Where do jazz standards come from?

My Song Factory class is coming up on the Standards and Showtunes unit, covering the Great American Songbook. I mainly relate to these tunes via jazz.

There are numerous sources of jazz standards. In this post, I collect some of the ones that appear in movie musicals, and I pair each one with a well-known jazz interpretation. (Note that most of these had appeared in stage musicals many years earlier.) Enjoy! Continue reading

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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Why are there so many minor scales

I wrote this explainer for my New School students; maybe you will find it useful too.

The white keys on the piano don’t just have to play C major. If you play the white keys over a droning or repeated A, you get a very different-sounding scale. It has a few different names: the A diatonic minor scale, the A natural minor scale, or A Aeolian mode. I prefer to call it natural minor.

But this is only one of several minor scales in widespread use. The minor-key world is more complicated than the major-key world. But that also makes for a lot of musical variety. Let’s dig in!

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Hidden Place

At the request of Wenatchee the Hatchet, and also following my own long-standing interest, I took a dive into the opening track from Björk’s exquisite album Vespertine:

I love Björk for so many reasons. A big one is her ability to make weird ideas sound approachable, which is closely related to her ability to make conventional ideas sound strange. “Hidden Place” is a perfect example. Is it a pop song? An art song? A dance groove? A work of experimental ambient music? The answer is, yes, all of the above. The basic structure is pop boilerplate: verse-prechorus-chorus form, a looped bassline and ostinato-based groove organized into four or eight bar phrases. But on top of that standard foundation is a lot of weird stuff. Continue reading

The Anchor Song

Is there a difference between Ionian mode and the major scale? C Ionian mode and the C major scale are the same collection of pitches. Does that mean that they are the same thing? There is a lot of confusion about this. Classic FM says that C Ionian and C major are interchangeable. This Stack Exchange thread says they aren’t, with some useful historical context. The difference really comes down to pitch centrality. The C major scale has a strong sense of being centered around the note C, and it implies the whole complex system of tension and resolution that you learn about in music theory class. By contrast, C Ionian mode doesn’t so much “function” as it drifts around without really progressing.

It’s hard to find examples of Ionian! There are plenty of pop songs based on the white keys of the piano whose key centers are ambiguous between C major and A minor, but it’s hard to find a piece of major-scale music that just floats around. The closest thing I can think of is Björk’s beautiful tune “The Anchor Song”, with its delightfully angular saxophone arrangement that she wrote with Oliver Lake.

Björk has talked a bit about writing “The Anchor Song”, but only about the lyrics, not the music. She has conservatory training and is deliberate about all of her note choices, so I’m sure she constructed this tune with intention, but I don’t know what that intention was. I figured the tune out by ear a while ago, and came up with a guitar arrangement that I’m proud of, but I didn’t try to write it out. Recently I tried to warp the song out in Ableton, and I discovered that I could not suss the meter out at all.

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Groove harmony

See also a study of groove melody

Chords work differently in grooves than they do in songs and linear compositions. In his book Everyday Tonality, Philip Tagg proposes that chords in loops are mainly there to signpost locations in the meter. By his theory, the metrical location of a chord matters more than its harmonic function. This idea aligns with my experience of listening to and making groove-based music. I’d like to develop it further, to form a general theory of how groove harmony works.

I don’t plan to try to explain every kind of groove there is, but I do want to look for widely recurring patterns. My main goal is to save my students the many years of trial and error that it took me to figure out this vast and understudied area of musical practice.

Disclaimers: this isn’t any kind of complete theory, it’s me thinking out loud about a bunch of examples. I chose those examples because I like them and find them interesting, not because I’m trying to be systematic.

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Learn to improvise on the white piano keys

Improvisation is a core musical skill across a variety of styles and genres. Being able to make up music on the fly is obviously useful in and of itself, but improvisation is also an excellent tool for songwriting, composition, production, and teaching. The best way to learn how to improvise is to do it along with actual music. The problem is that so much actual music is harmonically complicated. What do you do if you have limited technique but aren’t content to run “Hot Cross Buns” over and over? To solve this problem, I’ve made a collection of tracks you can confidently improvise over using nothing but the white keys on the piano (the C major scale and its modes).

If you’re a pianist or keyboard player, you can improvise along with all the music in this post just by playing the white keys. If you’re a guitarist, consult any fingering chart for the C major scale–the default setting on Guitar Dashboard is a good one. You can also play along using your computer keyboard via the default setting on the aQWERTYon, or on the Ableton Push in its default scale mode. Trust your ears and have fun! Continue reading