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

The major scale modes

When you first set out to learn your scales, it can be discouraging. There are so many of them, and their names are so bewildering. The good news is that when you learn one scale, you get a bunch of other scales “for free.” This is because many scales share the same pitches, just in different orders. Scales that are related in this way are called modes.

To understand modes, picture a set of Scrabble tiles. Say you have seven Scrabble tiles that spell the word RESPECT. You can take the first two letters off and stick them on the end to get SPECTRE (the British spelling of specter.) In music theory terms, SPECTRE is a mode of RESPECT; conversely, RESPECT is a mode of SPECTRE.

Now imagine your Scrabble tiles spell ABCDEFG. If you treat the letters as note names, this is a scale called A natural minor. If you take the first two letters off and put them on the end, you get CDEFGAB, the C major scale. C major and A natural minor are modes of one another; learning to play one gives you the other one for free.

This post will walk you through all of the modes of C major. To find a mode, pick any white key on the piano and play to the right to get the mode starting on that note.

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