words and the way that they  often gave their melodic lines a cryptic aspect by using multiple ‘spellings’ or arpeggiations of chords.  In a number of Monk tunes, a short melodic figure is immediately followed by an altered repetition of it.  ‘Well You Needn’t’ opens with an ascending arpeggio of F major immediately followed by a descending one, and ‘Four In One’ opens with an ascending major blues scale followed by a descending one that comes within two notes of being an exact retrograde:                                                                                

A fun variant on these kinds of opposite-motion melodic lines are mirror exercises on piano, which have been discussed both by Harold Danko in a Keyboard Magazine column and Chick Corea in a recent online video ‘lesson’.  Chick’s video reminded me of how I discovered at one point that both Monk’s ‘Straight No Chaser’ and Tadd Dameron’s ‘Hot House’ can be harmonized with mirror (i.e. inverted) counterpoint.  (Other examples of ‘found counterpoint’ – countermelodies derived from an altered version of the original tune – include the Modern Jazz Quartet’s canonic version of ‘Bags’ Groove’, and Fred Hersch’s  canonic arrangement of ‘Bemsha Swing’;these led me to discover that the Dizzy Gillespie tune ‘Bebop’ also works as a canon.) In contrast to the immediate reversals and respellings in the Monk tunes cited above, Jimmy Giuffre’s ‘Four Brothers’ and John Lewis’ ‘Afternoon in Paris’ both feature different spellings of the same chord within their first eight measures.  This abundance of arpeggiation is necessary because chords lasting only two beats occur frequently in these tunes, and in bebop, arpeggiation is a common strategy for melodically navigating two-beat chord changes. Most of the two beat changes in ‘Four Brothers’ and ‘Afternoon In Paris’ belong to one-bar major ii-V progressions.  A major ii-V progression is defined by two important characteristics: a minor 7th chord is followed by a dominant 7th chord, and there is the interval of an ascending fourth between the roots of the two chords.  In the Barry Harris system, the two chords in the one bar major ii-V progression (i.e. one where each chord lasts two beats) can be outlined with a single ascending seventh scale (using the ‘seven up’ pattern) or a single descending seventh scale (using the ‘seven down’ pattern).                                                            Barry Harris’ scalar approach to the ii-V can be contrasted with the more intervallic, arpeggiated approach to the one-bar ii-V progression in the melody to ‘Four Brothers’, which navigates the one-bar major ii-V with a melodic pattern that might be called the opposite-motion arpeggio.  The A section begins with what could be called a ‘convex’ ii-V pattern (an ascending arpeggio of a ii chord voicing countered with a descending arpeggio of the V); and the bridge includes a ‘concave’ shape.                                                                    

The one bar minor ii-V progression shares some of the same characteristics as the major ii-V, with two alterations: the minor 7th chord is now a minor 7 flat five (a.k.a. half diminished) chord, and the dominant chord has at least one alteration, a lowered ninth (i.e. ‘flat nine’), sometimes accompanied by or replaced by other alterations including sharp five.  Barry Harris‘ approach to the one bar minor ii-V progression is to apply the seventh scale from a major third below the root of the half-diminished ii chord, either with the ‘seven up’ pattern, or the ‘seven down’ pattern.  With the ‘seven down’ pattern, the last note in the scale is raised a half step to form what I refer to in another blog post as the ‘seven down to the third’ scale.                                                                                                             This seemingly abstract approach to the minor ii-V is consistent with the many accounts of Monk’s description of the half diminished chord: according to Kelley, he always called the first chord in the introduction to ‘Round Midnight’ ‘C minor sixth with A in the bass’ rather than ‘A minor seven flat five’.  In this context, Harris is taking the same approach to the ‘minor sixth’ here as he takes to the minor 7th chord in the major ii-V.

Charlie Parker recorded a number of solos on the chord progression to ‘What Is This Thing Called Love’.   On two of these performances, a 1952 studio version of ‘What Is This Thing’ with a big band and a live 1953 version of ‘Hot House’ (a Tadd Dameron tune which uses the same changes), Parker takes two different solos, but he can be heard working with some of the same material in both.  I would suggest that these two performances are different stages of a work that was constantly in progress, although not necessarily progressing in a linear way toward a single ideal of perfection.  Billy Taylor’s various versions of his tune I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free, discussed in another post, are another example of this kind of process.   (The tradition of revising one’s own solo is perhaps a modern extension of the older jazz tradition of revising a solo by another player which I explored in my post ‘Oh, Play That Thing!’.  So far as I know, although Parker studied the solos of Lester Young, he never performed any of them.) The more I listen to these solos, the more I think Parker was on a journey of ceaseless exploration rather than a quest for some kind of musical mountaintop, and so the most interesting question is not ‘which solo was better?’, but ‘how did Parker’s musical journey evolve over the course of these two solos?’.  When I compare the two versions I am fascinated by how Parker used a number of the same concepts and patterns in both of them, and yet never sounded repetitive.   (This reminds me that while playing a Bird transcription accurately can sound good, it is not in his spirit of constant creativity.)

One of the licks that Parker uses in both these solos is what I call the ‘seven down to the third’ scale.  This name comes from the scale approach that Barry Harris teaches to the minor ii-V progression.  As shown below, the minor ii-V progression has the same ascending-fourth/descending fifth root motion as the major ii-V progressions discussed in the last post, but the ii chord is a minor 7 flat five (rather than simply a minor seventh) and the V chord, in simplest version of the progression, is a dominant seven flat nine chord (rather than simply a dominant).  Barry’s approach to the minor ii-V, like many of his other teaching concepts, is based on the ‘seventh scale’ (a.k.a. the mixolydian scale).  Rather than assigning two different scales to the two chords of the minor ii-V, as many improvisation methods do, Barry uses a ‘seven up and down’ pattern with a seventh scale starting a major third below the root of the ii chord (or a minor third above the root of the V chord).

This scale choice has multiple benefits: for one, it is a pitch collection which is consonant with the m7b5 chord but avoids accenting its root.  Also, when the ‘seven down’ half of the scale is ended on the note a half step above the scale’s root, it outlines  a fully diminished chord that functions as a rootless voicing of the V chord.

In my class we call this scale ‘E flat 7 up and down to the 3rd of C’.  Building off of this admittedly lengthy name, I call the second half of this scale the ‘7 down to the 3rd’ scale.  (In my class, we practice minor ii-V-i patterns in which this descending scale is preceded by patterns that use what we call the ‘locrian pentascale’, which can be thought of as the third to the seventh degrees of the seventh scale from a major third below the root, or scale steps seven through four of the major scale beginning a half step above the root.  These patterns can be heard on the first phrase of each A section in this scale outline of ‘What Is This Thing Called Love’.

Parker uses the ‘seven down to the 3rd’ scale in both his ‘What Is This’ and ‘Hot House’ solos to outline the C7b9 chord in measure 10, but where the 1952 solo stretches the scale over the course of two measures, the 1953 solo flies through it at the end of a fast series of 16th notes.  Where the ’52 solo is more shorter and more playable, the ’53 solo is more virtuosic.  The later solo goes on longer, but is more frenetic, as though Parker feels that he’s running out of time.  In the transcription below, I’ve placed Parker’s two solos in two adjacent staves to highlight the way he reuses no less than five melodic ideas (the one mentioned above and those mentioned below the transcription) and yet ends up with two completely different solos.  (A side note: The more I look at Parker’s composed and improvised melodic lines from this contrapuntal view, the more I notice him consciously or subconsciously creating a countermelody to an earlier line on the same changes, either one of his own compositions or a popular song.  Look, for instance, at how the later solo counters the melodic motion of the earlier one in mm. 3, 7-8 and 14-15.)

In the ’53 solo, Parker begins the first A with the same four-note motive that he used in the last A in the earlier solo (m. 25), which gives the impression that he is picking up where he left in ’52, almost as though no time had elapsed.  The second phrase of the ’53 solo (m.3) also uses a phrase from the ’52 solo, this time moving a lick originally used in the second A (at beat 4 of m. 11) into the first A section.  Both solos use the same five-note motive on both the Ab7 and G7 chords at the end of the bridge, but enclose them in different phrases and place them at different points in the bar.  Measure 26 is the only time both solos use the same lick at the same time, a quote from the Bizet opera ‘Carmen’.

I first heard of Barry Harris from Yusef Lateef, whose improvisation class I took at Hampshire College in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.  On the first day of class, Yusef identified himself as one of Barry’s students by saying something like: ‘I’m just going to show you what Barry Harris showed me’.  Since then, I’ve sought out Barry’s playing and teaching more and more over the years and found him a perennial source of musical wisdom.

As with the work of other bop masters, I’ve found that I can return to Barry’s recordings over and over and learn something new each time.  I spent a while in the early 2000s transcribing the great tunes and arrangements from Barry’s album Luminescence, and over the last five years or so I have been I checking out At the Jazz Workshop.  Released a year after Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue brought the extended, floating harmonies pioneered by Ahmad Jamal and Bill Evans to a mass audience,  At The Jazz Workshop pays no heed to the modal style but rather reflects Harris’ devotion to the more frequently modulating, obstacle-course harmonies of the bebop period.   The album demonstrates how Harris was continuing to successfully evolve the melodic language of bebop, and the bebop concept of group interaction, at a time when many players had started to explore other sources of melodic invention and other concepts of ensemble playing. It is also a great example of how mid-20th century jazz repertoire created variety through a combination of popular tunes from the first half of the century (Don’t Blame Me, Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby), bop standards (Moose The Mooche, Woody N’You), and the blues (Barry’s original Morning Coffee).

At the Jazz Workshop is not built on arrangements as detailed as those of the Ahmad Jamal trio of the same era, nor does it go in the direction of the greater freedom for rhythm section players pioneered in the John Coltrane and Bill Evans group of that era; it is built instead on the model of the Bud Powell trios.  In this format, the focus is on piano improvisation, with bass solos and trading between piano and drums used regularly to vary the return to the head statement.  This format requires a rhythm section which, like any great pair of comedians or policemen, can keep a relentless pace without rushing and can respond immediately to sudden developments.  Sam Jones and Louis Hayes, already veterans by the time of this album, achieve the same kind of tenacious unity as Tommy Potter and Roy Haynes, or Curly Russell and Max Roach, the two rhythm sections on The Amazing Bud Powell Volume One.

At The Jazz Workshop contains great examples of a number of important improvisational concepts, among them Barry’s approach to the minor ii-V progression.  Barry can be heard using the ‘seven down to the third’ scale in a couple of places on  At The Jazz Workshop.  In the last A section on the third chorus of his Woody N’You solo, he navigates all three of the minor ii-V progressions with this scale.  As the whole chorus is a great model of left hand-right hand conversation on a tune with an active harmonic rhythm, I have included my transcription of the whole chorus here.

In his solo on take 2 of ‘Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby’ from At The Jazz Workshop, Harris repeatedly uses a phrase ending in the ‘seven down to the third of’ scale to navigate the recurring Gm7b5-C7b9 change.  Like Parker in the two solos above, Harris makes this motive sound different each time he recycles it by giving it a different rhythmic placement each time.  Here is the phrase as it would apply to a two bar minor ii-V.  (Harris uses this lick by double timing it, i.e., playing it in 16th notes over a single bar near the end of the phrase that starts at 1:20 on the recording.)

I encourage readers to leave a comment of any kind, but I particularly encourage comments mentioning (and perhaps including a link to) a favorite improvised solo on a tune involving minor ii-V or ii-V-i progressions, or examples of a lick being creatively re-used by a improviser, either within one solo or across multiple solos.

In a recent appearance on the NPR quiz show ‘Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, the actor Kevin Bacon was asked how he felt about ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’, a game which was invented by college students in the 1990s inspired by Bacon’s seeming omnipresence in movies of that era.  Bacon told Peter Sagal, the host of ‘Wait, Wait’, that he was initially ‘horrified’ to learn of the game.  In its simplest form, the game allows one movie buff to challenge another to start with any combination of a film and an actor, move to another film which shares at least one actor with the first film, and continue the sequence until they find the shortest possible path to a film involving Bacon.  Bacon said of his initial reaction, ‘I really thought it was a joke at my expense. I mean, I thought they were saying, can you believe that this lightweight can be connected in six degrees to Laurence Olivier?… And so I kind of thought well, I’m going to kind of become a laughingstock. And then I went onto a television show, and I met these young guys, and they were real fans. It wasn’t something that they had devised to, you know, bring my career down… And so then I just kind of said, well, I guess I’ve got to embrace it.’

Although webpages like The Oracle of Bacon cloak the game in mock-seriousness, to anyone familiar with Hollywood films from the 1980’s to the present, it is a testament to how Bacon’s willingness to shift between lead and supporting roles has made him a truly influential artist.  As even Bacon’s Wikipedia page shows, his career and personal life has not been without ups and downs, including roles in forgettable comedy and horror films and some unfortunate involvement with Bernie Madoff, but the enduring popularity of the ‘Six Degrees’ game shows how the flexibility and adaptability of his acting, combined with plenty of genuine talent, have often helped him rise above adverse conditions.

Hearing Bacon’s interview on ‘Wait Wait’ made me realize that I am sometimes feel as though I am living out a similar game called ‘Six Degrees of Bud Powell’, in which I am frequently reminded of the influence of Bud Powell both on my own musical development and on the development of jazz in general.  Two of the most important items in my jazz record collection as a teenager were The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume Two and a compilation (which sadly seems to have gone out of print) called ‘The Best of Blue Note’, which included ‘Un Poco Loco’ from The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume One as well as a Miles Davis rendition of ‘Tempus Fugit’.  (Both were presents from my forward-looking brother.)  I went on to include ‘Un Poco Loco’ (both a transcription of the solo and a performance of the tune) in my final project at Hampshire College, and I included my arrangement of ‘Tempus Fugit’ (based on the Bud Powell version) as part of a classical recital focused on fugues that I gave during my student years at the University of Vermont.  I’ve also returned to both these tunes on gigs of my own, as well as in my work with student groups.  Both of these tunes, which are among the more advanced and challenging of Bud Powell’s compositions, are available in the Hal Leonard volume ‘The Bud Powell Collection’.  This book includes transcriptions of Powell’s solos on these tunes; both solos are whole worlds of melodic invention and variation unto themselves, and I hope to deal with them more in depth in another post.

In 2010 I played a concert with my trio called ‘Tempus Fugue-it: Celebrating Bud Powell’ which included, in addition to the tunes mentioned above, Powell’s classic tune ‘Celia’ (named after his daughter).   I also included two tunes by great jazz composers which pay tribute to Powell.  Chick Corea’s tune ‘Bud Powell’ has a number of connections with the phrasing and structure of ‘Celia’; the first eight measures of both tunes have similar phrase structure and a similar melodic arc, and both tunes have bridges that move to minor keys.   (The Corea tune also uses what sounds like a direct quote from Tadd Dameron’s ‘The Scene Is Clean’.) The concert also included Herbie Hancock’s tune ‘Still Time’ from the soundtrack to the film ‘Round Midnight’.  As Hancock explained on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, the tune is based on the chord progression of Powell’s ballad ‘Time Waits’ and has a melody which contrapuntally complements the original melody.      (This same compositional technique – writing a countermelody which complements an existing tune but is not intended to be performed with it – seems also to have been used in at least two tunes attributed to Charlie Parker, ‘Ornithology’ and ‘Donna Lee’, both of which work well as countermelodies to the tunes they are based on, ‘How High The Moon’ and ‘Indiana’.) This, however, only explains the direct influence of Bud Powell on my life and work; more recently, his influence has also popped up in other more mysterious and surprising ways.

In 2011 I traveled to Florida to perform with Mike Gordon at the Allman Brothers’ Wanee Festival.  While I was there I got to hear the Tedeschi Trucks Band play the Billy Taylor civil rights anthem ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free’.  This performance truly ‘took me to church’, and led me to investigate Dr. Taylor’s many recordings of the tune.  One of the most powerful versions I’ve found, which I worked on a transcription of with my students Jacob Ungerleider and Martin Chandler, was on a video that is apparently no longer available.  I have posted the audio of it here. While Nina Simone’s versions of the tune, particularly  a live Montreux version with an intro that showcases her stride playing, powerfully display the lyrics of ‘I Wish I Knew How’ and their poetic evocation of the hunger for justice and freedom, Taylor’s solos on his instrumental versions of the tune to make a powerful case for the relevance of bebop melodic concepts to the backbeat-based ‘soul jazz’ style in which the tune is cast.  In the context of the themes that the song’s title and lyrics address, this statement takes on political significance.  Taylor’s solos on his various versions, while they are all different, follow a similar evolution of ideas, which gives them something in common with Louis Armstrong’s Dippermouth Blues solo (discussed in the last post), a three-chorus sequence that Armstrong evolved throughout his career.  The general musical outline that the solos follow seem to me to illustrate a spiritual progression, moving through gospel and blues approaches (which, in the context of Taylor’s solo, means improvising within a more limited range of one or two scales, contrasting the constantly moving chord progression with a more static melodic approach) and ending up with the bebop concept of ‘making the changes’, in other words, improvising a melody based a the harmonic progression.  This might also be described in modern terms as ‘responding in real time to a series of continuously evolving changes’.

Through each of these solos we can hear Taylor moving from a blues approach to improvising, which in this context is a way of creating melody largely independent from and even resistant to harmonic change, to a bebop approach, where a more intense and energetic melodic line results from a being more aware of and responsive to the changes in the chord progression.  Dick Dallas’ lyrics to the tune move from describing the reality of oppression (‘I wish I could break all the chains binding me’) and the almost insurmountable challenge of communicating one’s perspective (‘I wish I could say all I’m longing to say…I wish you could know how it feels to be me…’) to a vision of a more just and honest world (‘I wish I could be like a bird in the sky…then I’d sing cause I know how it feels to be free’).  In a similar way, Taylor’s solos make a musical journey from the blues approach to improvisation, which seems to parallel the struggle described in the opening verses of the song, to the bebop approach, which Taylor seems to associate with the vision of freedom, as it always occupies the concluding section of the song where the more visionary verses are sung.  In the version I linked to above, the double-time chorus where he employs bop language directly references the altered rhythm changes tune ‘Bud’s Bubble’ (aka Crazeology).   There is a potent resonance in Taylor’s reference to Powell at this high point in his musical sermon; as Pullman’s biography abundantly documents, Powell struggled against many forms of oppression throughout his life, not only the racial discrimination that was so blatant in the mid-twentieth century, but also the lack of cultural and institutional understanding at that time for people with mental illnesses.   (Pullman documents that Powell lost a significant amount of his creativity to the extensive and brutal electroshock therapy which he was subjected to, but also benefited from the assistance of more independently minded psychiatrists who intervened on his behalf.)  Another direct quote of a Powell tune occurs in Horace Silver’s solo on ‘Silver’s Serenade’, where Silver first disguises and then reveals the theme from Powell’s ‘Dance Of The Infidels’.  (My transcription of this solo appears in an earlier post.)

Another performance which ‘took me to church’ was Bobby McFerrin’s performance at the 2013 Discover Jazz Festival, during which he was playing music from his recent CD ‘spirityouall’ (a creative transformation of the word ‘spiritual’).  McFerrin’s performance, including spellbinding renditions of ‘Glory’ and ‘I Shall Be Released’, was one of the quietest I have ever heard by a five piece, partly electric ensemble.  The quiet dynamic allowed McFerrin to take full advantage of his considerable gifts at listening to and responding to sounds of all kinds.  (At one point, in response to a fleeting bit of microphone feedback, McFerrin improvised a completely believeable snatch of operatic soprano melody – which, coming from the son of an opera singer, is simultaneously a joke and not a joke).  While looking through McFerrin’s discography, I realized he had a connection to Bud Powell early in his career: his first album includes an acapella vocal cover of the Powell tune ‘Hallucinations’, where McFerrin approximates the sound of Powell’s two hands through overdubbing his voice.

Most recently, my wife and I watched the animated film ‘Chico and Rita’ on the recommendation of a student.  Its plot combines a fictional story of  romance between a man and a woman in Havana and New York during the 1940s and the actual relationship that developed during that time period between Latin dance music and the bebop movement in jazz in both those locations.  In addition to including the Latin jazz standards such as ‘Tin Tin Deo’, the film also prominently features a rendition of  ‘Celia’ by the Cuban pianist Rolando Luna.

Powell’s signature tune ‘Bouncin’ With Bud’ (which, in a murky historical turn typical for bebop, is sometimes also titled ‘Bebop In Pastel’ and attributed to Sonny Stitt) has also received many different interpretations ranging from a more recent version by pianist Zaccai Curtis to a multi-generational version featuring Powell on piano with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers during the era when the horn lineup included Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone.  (‘Celia’ and ‘Hallucinations’ are both available in the Hal Leonard volume ‘Bud Powell Classics’ as well as the somewhat-harder-to-find ‘Mostly Bud, Original Voicings’ published by Gerard and Sarzin; the latter book also includes versions of ‘Tempus Fugit’ and ‘Bouncin’ with Bud’.)

In Michelle Mercer’s biography of Shorter, she tells the story of how Shorter received an almost mystical visitation in his hotel from Powell the night of the concert.  After knocking on Shorter’s door and walking silently into his room, Powell said, ‘Play me something’, and Shorter responded with a solo version of ‘Dance of The Infidels’.  “After he played,” Mercer writes, “Bud thanked him, stood up, and walked to the door.  He turned around and stared.  ‘Are you all right?‘ Wayne asked.  ‘Uh-huh, it’s all right’, Bud mumbled in response.”  Mercer quotes Powell’s daughter Celia (the namesake of the song), who interprets her father’s visit to Shorter as stemming from Powell’s need to assure himself that everything was ‘all right’ for the future of music, and that he could depend on Shorter to carry on and develop the jazz tradition.

Shorter’s actual visitation from Powell, brought on by the power of Shorter’s playing on Powell’s tunes, reminds me a little of the recurring visitations that Powell’s musical themes make on my musical consciousness.  Each time I recognize a Bud Powell theme in a performance, or even better, hear the unmistakeable sound of the master himself, it re-connects me to one of my strongest musical inspirations, and refreshes my energy for studying, practicing and performing music.  I can’t count the number of times that unmistakeable sound of Bud Powell on the radio has drawn and held my attention, in the house, the car, or once in a doctor’s office (where Bud’s version of There Will Never Be Another You kept me from leaving after my appointment one day.)  (I have to credit the internet station Calm Radio Jazz Piano, which features Bud frequently, for providing me with some of these epiphanies.)  I think that, just as Kevin Bacon’s adaptability has been a key factor in making him influential in the film world, the adaptability that Bud Powell displayed throughout his career, from his early recordings with Charlie Parker and J.J. Johnson, to his seminal trio work, to his late-career recordings with Dexter Gordon, Mingus and the Jazz Messengers, is closely related to what has made his ideas indestructible and a vital part of the musical language.  Have you ever noticed a musical theme, from a particular piece or player or composer, that keeps recurring over any period of time, maybe even just a week or a day, or perhaps (as in my case) most of your lifetime?  If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comment section.

While I encourage comments of any kind, I encourage readers to choose one of the Bud Powell compositions I refer to in the entry (‘Celia’, ‘Hallucinations’, ‘Un Poco Loco’, Bouncin’ With Bud’ or ‘Tempus Fugit’ – sometimes spelled ‘Tempus Fugue-It’) and write a response contrasting Powell’s original recording of the tune with a more recent interpretation of the tune.  There are recordings of ‘Celia’ by both Chick Corea and Bruce Hornsby among many others; ‘Hallucinations’ by both Chick and Bobby McFerrin, ‘Un Poco Loco’ by both Hornsby and Tito Puente, and ‘Bouncin’ with Bud’ by both Chick and Zaccai Curtis.  Searching the titles on iTunes will lead you to many other versions.  Consider some of the following questions in your contrasting of the two versions:

 – Does the newer version add any elements that were not present in the original, such as different instrumentation or new sections of the arrangement?

– Does the head statement in the newer version closely follow Powell’s original melody, or is there some reinterpretation?  If so, how is the melody reinterpreted?

– Does the newer version use the same chord changes the original, or is there some reharmonization, either in the head statement or the solo?

In a 2013 interview with Charlie Rose, Yankee pitcher and five time World Series champion Mariano Rivera was asked how he prepares to face a particularly difficult hitter:

Rose: Tell me about studying for a hitter.  How do you study a hitter?

Rivera: Oh, we have so much videos, so much reports…

Rose: and what do you get out of that video?

Rivera: For me, I just learn about the experience.  I watch the game, exactly the game that we’re playing.  If the guy’s hot, well, pay attention to the game…I’m seeing the game while I’m doing something to get ready.

Rivera’s use of the word ‘hot’ to describe a highly skilled hitter who he studies on video in preparation for a real-time confrontation reminds me of how jazz musicians use the same word to describe a highly creative improviser.  A ‘hot‘ player is someone bandleaders want to feature, who colleagues are eager to perform with, and who aspiring players  may want to study through recordings, as a way of assimilating their ideas.  Rivera’s description of using videos to prepare for a game sounds not unlike a practice ritual which is common for jazz players at many levels, the practice of learning recorded solos by master players, either by notating them or simply learning them by ear.  Perhaps the most famous account of one great jazz player learning from another is the story of Charlie Parker at an early point in his career studying the records of Lester Young.  Here is the story as told by the bassist Gene Ramey (quoted in Carl Woideck, Charlie Parker: His Life and Music): ‘In the summer of 1937, Bird underwent a radical change musically.  He got a job with a little band led by a singer…they played at country resorts in the mountains.  Charlie took with him all the Count Basie records with Lester Young solos on them and learned Lester cold, note for note…when he came back, only two or three months, later, the difference was unbelievable’.

Part of Parker’s mystique was that, rather than actually performing Lester Young’s solos, he incorporated older player’s concepts into an improvisational language all his own. However, as Charles Mingus relates in his essay ‘What Is A Jazz Composer?’, it was something of a tradition among the older players of the swing era for great recorded solos to be played note-for-note in live performances, sometimes by the players who had originated them.  Mingus communicates a level of respect for this tradition, even to the point of questioning younger players’ ability to ‘repeat anything at all’:

‘When I was a kid and Coleman Hawkins played a solo or Illinois Jacquet created [his tenor sax solo on] “Flyin’ Home,” they (and all the musicians) memorized their solos and played them back for the audience, because the audience had heard them on records. Today I question whether most musicians can even repeat their solos after they’ve played them once on record. In classical music, for example people go to hear Janos Starker play Kodaly. They don’t go to hear him improvise a Kodaly, they go to hear how he played it on record and how it was written. Jazz was at one time the same way. You played your ad lib solo, you created it, and if it was worthwhile, then you played it in front of the public again…Today, things are at the other extreme. Everything is supposed to be invented, the guys never repeat anything at all and probably couldn’t. They don’t even write down their own tunes, they just make them up as they sit on the bandstand. It’s all right, I don’t question it. I know and hear what they are doing. But the validity remains to be seen -what comes, what is left, after you hear the melody and after you hear the solo.’ (The ellipsis represents a transition I’ve made to an earlier section of the essay, which I read as a response to the section I quoted first.)

Mingus seems to be referring to a tradition of improvised solos from recordings being performed more or less exactly as they were recorded, ‘because the audience had heard them on record’ and wanted to hear them the same way again.  This might be called ‘the literal approach’ to performing recorded solos.  In his book Creative Jazz Improvisation, which has with good reason become a standard jazz education text, Scott Reeves writes that ‘transcribing and practicing improvised solos by master jazz musicians helps the student of improvisation assimilate the vocabulary and style of these artists in much the same way that children learn to speak by imitating their parents’.  One possible interpretation of Reeves’ parent-child metaphor, and Gene Ramey’s Charlie Parker story, is that improvisers in earlier stages of development learn recorded solos and abandon this practice in their mature years – although the profusion of mature improvisers such as Ethan Iverson and James Mahone who publish their transcriptions on the internet suggests otherwise.  Reeves also mentions three ways a solo can be learned (by learning it aurally, by writing it down, and by learning it from a published transcription) and adds: ‘After practicing a transcription, create your own improvisation on the tune, incorporating elements of the artist’s style.‘   This reflects a fairly common view through the jazz education world that learning improvised solos from recordings is an early stage in a player’s artistic development.  Reeves’ comment suggests a two-step process, where the literal approach to performing a recorded solo leads directly to a spontaneous and original improvised solo.

This eminently logical view is supported by a number of recorded examples where literal performances of transcribed solos have a mechanical quality and lack the spontaneity of the original version.  For me, some of the music of the 1970s group Supersax, and the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross album ‘Sing A Song of Basie’, where they perform Count Basie Orchestra arrangements complete with their original solos and no new improvisation, falls into this category.  However, there is also a tradition, less well documented in the literature of jazz education, of great improvisers in their prime years re-creating existing solos with an attitude of simultaneously challenging and revering the original.  In both Louis Armstrong’s 1938 re-creation of King Oliver’s 1923 ‘Dippermouth Blues‘ solo, and Ella Fitzgerald’s 1945 re-creation of Illinois Jacquet’s 1942 ‘Flying Home‘ solo, we can see one jazz master’s deep admiration for another’s achievement expressed through a deeply imaginative revision of the earlier solo.  The fact that Fitzgerald and Armstrong recorded these tunes fairly early in their century-spanning careers suggests that taking the revisionist approach to performing a recorded solo might be a developmental stage between literal imitation and more spontaneous originality.  

The soundtrack to the TV series Boardwalk Empire includes a performance by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks of the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra tune ‘Sugarfoot Stomp’.  The original 1925 Henderson version of ‘Sugarfoot’ featured a young Louis Armstrong and was an early re-working of ‘Dippermouth Blues’, which Armstrong had recorded with King Oliver in 1923.  In ‘Sugarfoot’, Armstrong re-created Oliver’s original trumpet solo from ‘Dippermouth’ with a number of revisions, including taking a high A that Oliver had played briefly near the end of the solo and making it a long, sustained note that demonstrated Armstrong’s prodigious range.  Armstrong continued to respectfully and ingeniously revise Oliver’s solo in a version of ‘Dippermouth’ with his big band in 1936.  Although Armstrong’s revisions in many ways demonstrated the strides that he had made in his playing beyond the technique of his former employer Oliver, Armstrong also chose not to try and imitate Oliver’s use of the mute, and so he was in a sense adapting the solo to a different instrument, the straight (unmuted) horn.  (The choice was not without deliberation: in Terry Teachout’s Pops, Armstrong’s first wife Lil is quoted saying that Armstrong ‘spend a whole week trying without success to imitate Oliver’s ‘wah-wah’ muted inflections on ‘Dipper Mouth Blues’.)  It was perhaps this ‘handicap’ that Armstrong gave himself which prompted some of his imaginative additions to the solo.  When laid horizontally next to Oliver’s solo, Armstrong’s 1936 ‘Dippermouth’ solo, besides changing the long ‘A’ from ‘Sugarfoot’ to a series of repeated high notes (a move that was becoming one of his trademarks), Armstrong also makes ingenious use of filling the pauses Oliver left with eighth note movement that was highly modern for its time and exhibits the chromaticism which would later be associated with the bebop movement.  (While most audio files of the King Oliver ‘Dippermouth’ sound like the tune is in the key of B, my guess is the key has been lowered by the age of the recording, so I have transposed his solo to C, the key of Armstrong’s ‘Dippermouth’ version of 1936.  The small notes at the beginning of the Oliver solo are meant to show the range over which he bends the initial note through embouchure and mute.)

In her version of ‘Flying Home’ from 1945, Ella Fitzgerald re-creates the iconic Illinois Jacquet solo from the original Lionel Hampton recording that Mingus refers to in his essay.  Fitzgerald’s ‘Flying Home’ solo indicates her close study of bebop melodic concepts, particularly through the way that she introduces more eighth note motion than the original, more chromaticism, and more use of upper chord tones such as the ninth and thirteenth.  Fitzgerald’s ‘Flying Home’ also exhibits her ability to deftly incorporate quotes into her improvising; she concludes the chorus here with ‘Merrily We Roll Along’, but a later section of the solo also uses ‘Yankee Doodle’.  (Fitzgerald’s version seems to be in the key of G, but I have transposed it to A flat, the key of the original version by the Lionel Hampton band.)

Armstrong’s revisions to the ‘Dippermouth’ could arguably be called improvements and are in line with his many recorded quotes where he openly admits his technique was superior to Oliver’s.  However, Armstrong’s revisions of Oliver’s ‘Dippermouth’ solo show clear respect for the man Armstrong called ‘my hero and my idol’ by clearly preserving the outlines of Oliver’s phrases. Fitzgerald, on the other hand, alternates throughout the chorus shown here between playing four bars of Jacquet’s solo and introducing four bars of her own very different and bop-influenced ideas – an approach which suggests that her desire to challenge Jacquet was perhaps equal to her desire to honor him.

Sonny Stitt’s versions from 1958 and 1963 of Charlie Parker’s ‘Koko’ solo from 1945 shows how the tradition of performing classic recorded solos continued into the later years of the bebop period. (There is an argument to be made that we are still, in some senses, in that era today.)  In much the way that Fitzgerald simultaneously recalls and updates Jacquet’s, one can hear Stitt thoughout his longer solo constantly weaving his own phrases in between those of Parker, as well as personalizing the Parker phrases.

Between Stitt’s versions of Koko, Sonny Rollins began his solo on a live version of Lady Bird in 1959 with two choruses of Charlie Parker’s solo from the recording of Half Nelson with Miles Davis where Parker plays tenor.  Dexter Gordon made an homage to Parker on The Jumpin’ Blues, a tune on an album of the same name recorded in August of 1970 which contains pianist Wynton Kelly’s last solos on record before his death in 1971.  The original version of ‘The Jumpin’ Blues’ was recorded by The Jay McShann Orchestra in 1942 and contained one of Parker’s first recorded solos.  Gordon’s solo on his 1970 version begins with a quote of the first three measures of Parker’s solo, which then becomes a motive that Gordon develops through his first chorus.

As the availability of transcribed solos proliferates, the number of questions about how they should be used increases as well.  Should transcribed solos be used only as an exercise for aspiring players?  Is the process of creatively adapting an existing solo by a jazz master a valuable process for improvisers at all ability levels, or is it a task at which only the most proficient players can succeed?  Is the proliferation of notated solos in books and on the internet endangering the process of learning solos by ear, as Armstrong, Fitzgerald and Stitt almost certainly did?  Is it still possible to take a creative revisionary approach to performing solos by jazz masters, as Armstrong, Fitzgerald and Stitt did?  I encourage anyone reading this entry to respond in the comment section with their thoughts on these or any other related questions.

(Note: While I have added YouTube links for some of the examples in this post, a number of the most crucial examples are not available there; the reader is urged to purchase the original recordings through a legal source of their choice; all the solo piano music referred to is available on iTunes.) 

Louis Armstrong was once asked by one of his greatest admirers, Bix Biederbecke, how he managed to improvise long solos without repeating himself.  His reply is quoted in Pops, Terry Teachout’s engaging biography of Armstrong: ‘Well I tell you…the first chorus I play the melody.  The second chorus I play the melody round the melody, and the third chorus I routines.’  The question was asked at a time when Armstrong was becoming legendary for improvising solos of great length (including a reputed 125-chorus battle with Joe ‘King’ Oliver on ‘Tiger Rag’), and clearly reflects his young admirer’s amazement at these feats.  Although Biederbecke’s question is focused on long solos, Armstrong’s answer changes the subject and offers some highly distilled wisdom on how to balance melody interpretation and improvising within a short solo.  I think Armstrong’s response can be read as a reminder to aspiring improvisers that learning to play well-structured short solos is a crucial step toward developing a facility with longer solos.  (Armstrong’s discussion of a three-chorus sequence is significant given that, as Teachout mentions, he can be heard as late as 1957 playing a three-chorus solo on ‘Dippermouth Blues‘ [at 3:43 in the link] which is closely modeled on a solo of the same length played thirty-four years earlier by his mentor Joe ‘King’ Oliver [at 1:19 in the link.]  Although this solo is the not the kind of variation-on-a-theme solo that the quote refers to, it does illustrate the basic concept of building over three choruses.)   Armstrong’s answer also has an important message for those who are fascinated and yet mystified by the art of jazz improvisation: when great improvisers might seem to be on an inscrutable flight away from their chosen melodic theme, closer analysis can often show that they are honoring that original melody by ornamenting and varying it.

The first part of Armstrong’s explanation – ‘first I play the melody’ – can actually be a complete strategy for an effective performance.  This is is clearly and elegantly demonstrated by couple of piano performances which are simply short, creative presentations of the melody.  Ellis Marsalis’ version of Rodgers and Hart’s ‘My Romance’ (a piano interlude on Wynton Marsalis’ ‘Standard Time, Volume Three’) and Hank Jones’ rendition of Duke Ellington’s ‘Come Sunday’ (on a album of piano/bass duets with Charlie Haden which is named after the tune) are focused almost entirely the original melody of each tune.  Marsalis plays just the thirty-two bar song, and Jones adds a repeat going back to the bridge of the tune’s AABA form.  Like most jazz standards, both these tunes were originally intended for instruments on which performers have the ability to sustain notes at a considerable length (‘My Romance‘ is originally a vocal piece, and ‘Come Sunday‘ was at different times a feature in the Duke Ellington band for Ray Nance’s violin, Johnny Hodges’ alto saxophone, and Mahalia Jackson’s voice.)  A pianist approaching either of these tunes as a solo vehicle has to deal with the challenge of how these long notes decay much more quickly on the piano, even when supported with finger weight or the damper pedal.  Marsalis‘ solution to this problem is to provide simple and elegant inner voice movement underneath many of the original melody’s long notes, starting with those at measures 1 and 8.  Jones maintains a sense of forward momentum by contrasting the melody’s quarter-note motion with improvised double-time phrases using triplets and swinging sixteenth notes.  His one-bar introduction foreshadows the way in which he gradually populates the long notes of the original tune with a double-time swing feel – a good example of playing ‘the melody around the melody’.

Ellis Marsalis’ performance of ‘Mood Indigo’ (from his solo piano album Duke In Blue ) and Hank Jones’ solo performance of ‘Oh! Look At Me Now’ on Kids, his album of duets with saxophonist Joe Lovano, both move from playing ‘the melody around the melody’ into the ‘routines’ of an improvised solo, but still stay within the context of a short performance focused on the original melody.  Jones’ rendition goes just twice through the tune’s form, while Marsalis’ performance goes two and a half times around.  After playing a swinging intro followed by the thirty-two bar melody of ‘Oh! Look At Me Now’, Jones improvises through just the first two A sections of the song before returning to the melody on the bridge.  One of the ways Jones maintains a sense of forward motion is through clever re-use of his intro figure throughout the performance (a strategy that also enlivens his arrangements of ‘Oh What A Beautiful Morning’ – heard to great effect on the version from ‘Hanky Panky’ – and ‘Love For Sale’).  The song’s title, ‘Oh! Look At Me Now’, may have had a personal significance for Jones, who was at the time sustaining an astonishingly high level of creativity for a jazz master in his eighties.  (This seems poigniantly to be the last and most concise of a number of versions of the tune which Jones made over the course of his long recording career.)  His performance, which is one of only two solo pieces on his duo record with Lovano, is noteworthy for being energetic and inspired without excessive technical display.

Marsalis develops his improvised solo on ‘Mood Indigo’ much as Jones develops his melodic interpretation of ‘Come Sunday’, by contrasting the song’s rhythmic language of quarter notes and swing eighths with improvised double-time phrases using triplets and swinging sixteenth notes.  On the second half of the solo, Marsalis plays a phrase that  reminded me of Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant’.  Whether or not that particular tune was Marsalis’ reference point, the phrase points up the relationship between ‘Mood Indigo’ and the sixteen-bar ‘Gospel Blues’ form that I discuss in my last post.  It’s also worth noting that ‘Mood Indigo’ demonstrates Ellington’s gifts for musical recycling, as the basic chord progression from its first and last four-bar phrases reappears in a number of his other classics, including ‘Solitude’, ‘I Got It Bad’ and Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Take The A Train’.

Another great example of a two-chorus rendition is Kenny Barron’s solo rendition of ‘Blue Moon’ (on the curiously-titled ‘#11. The Third Man’, a 1992 compilation of various film-related tunes).  Barron uses a wonderful reharmonization of the tune that seems to derive partly from Wayne Shorter’s arrangement for the Jazz Messengers on the album ‘Three Blind Mice’.  Barron’s head statement, done in an energetic rubato style reminiscent of Bud Powell’s takes on ‘A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square‘ and ‘Over The Rainbow’, is followed by a masterful solo with left hand stride over the first two A sections and the bridge.   (Although the solo version is most highly recommended, a great duo version with bass can also be heard here.)  Barron’s solo on the solo piano version ‘Blue Moon’, like the one on Barron’s rendition of ‘But Beautiful‘ (from the Frank Morgan album You Must Believe In Spring), is a model of how to combine quarter note stride in the left hand with a right hand solo based in swinging sixteenth notes.

Barron’s improvised solo on ‘But Beautiful’ extends over the course of a chorus and a half before returning to the melody.  His strategy for maintaining a sense of forward motion here includes alternating between swinging sixteenth notes and some blazing passages in thirty-second notes (or what might be called double-double-time).  There is an interesting contrast to this approach in Hank Jones’ solo piano rendition of ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ (from the album ‘Handful Of Keys’), which is also a three-chorus performance, but with a rhythmic language limited to eighth notes and triplets (a strategy that proves effective when combined with Jones’s moderately brisk choice of tempo).  Despite having different tempos and rhythmic approaches, Jones and Barron both find their own ways to move from ‘the melody round the melody’ into ‘routines’, Barron through his use of double-doubletime and Jones through his imaginative quoting of harmonically similar tunes including Ahlert and Turk’s ‘Mean To Me’ and Gerry Mulligan’s ‘Jeru’. It is interesting to contrast Jones’ rendition with Fats Waller’s own solo performance of the tune, which contains what one would naturally expect from a virtuoso composer displaying his own work: a exposition of the melody in two keys surrounded by bravura flourishes which frame the melody but never diverge from it.  (Ellington and Monk’s solo renditions of their compositions take a similar approach, focusing exclusively and often extensively on the melody, and leaving it to other performers to explore the tune’s potential as an improvisational vehicle.)

When compared to the great solo jazz pianists from earlier eras of jazz such as Teddy Wilson, these six performances by Jones, Marsalis and Barron represent a modern trend toward a simpler interpretive approach.  Even in Wilson’s simpler playing (such as ‘Alice Blue Gown’, recorded for his ‘School Of Stride Piano’ collection), his melody statements are virtuosic renditions of the original theme, featuring brisk tempos, octaves, and displacements of the typical boom-chuck left hand stride pattern.   (These displacements are occasionally called ‘secondary ragtime’ rhythms, but are named in a number of other ways by stride players as discussed by David Feurzeig below.)  All of the performances I’ve discussed by Jones, Marsalis and Barron feature simpler statements of the original melody, even with tunes like ‘Oh! Look At Me Now’ that are pop song adaptations rather than jazz masterworks. Where Wilson’s left hand has the relentless quarter-note energy of the stride piano tradition, Jones, Marsalis and Barron alternate between quarter note stride, half note stride and other more skeletal approaches to left hand accompanying (such as 1-7 shells and compound tenths).  While the acrobatic brilliance of players like Wilson is exhilarating to hear, and imitating them is a worthy long-term project, it is good to be reminded by modern masters that it is possible to achieve beautiful results by taking a simpler technical approach.

(I encourage readers to use the comment section to mention other great solo jazz piano performances they feel are relevant to this discussion, particularly those with simpler and/or shorter performances of standard tunes.)

When the University of Vermont announced that Wynton Marsalis would give the commencement speech at its 2013 graduation proceedings, it added serious star power to the event, given his well-established career as a cultural spokesman.  Marsalis also had a personal reason to be there, as his son Simeon was part of the graduating class.  His speech was a moving reflection from a parental viewpoint on the transition to postgraduate adulthood, and the UVM audience responded to it with jubilant and respectful applause.  The jubilation was turned up a notch, however, when he put down his speech notes and picked up his trumpet.  The tune he chose to play at this moment, ‘When The Saints Go Marching In‘, had a strong association in my mind with the traditional New Orleans funeral parade, as I’d heard that tradition carried on locally by the Onion River Jazz Band at the funeral of a friend.  (2016 update: I had the pleasure of subbing for ORJB’s piano player, Andy Ellenberger, on New Year’s Eve last year.)  While this tune has been used in many contexts, I had never heard it played at a graduation ceremony, where the stuffy 19th century  strains of Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ are usually the main soundtrack.  (The UVM Brass Ensemble gave a fine performance of this chestnut at the 2013 ceremony.)

In his speech, Marsalis expanded my understanding of ‘When The Saints’ by explaining how the tune could shed new light on the meaning of a college graduation.  “A favorite tradition in New Orleans,” he said,  “is the jazz parade. The dancers that follow the band are called second liners. Our most celebrated song, When the Saints Go Marching In, has a line, ‘Lord I want to be in that number, when the saints go marching in’. Well, we are in that number today.  We are YOUR second line–your support system. Our presence today IS our pride. And though there is much of life that you must face alone, you cannot make it out here in this world by yourself.”

Marsalis’ ability to transform the meaning of this tune through his speech and his playing (which I discuss below) reminded me of another masterful reinterpretation given to another well-worn sixteen-bar melody in a different genre: Paul Simon’s use of the hymn ‘O Sacred Head, Now Wounded’ in his Watergate-era song ‘American Tune’.   The narrator in the text of the hymn, well known for its use in J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, speaks of identifying his own struggle for salvation with the biblical story of Jesus’ suffering; in some Christian traditions it is sung just before the story of his resurrection is celebrated at Easter.  Simon uses the hymn’s melody as the basis of a song which had particular significance in the era following the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.  Simon’s narrator speaks having been ‘forsaken’ and ‘misused’, but moves from this awareness of personal loss toward a sense of empathy with others in a similar situation, saying ‘I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered / don’t have a friend that feels at ease’.

Marsalis made a shift in meaning similar to the one Simon made in ‘American Tune’ by taking ‘When The Saints’, a song with lyrics based on the book of Revelations and its images of the end of the world and which which has often been used to commemorate the end of an earthly life, and turning it into a statement of profound hope for a group of young people embarking on their careers.  In doing so, he demonstrated, like Simon (who performed ‘American Tune’ at a concert celebrating Jimmy Carter’s inauguration), a crucial service to the public sphere that a master musician can provide: the ability to take a song which seems to have been given every interpretation possible and find yet another level on which it can resonate.

Marsalis’ solo in his UVM version of ‘When The Saints’, accompanied by Ricky Gordon on percussion and framed by head statements with Ray Vega on a second trumpet part, could be described as a short history of jazz improvisation.  He begins (at m. 17) in the style of early jazz (staying close to the scale the song is built on – F major – and the triadic harmony of its opening measures), moves into a more blues-based approach (introducing a flatted seventh [E flat], outlining the F 7th chord, introducing what could be called the ‘F minor blues scale’, and including one of the quasi-vocal gestures that Marsalis is so adept at coaxing out of the trumpet) and closes with what I’d call a nod to the bebop language (by using what Barry Harris calls ‘the half step between the fifth and the sixth’).

Marsalis had a number of options available to him for performing the tune – he certainly is a master of the unaccompanied trumpet solo, and his father Ellis Marsalis, a magisterial eminence of jazz piano, was in attendance – but his decision to frame his melodic interpretation with the basic musical elements of rhythm (via Ricky Gordon’s funky bass drum and cymbal) and harmony (via Ray Vega’s counterline) located his version firmly in a call-and-response style.  (As we’ll see shortly, the call-and-response style can be contrasted with an approach where the main contrast is between a single solo voice in the foreground and an accompaniment in the background.)

Ray Vega’s answers to Marsalis’ melody phrases during the head in and out provide a real counterpoint to the melody; he finds a number of different ways to counter the ascending motion of the opening phrases with downward motion, and then switches to filling in the harmony in the later phrases of the tune.  When Marsalis repeats the melody after his solo, Vega’s responses become more frequent and spirited, which is perhaps what causes Marsalis to alter the melody at m. 41; before that point his repeat of the melody is quite similar to his opening statement.  To me, it is another mark of the master musician that Marsalis responds to Vega by finding a way to play one less note in this phrase than he did previously.  To my ear this demonstrates how, especially on a small scale, leaving space can be an answer as meaningful (and as respectful) as an audible response.

The power of Marsalis/Vega performance sent me on a voyage of rediscovering this tune that I have taught many times through the arrangement that appears in the Alfred Adult Basic Piano Method Volume One.  First, I went to YouTube and checked out a variety of versions of the tune.  Some were truly swinging, including the 1938 big band version by Louis Armstrong that began the popular fascination with the song, a 1963 version by one of Armstrong’s small groups that shows his remarkable ability to adapt to changing styles of jazz and multiple generations of players, a live version by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and a cool reharmonization by Dr. John.  Some were surreal, like the 1960s version led by Dinah Shore on her TV show, featuring Al Hirt, Andy Williams, Ella Fitzgerald, and Perez Prado and his orchestra.  All these versions use a call and response structure in some way or other.  In doing so, they provide a link to African-American gospel music, the crucible that, through its heat and ingenuity, transformed ‘When The Saints’ and many other folk songs into sources of glorified light in American popular culture.

Listening to these versions helped me understand what is so special about the Marsalis/Vega version: it makes it easy to hear the musical conversation, the calls and responses, through which improvisors collaboratively transform a melody: the lead part creating its variations on the original melody while being influenced by the echoes or counterlines which the second part plays in the breaks.  Both the ’63 Armstrong version and the Preservation Hall version follow a typical New Orleans front line approach in which the trombone and clarinet improvise simultaneously in response to the calls of the trumpet as it plays the melody.  The result is a joyously busy contrapuntal texture, but if one can isolate the interplay of Armstrong and trombonist Trummy Young in the ’63 video, one can hear the conversational tradition that Marsalis and Vega draw from in their duet.  In this tradition, all voices are free to participate in the statement of a theme by adding their own variations and even to occasionally overlap the lead voice.  In the Marsalis/Vega duet, however, Ray Vega skillfully demonstrates an important guideline for the melodic conversation: in order to overlap meaningfully with one’s duet partner, one must first know how to stay out of their way.

The vocal sections of all the versions, with their simpler calls and responses, can seem almost dull by comparison; however, they also function as a tension-releasing break before individual solos (although the soprano descants added by Jewel Brown in the ’63 Armstrong version and Ella Fitzgerald in the Dinah Shore version certainly keep the energy from flagging.)  The more arranged call-and-response heard in the openings of the ’38 Armstrong version and the Dinah Shore version are lower in energy and place more responsibility on soloists to lift the energy of the performance.   As the Dinah Shore version shows, performers who are less conversant with improvising tend to limit themselves to minimal variations on the melody, and not even the presence of a great improviser like Ella Fitzgerald, or a great band like Perez Prado’s, can stop the tendency of this kind of performance to flatten out dynamically.  (Trumpeter Al Hirt is the only white performer in this situation who can offer anything other than slight variations on the melody.)

Other versions of ‘When The Saints’ are forgettable and yet indicate the wide ranging impact of the tune, like the version by the Beatles  in an early incarnation when their lead singer was Tony Sheridan, whose voice showed a heavy Elvis Presley influence.  Although this version neuters the song by removing swing feel and call-and-response structure, it demonstrates the Beatles’ gift for mimicry, as it seems they and Sheridan imagined what a version by Elvis would sound like before Elvis himself had recorded the tune.  (YouTube suggests that Elvis didn’t record the tune until a 1965 version in the film Frankie and Johnny, a few years after the Beatles became a success in the U.S.A.  Although Elvis’ version has more swing feel than the Beatles’ version, it neuters the song in other ways, combining it in a medley with ‘Down By The Riverside’ sung by an all-white chorus and marching band.) The Beatles’ version also provides a link to a later and more evolved phase of their creativity: in their original tune ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, they borrow the chord progression from ‘When The Saints‘ but disguise the borrowed material through adding new harmonic twists and a bridge of unusual length for a pop song.

I also looked up ‘Streets Of The City’, a tune by New Orleans composer Paul Barbarin which uses the same chord changes as ‘When The Saints‘.  (While Barbarin’s tune is a jazz variation on the tune, the same changes are shared by tunes in other tradtions, including ‘She’ll Be Comin’ Around The Mountain’, Willie Dixon’s ‘My Babe’ and its gospel forebear, Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s  ‘This Train’.)  A version of ‘Streets‘ by clarinetist George Lewis (available on iTunes) includes a great solo by pianist Alton Purnell which demonstrates how the call-and-response concept can be applied on the piano.  Purnell’s left hand spends most of the chorus doubling the bassline in the low register of the piano, but in the middle of the chorus Purnell includes some more block-chord style comping through which his left hand responds to his right much as Vega responds to Marsalis in m. 10-17 of ‘When The Saints’.  

The first chorus of George Lewis’ clarinet solo, like Marsalis’ solo at UVM, is a model of how to combine diatonic playing (which in the case of this tune means limiting oneself to the F major scale) with judicious chromaticism that helps the improvised line ‘make the changes’.

On a visit to the Montreal Jazz Festival about a month after Marsalis‘ speech, I heard Charles Lloyd and Bill Frisell play an inventive version of the folk tune ‘Red River Valley’.  In addition to demonstrating the gift that both these players have for using any tune as an improvisational vehicle, it reminded me that this tune uses the same changes as ‘When The Saints’ with the addition of a IV chord in the third bar.  A little more rummaging through my musical memory made me realize that Bob Dylan uses the ‘Red River Valley’ changes, with the addition of a bridge, in ‘You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go’.  The lyrics of Dylan’s tune use the phrase ‘Careless Love’, which is also the title of a tune with a progression that, like ‘Red River Valley’, works a slight variation on the progression of ‘When The Saints’.  (I remember feeling homesick in Italy and hearing a version of ‘Careless Love’ by Dr. Michael White and his band that melted my melancholy away.)

The progression from ‘When The Saints‘ is also a musical ancestor of the progressions found in Horace Silver’s ‘The Preacher’, Jerome Richardson’s ‘Groove Merchant‘ and Sonny Rollins‘ ‘Doxy’.  (Dig the opening solo by a young Roland Hanna in the ‘Groove Merchant’ video!)  In the version of ‘Doxy‘ from ‘Miles Davis and The Modern Jazz Giants’ (available on iTunes), Horace Silver’s piano solo demonstrates how pianists from the bebop era onward moved the role of the left hand away from the metronomic timekeeping heard in most of Purnell’s solo and made it an independent voice which could use chords as conversational responses to right hand melodic phrases.  Where call and response is a primarily a method of melodic evolution in the Armstrong and Marsalis versions, Silver’s solo is like a tennis game between harmony and improvised melody in which the left hand lends a sense of tension to the chord progression by bringing many changes in a half beat earlier (and in m. 6, a beat and a half earlier) than they appear in the bass line.

Saxophonist David Murray and drummer Steve McCall make great use of ‘Doxy’ in their accompaniment to the Amiri Baraka poem ‘The Last Revolutionary’ on the early eighties record ‘New Music, New Poetry’.  (Baraka’s poem, which skewers leftist icons like Abbie Hoffman and David Dellinger, offers a counterpoint to conventional narratives of 1960s political activism, and is a prime example of Baraka’s poetic gifts.)  The sarcasm with which Murray plays the tune in this version helped me connect it with a number of tunes that use very similar progressions and fall into a category that might be called the ‘gospel of the marketplace blues’.   This was a prolific trend in pop songwriting of the 1920s and 30s: tunes that used the premise of either advertising a product or offering cautionary advice to the buyer.  These include advertising tunes like Robert Johnson’s ‘They’re Red Hot‘ and its distant cousin, Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice Restaurant’ and cautionary tunes like Sippie Wallace’s ‘Women Be Wise’ and Fats Waller and Andy Razaf’s ‘Find Out What They Like And How They Like It’.

‘Find Out What They Like’, which Waller seems not to have recorded himself but rather intended as a vehicle for female singers, has had its shelf life extended by being included in the late 1970s Waller/Razaf revue ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’.  One of the earliest versions of it, by vocalist Lena Wilson (available on iTunes), shows its potential as a jazz standard through an exemplary solo by the unsung stride pianist Cliff Jackson.  Jackson’s solo reminded me of the many great uses that were made of this progression by players and composers in the stride piano style, from James P. Johnson’s ‘Feelin’ Blue’ to Art Tatum’s version of ‘Ja-Da’.  (To give credit where credit is due, I wouldn’t have discovered ‘Feelin’ Blue’ without Ethan Iverson’s exhaustive and fascinating blog entry on James P, and I was introduced to Tatum’s ‘Ja-Da’ by hearing Michael Arnowitt give a masterful performance of the transcription.)

Although the world-weary humor of Sippie Wallace and Fats Waller seems far removed from the reverence and sincerity of Paul Simon in ‘American Tune’ and Wynton Marsalis in his UVM rendition of ‘When The Saints’, all these tunes and performances demonstrate an important jazz truth: knowing and respecting a tune, and having some awareness of its origins, gives you the flexibility to interpret it in a way that tells a new story.  To put it in different terms, if you know where the train you’re riding began and where it’s headed, you can relax and tell your story along the way.

Many great improvisers, in addition to creating extended solos in which they are the main melodic voice, are also masters of the musical dialogue known as trading.  (This is discussed in detail in an earlier post.)  As I mentioned in the last post, another kind of dialogue occurs within many great piano solos, in which the pianist’s left and right hands carry on a conversation with each other.

‘Ida Lupino’ by Carla Bley and ‘Silver’s Serenade’ by Horace Silver are two more tunes which lend themselves to piano solos with a conversational improvising approach.  As with the previous examples by Charles Lloyd and Joe Henderson, the chord progressions of both these tunes consist mostly of chords lasting two measures.  There are links below to transcriptions of  Horace Silver’s piano solo on ‘Silver’s Serenade’ (from the album of the same name) and Paul Bley’s solo on ‘Ida Lupino’ (from the trio record ‘Ramblin’) which demonstrate two different conversational approaches to piano improvising.  (Recordings of both tunes are available on iTunes, and a chart of ‘Silver’s Serenade is in The Real Book Volume Two, Sixth Edition.  My exercise on ‘Ida Lupino’ includes a chart of the melody.)

Paul Bley’s version of ‘Ida Lupino’ on the ‘Ramblin’ album is one of the earlier versions of many recordings he has made of this tune.  The solo on this version begins with a conversational approach and then moves on to more overlapping of the left and right hands.  In the first eight bars of his solo(click on the link to see my transcription of this section), Bley’s opening strategy is to have the right hand play simple melodic phrases over the held chords in the left-hand vamp and then rest when the vamp is active again.  Bley’s approach in this section is largely limited to the G major scale, avoiding the differences between the chords in the vamp.  The rest of the solo seems to be harmonically free – Bley’s left hand leaves the G pedal point and bassist Steve Swallow follows the improvised changes with remarkable intuition.  It is interesting to note that Bley’s solo on his version of the tune from the album ‘Closer’, recorded a year before ‘Ramblin’, has a very similar opening.  This suggests that Bley was taking a semi-compositional approach to soloing on the tune, keeping some elements of his solo and changes others from version to version.  Carla Bley’s current husband Steve Swallow has mentioned in an interview that he does this with some solos and thinks many other great players do as well.  The interview includes Carla Bley as well, who also makes interesting comments on her evolution as a soloist.

My exercise on the vamp, which is in the middle of an arrangement of the tune (click here for page one and two) begins with a simplification of Bley’s one-scale approach, but moves on to scales that emphasize the harmonic motion within the pedal point.

Horace Silver’s solo on ‘Silver’s Serenade’ begins with left hand chords that are lined up with the beginnings of right hand phrases and works through a number of choruses toward a cleaner separation of chords and melodic phrases.  In the sixth chorus (click the link to see a transcription on which I collaborated with my student Kazuha Kurosu), lightly questioning left hand chords are crisply answered with bop-style melodic phrases in the right hand.  This chorus also includes two musical quotes that are seamlessly woven into the melodic line: the motive from Fats Waller’s ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ seems to be  foreshadowed in m. 3-4, is fully revealed in m. 5-6 and then is concealed within the phrase at m. 9-10, as if being drawn back into the bubbling musical subconscious that it came from.  At m. 13 a phrase from Bud Powell’s ‘Dance of the Infidels’ is also deftly placed at the end of the ii-V-I phrase that begins at m. 11.  I don’t think there’s a way to practice this kind of inspired, split-second borrowing; instead, I think it shows how deeply Horace Silver had internalized these two great tunes.  My exercise combines Silver’s left hand voicings with the basic right hand scales for each change or group of changes.