Exploring Hip-Hop Pedagogies in Music Education

Over the weekend I went to a hip-hop education panel organized and moderated by my fellow white hip-hop advocate Jamie Ehrenfeld, featuring four of the brightest lights in the field: Jamel Mims aka MC Tingbudong (rapper in English and Mandarin), Dizzy Senze (devastatingly great freestyle rapper), Regan Sommer McCoy (curator of the Mixtape Museum), and Marlon Richardson, aka UnLearn the World (another devastatingly great freestyle rapper). Several other emcees showed up, including one of my main hip-hop peer educators, Roman The Mafioso, pictured below.

After the panel, all the emcees got into a cypher. At first they were rapping over a DJ, while a few NYU kids tried to play along on saxophones and piano. Then the DJ paused and folks tried rapping over just the NYU music students’ instrumental accompaniment. Roman gently trolled the NYU kids: “Keep it steady, keep it steady.” They did better when Steff Reed jumped on the piano and replaced their uncertain jazz with thumping gospel. Listening to this, I felt what I always feel in a cypher: that freestyle rap is the most advanced and sophisticated form of music I have ever heard in my life.

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Freedom Jazz Dance

A friend texted me to tell me that he was listening to a jazz show on public radio in Denver, and that they referenced an old blog post of mine about “Freedom Jazz Dance” by Eddie Harris. That was a pleasant surprise, and it made me want to go back to the post and freshen it up. So here are some new thoughts about what is arguably the weirdest jazz standard.

To be clear, there are many weirder jazz tunes than this, but not in the core repertoire. Also, “weird” does not mean “complex”. This tune is radical in its simplicity. In fact, it is so radically simple that usually when other people play it, they insert more structure into it. It illustrates the surprising fact that the simpler a tune is, the harder it can be for jazz musicians to improvise on it. We will get to this idea in more depth below.

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Check out this excellent blue note

I got a question from a Twitter friend:

Let’s find out! The note in question comes at 1:28.

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Dorian mode

Dorian mode is such a cool scale. It evokes medieval chant and the blues. Its characteristic minor sixth chord is almost a diminished chord. And it’s unique among the diatonic modes for being symmetrical, meaning that it uses the same sequence of intervals going up and down. When you write Dorian on the chromatic circle, it’s left-right symmetrical, and it’s even more obviously symmetrical on the circle of fifths.

Dorian mode is like a combination of the natural minor scale and Mixolydian mode. You can make Dorian by raising the sixth of natural minor, or by flatting the third of Mixolydian.

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Mixolydian mode

If you flatten the seventh note of the major scale, you get Mixolydian mode. It’s like a bluesier version of major.

Mixolydian is a medieval mode that fell out of favor with “art” music composers during the Baroque era. However, it stayed alive and well in various European folk traditions before having an explosion in popularity during the rock era, helped by its resemblance to the blues.

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Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues

There is a fascinating moment in “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin where Robert Plant plays a very flat ninth on the harmonica. I love this note, because there is so much music theory and history encoded within it. Listen at 0:41.

Before we can get into the details of this note and what makes it so, um, noteworthy, you need some background. “When The Levee Breaks” is heavily adapted from a song of the same name by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. It tells the story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which left hundreds of thousands of mostly Black people in horrific refugee camps. Kansas Joe sings and plays rhythm guitar, and Minnie plays lead.

Led Zeppelin’s song is a word salad of the original over a different instrumental backing. The lyrics don’t make any particular sense, and they don’t try to; Robert Plant is going for more of a vibe. When I was a teenaged Zeppelin fan, I didn’t know what a levee was, and my understanding of Black history was vague at best. I certainly didn’t know anything about the Great Mississippi Flood. The same was probably true of Robert Plant when he wrote his lyrics. Continue reading

Waiting For Benny

The Genius of the Electric Guitar is an aptly-named compilation of studio recordings that Charlie Christian made with Benny Goodman between 1939 and 1941. The album includes a couple of informal studio jams recorded while Goodman’s band was waiting for their leader to show up. Both jams have self-explanatory titles: “Blues in B” and “Waiting For Benny.” The latter one is where the real magic happens.

After a minute and a half of jamming in the key of A, Charlie Christian suddenly cues the band into a tune. Its key is ambiguous at first, but once the piano comes in, it quickly reveals itself to be F. I had always known this tune simply as “Waiting For Benny,” as do many other jazz fans. However, Benny Goodman later recorded it under the title “A Smo-o-o-oth One.” Apparently this recording was made at the same session as “Waiting For Benny”, though the documentation is unclear. Continue reading

Lightnin’ Hopkins – “My California”

I’m spending this month in California with my in-laws, and so naturally I went searching my iTunes for thematically appropriate songs. One of the results was this exquisite Lightnin’ Hopkins recording.

Here’s my visualization using Ableton Live. I tuned the recording up a half step so that it’s in A rather than A-flat, which makes it easier for you to play along. The big challenge was to figure out the meter, which changes constantly. I aligned the Hopkins track to the grid over a drum machine kick, programmed in the tempo changes, and used audio to MIDI conversion as a starting point for my transcription. Then I sweated out the details in Dorico, before bringing the MIDI back into Ableton to make the visualization. There was necessarily quite a lot of interpretation involved here.

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