{"id":172,"date":"2013-07-06T18:11:06","date_gmt":"2013-07-06T22:11:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/?p=172"},"modified":"2023-03-12T19:14:20","modified_gmt":"2023-03-12T23:14:20","slug":"conversation-pieces-part-two-carla-bley-and-horace-silver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/2013\/07\/06\/conversation-pieces-part-two-carla-bley-and-horace-silver\/","title":{"rendered":"Conversation Pieces, Part Two: Carla Bley and Horace Silver"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 (This is discussed in detail in an earlier post<\/a>.)\u00a0 As I mentioned in the last post<\/a>, another kind of dialogue occurs within many great piano solos, in which the pianist\u2019s left and right hands carry on a conversation with each other.<\/p>\n

\u2018Ida Lupino\u2019 by Carla Bley and \u2018Silver\u2019s Serenade\u2019 by Horace Silver are two more tunes which lend themselves to piano solos with a conversational improvising approach.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There are links below to transcriptions of\u00a0 Horace Silver\u2019s piano solo on \u2018Silver\u2019s Serenade\u2019 (from the album of the same name) and Paul Bley\u2019s solo on \u2018Ida Lupino\u2019 (from the trio record \u2018Ramblin\u2019) which demonstrate two different conversational approaches to piano improvising.\u00a0 (Recordings of both tunes are available on iTunes, and a chart of \u2018Silver\u2019s Serenade is in The Real Book Volume Two, Sixth Edition.\u00a0 My exercise on \u2018Ida Lupino\u2019 includes a chart of the melody.)<\/p>\n

Paul Bley\u2019s version of \u2018Ida Lupino\u2019 on the \u2018Ramblin\u2019 album<\/a> is one of the earlier versions of many recordings he has made of this tune.\u00a0 The solo on this version begins with a conversational approach and then moves on to more overlapping of the left and right hands.\u00a0 In the first eight bars of his solo<\/a>(click on the link to see my transcription of this section), Bley\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Bley\u2019s approach in this section is largely limited to the G major scale, avoiding the differences between the chords in the vamp.\u00a0 The rest of the solo seems to be harmonically free – Bley\u2019s left hand leaves the G pedal point and bassist Steve Swallow follows the improvised changes with remarkable intuition.\u00a0 It is interesting to note that Bley’s solo on his version of the tune from the album ‘Closer’<\/a>, recorded a year before ‘Ramblin’, has a very similar opening.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Carla Bley’s current husband Steve Swallow has mentioned in an interview<\/a> that he does this with some solos and thinks many other great players do as well.\u00a0 The interview includes Carla Bley as well, who also makes interesting comments on her evolution as a soloist.<\/p>\n

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

Horace Silver\u2019s solo on \u2018Silver\u2019s Serenade\u2019 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.\u00a0 In the sixth chorus<\/a> (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.\u00a0 This chorus also includes two musical quotes that are seamlessly woven into the melodic line: the motive from Fats Waller\u2019s \u2018Honeysuckle Rose\u2019 seems to be\u00a0 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.\u00a0 At m. 13 a phrase from Bud Powell\u2019s \u2018Dance of the Infidels\u2019 is also deftly placed at the end of the ii-V-I phrase that begins at m. 11.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think there\u2019s 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.\u00a0 My exercise<\/a> combines Silver\u2019s left hand voicings with the basic right hand scales for each change or group of changes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 (This is discussed in detail in an earlier post.)\u00a0 As I mentioned in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":865,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/865"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2095,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/2095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/tgcleary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}