Identifying added-note chords

My NYU aural skills students are working on chord identification. My last post talked about seventh chords; this post is about chords with more notes in them, or at least, different notes. My theory colleagues call them added-note chords. They are more commonly called jazz chords, though many of the examples I list below are not from jazz. You could also call them extended chords, or complicated chords, or fancy chords, or cool chords. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the numbers and symbols. My preferred way to organize all this information is to think of chords as vertically stacked scales. It is intimidating to try to learn to distinguish between C7, C9, C13, C7sus4, C9sus4 and C13sus4, but they are really just different combinations of the notes in C Mixolydian mode, and they all convey a similar “Mixolydian-ness”. But before we get to those, let’s start with extended chords you can make from regular old C major.

Major scale chords

Continue reading

Jack Straw

After spending their first few years writing abstract psychedelic tunes, the Grateful Dead took a hard turn into Americana. They wrote a bunch of songs inspired by blues, country and folk, and in doing so, they massively expanded their listener base. Several of these songs involve outlaws and drifters in the Wild West. I think the best of the Dead’s cowboy songs, both lyrically and musically, is “Jack Straw”.

When I was a kid, my older stepbrother had a bunch of Dead albums stored in our apartment. I avoided listening to them at first because their covers suggested that they would be too heavy and frightening for my tastes. Imagine my surprise when I finally did try them and they turned out to be affable psychedelic country. I first heard “Jack Straw” on What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been, the hugely better of the two Grateful Dead greatest hits compilations. (The other is Skeletons from the Closet, which has some baffling choices – “Mexicali Blues”, why?)

Continue reading

Whisper Not

When I was in college, I picked up a cassette of Legacy by Jon Faddis from the dollar bin at the record store. It’s a kind of greatest hits of jazz trumpet, and it was one of the best dollars I ever spent. The last three tunes were especially wonderful: “A Child Is Born” by Thad Jones, “Lil’ Darlin’” by Neal Hefti, and “Whisper Not” by Benny Golson. I have to give it up to the producer for that sequencing; the obvious move would have been to end the album on “Lil’ Darlin'”, but instead, just when you’ve been lulled into a peaceful slumber, “Whisper Not” opens up a whole new and unexpected atmosphere of nocturnal mystery. I rewound this part of the tape endlessly.

Here’s a live performance of Benny Golson playing “Whisper Not” with the Jazz Messengers in France in 1958, along with Art Blakey on drums, Lee Morgan on trumpet,  Bobby Timmons on piano and Jymie Merritt on bass.

Golson gives some insight into his compositional process in this Jazzwax interview with Marc Meyers. Continue reading

Can I Kick It?

In order to shop at the Park Slope Food Coop, you have to do a monthly work shift. I do two a month, one for me and one for my wife, who is much too busy earning most of our money to do her own shifts. I work early mornings on the Receiving squad. As produce gets unloaded from trucks outside, we break down the pallets, bring everything into the basement, and organize it into the various walk-in coolers. One of the Receiving coordinators plays music from a mammoth Spotify playlist called Sea of Liquid Love, over 1,900 tracks spanning hip-hop, electronic dance music, reggae and other groove-oriented styles from around the world. During my last shift, “Can I Kick It?” came up in the rotation, and in spite of the fact that we were schlepping boxes of vegetables around before dawn, everybody lit up. Why is that track so great? How did these guys, all of whom were younger than twenty years old, record such an all-time banger?

Before I try to answer the bigger questions, let’s take a look at the samples in the order of their appearance in the track.

Continue reading

You’re Gettin’ A Little Too Smart

After reading Dilla Time, I did a deep dive into Dilla’s preferred sample sources, including the Detroit Emeralds. Here’s one of their nastiest grooves:

I combined that opening groove with Charles Mingus and Vassily Kalinnikov to create one of my favorite of my own tracks:

According to WhoSampled.com, “You’re Getting A Little Too Smart” has been sampled in a couple of hundred rap songs. I drove myself crazy trying to figure out which part everybody was sampling. Was it the second bar? If so, how did they get the bass out? Or was it the break after the first chorus? But then how did they remove the reverbed-out cowbell and clave?

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing

Every ten years it occurs to me to learn this tune, and then I come up against the fact that it’s in E-flat minor, I get discouraged, and I give up. Well, not this time! This time I decided to take the coward’s way out: I put the tune in Ableton and transposed it up to the much more guitarist-friendly key of E minor. 

Yusuf Roahman plays shaker and Sheila Wilkerson plays bongos and güiro, and Stevie plays everything else: piano, (synth) bass and drums. I assume that Stevie put down the piano first and then they overdubbed everything on top?

Continue reading