Meshell Ndegeocello at Tonic

In my twenties, I forced myself to experience a lot of very highbrow avant-garde music: free jazz, experimental electronica, and various combinations thereof. One such experience was a show at Tonic. I forget who was on the bill exactly, but it included Susie Ibarra and various other downtown luminaries. The group was ad hoc and clearly had never played together before. Their freeform improvisation was colorful and interesting, but tough to get an emotional hold on.

During the second set, Meshell Ndegeocello showed up, and the band invited her to sit in. She sat onstage with her bass for a minute or two, just listening to all the atonal noise swirling around her. Then she started playing a simple G minor funk groove, quietly but insistently. One by one, the other musicians locked into it, until the whole group was actually playing together, not just at the same time, but together. It was the best show I ever saw at Tonic. It also made me realize that the best musicians play stuff that makes sense.

Ira Newborn and BB King

My favorite class at NYU this semester is Scoring For Film and Multimedia with Ira Newborn. Ira is a cynical curmudgeon — think Larry David with a beard — but he’s really passionate about music. He came up in the blues and funk world before moving into orchestral music. A student in the class had written something really far out and atonal, and it reminded Ira of a story. He had written an atonal piece, and he wanted BB King to play on it for some reason. So he brought BB in and didn’t explain the piece at all or show him a chart, just had him just play whatever he felt like. BB laid down straightforward blues on A7, and Ira said that it tied the whole piece together.

Miles Davis and Bitches Brew

About seventeen minutes into “Pharoah’s Dance,” Miles enters with a short repetitive funk theme. You can hear the swirling chaos gradually coalesce around him into a nice groove.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’re an adventurous and avant garde musician or composer, don’t be afraid to feel the funk. Leave hostility to wards the listener back in the fifties where it belongs. Your music is stronger when you take the risk of inviting the audience in to feel your feelings.

Composition
Duke Ellington – “Concerto For Cootie”

Blues feeling
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers – “Moanin’”

Romance
Count Basie – “Lil Darlin’”

Effortless virtuosity
Clifford Brown and Max Roach – “Joy Spring”

Reinterpreting pop music
Miles Davis – “Someday My Prince Will Come”

Funk
Herbie Hancock – “Fat Albert Rotunda”

Soul-searching and inner flight
John Coltrane – “Venus”

Original post on Quora

I learned the answer from Creative License: The Law And Culture Of Digital Sampling by Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola. It’s a companion book to the invaluable documentary Copyright Criminals. The story of Jay-Z and Alan Lomax isn’t quite as epic a copyright fail as the Biz Markie lawsuit or the story of “Bitter Sweet Symphony” but it’s still pretty absurd.

So here’s Jay-Z’s “Takeover.” As you might expect, it contains salty language.

For my tastes, “Takeover” isn’t one of the better Jay-Z songs, since all it does is make fun of Nas. It’s depressing when an artist of Jay’s caliber devotes his  considerable creativity to a diss track. Still, the production is pretty powerful. The main samples come from the Doors’ “Five To One.” Jay also quotes David Bowie’s “Fame,” along with various other rap songs. Finally, the sampled line “Watch out, we run New York!” comes from “Sound Of Da Police” by KRS-One.

KRS-One samples a riff from “Inside Looking Out” by Grand Funk Railroad — listen at 6:28.

Grand Funk didn’t write the song. It’s a cover of The Animals.

The Animals didn’t really write the song either. As was a common practice among their British rock peers at the time, they took a folk melody and wrote somewhat different lyrics. The tune they used is called “Rosie,” which they learned from a recording made by Alan Lomax of a chain gang at Parchman Farm.

“Rosie” can’t be said to have any particular author. But Lomax was the first person to record and publish it, so according to the peculiar norms of America’s property laws, he was able to copyright it. Not only does Lomax hold the copyright for “Rosie,” he’s also listed as a co-author of both versions of “Inside Looking Out.”

Here’s where the story gets truly silly. When KRS-One sampled Grand Funk Railroad’s cover of “Inside Looking Out,” he needed the permission of both the owner of the recording and the underlying composition. This is in spite of the fact that the sample is from an instrumental section that Grand Funk added, and that doesn’t reference the original melody at all. And even though Jay-Z sampled KRS-One’s unaccompanied vocal, he also needed to get copyright permission from everyone sampled in KRS-One’s track. Including Alan Lomax.

So that’s how a folk song collector wound up as the legal co-author of a Jay-Z diss track. I can’t think of a better illustration of the copyright system’s dysfunction than that.

The copyright maze is no obstacle to Jay-Z — he has the money, lawyers and connections to clear whatever he wants. But what about up-and-coming or unheard-of artists? What if they want to use samples? Should the most vital art form of our time be the exclusive province of forty-year-old multimillionaires? And grateful as I am to Alan Lomax for recording and disseminating so much great folk music, I remain baffled as to why he was allowed to copyright it. Our creative heritage deserves better stewardship than our current laws provide.

Update: I seem to have touched a nerve with this post. Jesse Walker posted it on the Reason Magazine blog, and since then it’s also been on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, Metafilter and Techdirt. There are some interesting discussions happening in the comments to those posts. Thanks for linking, everybody!

The good news is that while figuring out keys is complex, it’s not impossible. Before you can do it, you need to know what all the possibilities are, and you need some tools to help you in your analysis. I’m assuming here that you don’t have sheet music of the tune you’re trying to figure out, but you do have an audio recording. You’ll want a program that can loop and slow down different sections. I recommend Transcribe for this purpose. Audio editing tools like Ableton Live and Pro Tools work too.

Figuring out the root

The root is “home base” for the key. The best way to figure it out is trial and error. There are only twelve possibilities; put the passage on a loop and try them all. Often the root is the note that the melody starts or ends on, or repeats frequently. The root is also the likeliest note for the bass to be playing. Neither of these are hard and fast rules, though; you need to let your ear be the final judge. A teacher can help you develop your instinct through ear training.

Simple major and minor

In traditional western classical and folk music, figuring out keys is relatively straightforward. There are twelve major keys and twelve minor keys. If the piece or section feels happy, it’s probably major, and if it feels sad, it’s probably minor. Once you’ve figured out the root, you’re in business. The key signatures in western notation denote either major scales or their relative minor counterparts.

Jazz theory gives another handy method for identifying keys. In jazz, keys tend to change a lot, and it’s not uncommon to pass through a key without ever landing on the root. Many jazz standards have sequences of ii-V progressions that don’t resolve. For example:

| C-7 F7 | Bb-7 Eb7 | Ab-7 Db7 | G-7 C7 |

How do you make sense of something so complex? Jazz says: look at the dominant seventh chords. Whenever you see one, you’re in the key one slot counterclockwise on the circle of fifths.

So in the example, F7 indicates that the first bar is in Bb major — you can play the Bb major scale over C-7 and F7 and it will sound good. The Eb7 indicates that the second bar is in Ab major. The Db7 puts the third bar in Gb major, and the C7 puts the fourth bar in F major.

Dominant chords can indicate minor keys if they have “minor-sounding” extensions in them like b9, #9 and b13. Half-diminished ii chords suggest minor keys too. So if you see this:

| C-7b5 F7b9 | Bb-7b5 Eb7#9 | Ab-7b5 Db7b9 | G-7b5 C7#9 |

then you’re looking at the keys of Bb minor, Ab minor,  Gb minor and F minor, respectively. See a good jazz theory text for more details; I recommend The Jazz Theory Book by Mark Levine.

The blues

Blues music makes the key situation more complex, because it combines features of both major and minor. Blues mixes the major and minor third, the natural and flat seventh, and characteristically major-key and minor-key chords. Also, blues uses dominant seventh chords in non-functional ways, so you can’t really use the jazz analysis on them. I think it’s best to think of “blues keys” that are distinct from major or minor. So the key of “C blues” will use chords like this:

C7  Eb  F7  F#dim7  G7  Bb

Melodies in C blues will combine C major and the C blues scale. There’s also minor blues, but that follows traditional classical minor-key rules more closely.

Modes and other exotica

Major, minor and blues will cover you for most of the material you’ll encounter in western pop, but there are still some tunes and passages that will continue to defy analysis. Music from non-western cultures uses plenty of scales not mentioned above, and western practice has absorbed a lot of them, especially the ones that happen to map onto modes of the major scale. Western music also occasionally ventures into modes of the harmonic and melodic minor scales.

There are also the so-called synthetic scales: whole-tone and diminished. It’s vanishingly unusual to hear them in pop songs, but they do show up in jazz, classical and film score music. Hollywood leans heavily on a scale I learned as “harmonic major” — like harmonic minor but with a major third:

C D E F G Ab B

This scale is rarely discussed in music theory texts, but it’s handy if you want to create a feeling of epic mysticism, like in the Lord Of The Rings movies.

Putting it all together

This flowchart shows all of the scales you’re likely to encounter in contemporary American music, at least the more mainstream and accessible stuff. Find yourself a piece of music whose root is C. Try out different notes on top of it and follow the arrows until you hit your scale.

For example, let’s take “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” by Hall and Oates.

Take a listen to the verses. The root is C. There’s G in there, whereas Gb sounds peculiar. The section is minor, so Eb fits and E doesn’t. Continuing out, Bb fits better than B, and A fits better than Ab. So the key here is C dorian. The prechorus — “I’d do anything you want me to do” — is more complicated. It has C and G, and the third is E, rather than Eb. But the different chords in that section use both B and Bb. The prechorus switches back and forth between C major and C mixolydian. See what I mean about key changes being common?

If you’re trying to figure out something and the root isn’t C, my chart won’t be much help unless you transpose everything. Someone want to commission me to do this chart in all twelve keys? Get in touch.

Music theory excites nerds like me, but it makes a lot of musicians miserable. It’s best to learn it in the context of actual tunes that you like. Each scale has its own unique emotional color; puzzling them all out and comparing their qualities can be great inspiration for writing and improvising your own stuff. Happy transcribing!

I started learning harmonica in high school. It was the first instrument I learned voluntarily, not counting my ineffectual middle school attempt at classical cello. As a teenager, my obsession with the Grateful Dead was at its high water mark. The Dead’s first frontman, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, was a more than respectable blues harmonica player. Through the Dead I also got exposed to all the blues and country greats. I forget exactly how and why I started playing harmonica myself, but it’s probably because it was inexpensive and looked easy. I started with Country And Blues Harmonica For The Musically Hopeless by Jon Gindick, which I enthusiastically recommend.

Meet the harmonica

The harmonica was invented in Germany in the early 1800s, probably inspired by the east Asian sheng. There are many varieties, but the most familiar one here in America is the ten-hole diatonic model. It’s designed so that it only plays the notes within a particular major scale. When you blow in the holes, you get a major chord arpeggiated through three octaves. You can also suck air through it to get a dominant seventh chord (actually a ninth chord.) Harmonica is the only instrument I know of that you play by inhaling.

You need to have a different harmonica for each key you want to play in. I have at least one for each of the twelve keys, but you can get along pretty well with just C, G, D and A. My preferred brand is the Hohner Special 20, which sounds great out of the box and lasts for basically ever, as long as you clean it out once in a while. I’ve also tried out the Hohner Golden Melody, which has a more delicate sound and gives finer pitch control, but is more expensive. The Hohner Marine Band sounds good too, but I find it a little harder to control, and it gets pretty repulsive after it’s been in your mouth a thousand times.

The notes

Here are the notes you can play on a C harp. The top row shows the C major triads you get from blowing, and the bottom row shows the G9 chord you get from drawing.

By blowing and drawing on the C harp, it’s very easy to figure out certain major-key folk tunes. “Oh Susanna” is the canonical beginner harmonica song. You can also play Brahms’ Lullaby, and even (if you’re very enterprising) Bach’s “Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring.”

Effortless though it is to play I and V7 chords on the harp, you quickly run into some severe limitations. Playing the major scale in sequence is a challenge because of the idiosyncratic arrangement of the notes across the holes. Also, you can’t play the IV chord (F major in the key of C.) You can fudge it by drawing holes 5 and 6, but that isn’t the full chord and feels unsatisfying.

You’re likely to experience even more frustration if you want to play blues, or rock, or many flavors of country, or really anything else descended from the African-American tradition, since the plain-vanilla major scale just does not have the notes you want. To get that blues sound, you need to play in a style called cross harp.

Cross harp and the blues

In cross harp, you play a harmonica tuned to a different key than the one the song is in. This gives you a spicier collection of notes to work with than in straight harp.

Take a look at this diagram of the twelve keys in western music. It’s called the circle of fifths because the keys are arranged a fifth apart as you go around clockwise.

To play cross harp, find out what key the song is in, and use the harp from the next key counterclockwise. For a song in A, use a D harp. For a song in D, use a G harp. For a song in G, use a C harp, and so on.

So let’s take a look at the notes in a C harp as viewed through the lens of the key of G.

In cross harp, you’re mostly drawing, which gives you the I7 (G7) chord. In scale form, this chord is known as the mixolydian mode. Mixolydian has the flat 7th from the blues scale. By leaning on this note (5 draw) and the notes surrounding it, you get the classic “train chord” that forms the foundation of blues harp. By bending or flattening B (3 draw) and D (4 draw), you get the other blues scale notes — more on this technique below.

When you blow in cross harp, you get the IV (C) chord. You can’t play the V7 (D7) directly, but you can fudge it in a couple of interesting ways. If you play on the bottom two holes you get D7sus4, and if you draw on holes 4, 5 and 6, you imply D7#9, which sounds pretty darn hip. The blues scale works for those chords too. In fact, the blues scale works in just about any harmonic situation you might find yourself in.

Bending and microtones

By far the hardest aspect of playing harmonica is learning how to bend notes so they go intentionally flat. This technique of playing between the piano keys is essential to soulful blues (and rock, and country, etc.) Here’s a handy video explanation.

Bending takes a lot of practice. You’ll try and try and try and it won’t happen, and then all of a sudden you pick up the harp one day and you can bend effortlessly. Hang in there.

Minor keys

Harmonica does not get along well with minor keys, sad to say. It’s easy to play dorian mode if you use a harp tuned a whole step below the key of the song. But not that many songs are solely in dorian, and the natural sixth clashes horribly with natural or harmonic minor. So either you can carefully avoid the sixth, or try to bend it down to flat six. Either way, it’s awkward. You can buy special harmonicas tuned to natural and harmonic minor scales, but that’s a pain too.

Who to listen to

DeFord Bailey was the first black performer on the Grand Ole Opry and played beautiful unaccompanied solo harp. He was also a snappy dresser.

Little Walter Jacobs played on most of the classic Muddy Waters recordings, as well as his own solo albums. He famously played harp through a cranked-up guitar amp to get a sound resembling distorted saxophone, which has been much imitated since. He also basically wrote the book on wailing blues feel.

Here’s Little Walter with Muddy Waters:

Sonny Terry played incredibly uninhibited and energetic blues harp, punctuated by his yelping and hollering.

My favorite straight harp player is Bob Dylan, who brings the same wailing intensity to plain-vanilla major-key folk as the people above do to cross harp. Like any good sixties folkie, Bob plays harmonica in a neck-mounted holder so he can play guitar at the same time.

For sheer staggering virtuosity, it’s worth calling out Howard Levy, who bends notes with such precision that he can get any exotic scale he wants out of a regular diatonic harmonica. You can hear him with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones and many other equally geeky bands.

And what about Stevie Wonder, you may be asking? Isn’t he one of the greatest harmonica players of all time? He is indeed, but Stevie plays a different instrument, the chromatic harmonica. This is a bigger and more complex thing with a thumb-activated slider that allows you to play all the notes on the piano.

Chromatic harp is so difficult that it seems like it would make more sense to just play the saxophone or something. Stevie makes it wail, but few of us have the discipline to practice as much as Stevie does.

The best harmonica player in the world of straight-ahead jazz is Toots Thielemans, who plays full-blown bebop on chromatic harp. Toots has also written some landmark tunes, most famously “Bluesette.”

Future harp

Harmonica is inevitably associated with old-timey music, but I’ve found it works great over abstract electronica too. Back when I had an improv-based techno band, I sometimes played harp through my guitar multi-FX unit. Guitar distortion works well on harp, as Little Walter figured out back in the fifties. Delay is another really good harp effect. Set it to a long decay time and hold out some long bent notes. Trippy! I also like the sound of phaser, tremolo, harmonizer and ring modulator. I haven’t tried out a loop player with harp yet, but that seems like the next logical step.

Learning to play

Harmonica is mostly about feeling, tone, rhythm and phrasing. It’s hard to explain verbally. I recommend getting a good teacher, at least when you’re getting started — if you’re in or around New York City, get in touch with me. YouTube is a great resource too. The best resource is recordings. Start with Little Walter and work your way out. Practice often and have fun.

To make a diminished chord, you start on any note, go up a minor third, then another, then another. Here are the notes in C diminished — the scale tones are in red.

Here are some good guitar fingerings for diminished chords.

Diminished chords are highly symmetrical, which gives them a peculiar property. The circle above shows C diminished, but the same notes also make Eb, F# and A diminished. The only difference between these four chords is their respective bass notes. This symmetry means that there are only four diminished chords total. The diagrams below show what I mean. On the left is the circle of fifths; on the right is the circle of half-steps. Each square is a diminished chord.

To play blues you mostly only need to concern yourself with the diminished chord on the root of the key. In C, that’s Cdim7 (though you can also substitute Ebdim7, F#dim7 and Adim7.) Here are the most common uses of diminished chords in the blues in C.

C diminished

To make Cdim7, you slide every note in C7 down a half step except for C itself.

C7:    C  E  G  Bb
Cdim7: C  Eb Gb A

Any time you have an uninterrupted stretch of C7, you can liven it by dropping briefly to Cdim7 and then sliding back up to C7. Robert Johnson did this a lot on the first four bars of twelve-bar blues. Instead of this:

| C7 | C7 | C7 | C7 |

Robert Johnson played this:

| C7 | Cdim7 | C7 Cdim7 | C7 Cdim7 C7 |

In “Kindhearted Woman Blues” you can hear this riff on the line “Now there ain’t but the one thing that makes Mr Johnson drink, I swear by how you treat me baby, I begin to think.” Listen at 1:18.

See guitar tab for a good voicing of this lick in the key of A.

The individual notes in C diminished make a great melodic line. C is the root, naturally. Eb and F# are from the blues scale. A is from the major scale, and it forms a nicely dissonant tritone.

Eb diminished

This chord is part of a ubiquitous blues and jazz lick that I know as the Blue Monk lick.

C7  Dm7  Ebdim7  C7/E

There are some variations you can use on the second chord:

C7  Dm7(b5) Ebdim7  C7/E
C7  Ddim7   Ebdim7  C7/E
C7  Bb/D    Ebdim7  C7/E

You can freely insert the Blue Monk lick anywhere you have a couple of bars a single dominant chord. Instead of:

| C7 | C7 |

Play:

| C  Dm7 | Ebdim7  C7/E |

This riff has been the basis for a lot of songs, most notably (surprise!) “Blue Monk” by Thelonious Monk.

You can also hear it in the bridge of “Honeysuckle Rose” by Fats Waller, under the line “You’re my sugar.” Here’s a live version by Ella Fitzgerald, listen at 0:47.

The Blue Monk lick works equally well backwards:

C7/E  Ebdim7  Dm7  C7

Wikipedia calls this the How Dry I Am lick; I associate it more with Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.”

Robert Johnson used the descending Blue Monk lick for his characteristic intro — grab the tablature here.

F# diminished

Use this chord after F7 to get what I call the gospel lift. Use it in bar six of the twelve bar blues and feel the spirit. Instead of:

| F7 | F7 |

Play:

| F7 | F#dim7 |

Jazz loves the gospel lift. Hear it in Duke Ellington’s “In A Mellotone” as sung by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross — listen at 1:05 and try to ignore the goofy video.

The gospel lift also shows up in a turnaround commonly used in bars eleven and twelve of twelve-bar blues.

| C  C7/E  F7  F#dim7 | G7 |

This turnaround makes a nice intro, and with a slight tweak, it also makes a swell ending.

| C  C7/E  F7  F#dim7 | C  Db7 C7 |

I haven’t yet talked about A diminished. That’s because it doesn’t get a lot of action in the key of C except as an alternative voicing for the other diminished chords.

The other big diminished use case: minor-key V chords

The other major use case for diminished chords is for dominant chords in minor keys. In C minor, the dominant chord is G7(b9). This chord includes B diminished (or D, or F, or Ab diminished, however you want to think about it.) This is good to know for minor blues. It’s also handy anywhere you encounter a minor chord. Just insert the diminished chord a half-step below the root and you can get some nice passing chords and chromatic basslines. For example:

| Cmaj7 | C#dim7 | Dm7 | G7 |

This isn’t blues, but the Roots use the minor-key dominant diminished idea heavily in their awesome song “Don’t See Us.”

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 red note on the diagram below and read clockwise to get the mode starting on that note.

Each mode goes with a chord, so I’ve listed those too, along with real-world examples.

C to C – Ionian mode

Ionian mode is just the regular old major scale. You only see the Greek name used in music theory textbooks.

Scale: C D E F G A B
Chord: C E G B D F A -- Cmaj7

Examples include everything from “Jingle Bells” to the William Tell Overture. See my major scale post for more.

D to D – Dorian mode

Same as the D natural minor scale, but with a natural sixth. Dorian is fabulously useful for jazz and funk.

Scale: D E F G A B C
Chord: D F A C E G B -- Dm7

“So What” by Miles Davis uses Dorian all the way through, in D on the main part and in Eb on the bridge.

The ninth, eleventh and thirteenth in D dorian are E, G and B. These notes form an E minor triad. If you play E minor and then D minor, you get the distinctive “So What” riff.

Other examples of tunes in Dorian, from Wikipedia:

• “Greensleeves”
• “Born to Be Wild“
• “Scarborough Fair”
• “Eleanor Rigby”

E to E – Phrygian mode

This mode has a distinctive flamenco vibe. It’s the same notes as E natural minor with a flat second.

Scale: E F G A B C D
Chord: E G B D F A C -- Em7(b13)

Outside of flamenco, Phrygian doesn’t get much action, but Samuel Barber uses it in his Adagio for Strings. Rightly so — with its flatted second, third, sixth and seventh, it’s pretty much the saddest of all scales.

F to F – Lydian mode

This beautiful, somewhat otherworldly scale is the F major scale with a sharp fourth.

Scale: F G A B C D E
Chord: F A C E G B D -- Fmaj7 (#11)

Lydian is great for dream and fantasy sequences. Björk uses it for “Possibly Maybe,” starting on the line “Much as I definitely enjoy solitude.”

G to G – Mixolydian mode

The same as the G major scale, but with a flat seventh.

Scale: G A B C D E F
Chord: G B D F A C E -- G7

Mixolydian is one of the defining sounds of blues and rock. Examples:

• Just about every blues tune
• “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Day Tripper,” the “Nah nah nah nah” section of “Hey Jude” and many other songs by the Beatles
• “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Björk again! “Big Time Sensuality”

A to A – Aeolian mode

This mode is better known as A natural minor — Aeolian is another one of those Greek names no one really uses.

Scale: A B C D E F G
Chord: A C E G B D F -- Am7

Natural minor is the basis of the whole minor-key universe and is a blog post unto itself. Use it whenever you need tragedy. Example: “Concierto de Aranjuez” by Joaquín Rodrigo (as played here by Miles Davis.)

B to B – Locrian mode

A very dark, strange scale. Like B natural minor with a flat second and fifth.

Scale: B C D E F G A
Chord: B D F A C E G -- Bm7(b5)

The flat second and fifth make Locrian very unstable, and I can’t think of any tunes based entirely on it. The main thing you need Locrian for is a minor-key chord progression that you see all the time in jazz:

Bm7(b5)  E7      Am
ii       V       i

Over Bm7(b5), you play B locrian (or A natural minor, however you prefer to think of it.) Over E7, you usually play A harmonic minor. Over Am, you can play any A minor scale of your choice.

One of my favorite jazz tunes is “Whisper Not” by Benny Golson, which is mostly made up of minor ii-V-i in various keys. Here’s the awesome Dizzy Gillespie big band arrangement:

Learning the modes

The best way to learn any music theory concept is in the context of actual music. “So What” teaches you Dorian mode better than any teacher can. That said, a good teacher can help you connect the various scales to specific pieces of music. Ideally, you should be studying songs that you already know and like.

Music theory takes a lot of memorizing, but it doesn’t need to be tedious. Even if you’re just systematically running the scales up and down, put a good drum machine beat on and try to get them to sound like music. If you’re in New York City, contact me and I’ll be happy to get you pointed in the right direction.

You might also enjoy a more general post about scales and emotions.

When you’re first learning to improvise, it’s daunting to be confronted with all the scales. Fortunately, there’s one scale that sounds good in any situation: the blues scale. It’s a universal harmonic solvent. I haven’t encountered a chord progression yet that didn’t fit with the blues scale. It works in blues, of course, but it also sounds terrific in rock, country, jazz, reggae, funk and much else.

How to play the blues scale

The blues scale is the minor pentatonic with a note added, the sharp fourth/flat fifth. The C blues scale is C, Eb, F, F#, G, Bb. Here it is in standard music notation:

And here’s how you program it into Auto-tune.

The blues scale is easy to play on guitar. Your index finger plays the root on the E string, so to play C blues, put your index on the eighth fret.

The Eb blues scale is exceptionally easy to play on piano — just play the black keys and add the note A.

The blues scale and music theory

In western music theory terms, the blues scale is practically inexplicable. The Eb in the C blues scale makes it sound minor, but the scale is customarily played on top of major chords. And no traditional western scale has three adjacent chromatic notes, the blues scale’s F, F# and G.

The F# is especially odd, since it’s a tritone away from the root C. But western music theory can’t explain everything that people like. From a science perspective, the F# is perfectly reasonable, since it emerges naturally from the overtone series of C. And science aside, there’s something about the blues scale’s asymmetrical sequence of big and small leaps that appeals to the intuition. I can’t articulate any particular reason why. Your thoughts on this are welcome.

As I said above, blues scale works in just about any improvisational situation. This makes it especially useful when you’re learning to play jazz. Until you’ve attained a significant level of mastery, it’s hard enough to follow a tune’s chord changes, much less express yourself while doing so. Even the best jazz soloists sometimes get lost in the changes. The blues scale is a reliable fallback position. Other musicians might judge you for not being able to make the changes, but the audience is always glad to hear blues, so I say, let the haters hate.

The blues scale is a fertile source of harmonic ideas for songwriting and arranging. Use the scale tones as roots for chords and get ready for pleasure. Dominant seventh chords work great: C7, Eb7, F7, F#7, G7, Bb7. The F# also suggests F# diminished, a jazz standby.

Blues scale melodies

As a kid, my most memorable exposure to the blues scale was Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme.” Mancini also uses chromatic approach notes above and below the scale tones, very hip.

Charles Mingus uses the blues scale as the upper extensions for a set of abstract chords in “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” This might be one of the most beautiful blues melodies in history.

“Take Five” by Dave Brubeck uses blues scale for its A section.

Other blues scales

You can combine the blues scale with other scales for a richer assortment of tones. Combining the blues scale with the major scale gives you the entire chromatic scale except for flat two and flat six. You can throw those two notes in as passing tones too, so you can effectively play any note you want over blues. That’s a lot of possibility!

Diminished chords sound great over blues. C diminished seventh is C, Eb, Gb, A. The combination of the major sixth A with the flat third Eb is especially tasty, since there’s a tritone between them. Check out the turnaround at the end of Miles Davis’ trumpet solo in “All Of You” on Round About Midnight for a great diminished chord blues lick. Listen at 1:40.

Blue notes

Blues wouldn’t be blues without blue notes. Blue notes are microtones in between blues scale notes and major scale notes. The pitches in between Eb and E, or between F# and G, are good examples. Here’s a more complete discussion of blue notes.

Blues is a confusing term. You probably have some idea of what blues is, but it’s surprisingly hard to define it specifically. There are many songs with the word “blues” in the title that aren’t technically blues at all, like “Lovesick Blues” by Hank Williams. John Lee Hooker was the living embodiment of blues, but a lot of his best-known songs aren’t technically blues either.

Meanwhile, there are quite a few songs using the blues form that you might not think to identify as blues. Two examples: “Shuckin’ The Corn” by Flatt and Scruggs, and the theme from the sixties Batman TV show.

So what exactly is blues?

Blues is a mood

The term descends from the “blue devils,” slang for depression. Blues music is a soulful, wailing expression of pain, heartbreak and yearning. But not all blues is depressing, and not all depressing music is blues. There’s a whole category of bragging, sexually dominant blues by artists like Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith, the precursors to swaggering hip-hop MCs. Meanwhile, punk-influenced bands like Nirvana and Radiohead make music that’s full of anguish, but you wouldn’t call their material blues. To me, blues is more about persevering through the pain than the pain itself. It’s an expression of adult regrets and sorrows, as opposed to rock’s more adolescent angst.

It’s possible to invest just about any style of music with blues feeling. In rock, jazz, country or pop, you can get blues feel by playing slower, swinging more, using more expression and idiosyncrasy, playing repetitive and riff-based ideas, and being as emotionally direct as possible. You can also slip in the blues scale; more on that below. I’ve noticed that most of the singers I like infuse everything they do with blues feeling, from Aretha Franklin to Gregg Allman to Michael Jackson.

Aside from the general emotion, the word blues refers to three specific technical music concepts: a scale, a set of pitches, and a song form.

The blues scale

To make the blues scale, start with a minor pentatonic scale and add the sharp fourth/flat fifth.

The blues scale descends from west African music brought to America by slaves. It sounds equally good over major and minor chords, and it flouts European conventions of consonance and dissonance. See a full blog post about the blues scale.

Blue notes

A lot of people incorrectly describe the flat third and seventh of the blues scale as “blue notes.” Blue notes are microtonal pitches that lie between the piano keys. See a full blog post about blue notes.

The blues song form

When musicians say “This song is a blues in C,” they mean that the song has a twelve-bar form using a particular combination of C7, F7 and G7 chords. All those 7th chords have unresolved tritones in them, a crucial ingredient in the blues feel. Here’s the simplest version of twelve-bar blues in C.

| C7 | C7 | C7 | C7 |
| F7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |
| G7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |

Here’s a more common version, with a little more complexity.

| C7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |
| F7 | F7 | C7 | C7 |
| G7 | F7 | C7 | G7 |

There are uncountable thousands of songs written in the twelve-bar blues form. One of my favorites is Muddy Waters’ “Standing Around Crying” — the devastating harmonica is by Little Walter Jacobs.

There are endless refinements and embellishments you can tack onto this basic structure. Jazz musicians will usually play something more like this:

| Cmaj7 | F7     | Cmaj7 | G-7 C7 |
| F7    | F#dim7 | C7    | A7     |
| D-7   | G7     | C7 A7 | D-7 G7 |

Again, to pick one example out of uncountably many, here’s “Parker’s Mood” by Charlie Parker.

“Parker’s Mood” and “Standing Around Crying” hint at the staggering breadth of expression you can get out of the twelve-bar-blues form. Some musicians return to the form again and again and never exhaust the possibilities. Duke Ellington alone probably wrote hundreds of twelve-bar blues tunes.

The blues form is basic knowledge for American musicians, which makes it a reliable standby, especially for informal or ad hoc groups. I did a show at St Nick’s Pub a few years ago with a jazz and R&B singer named Nicole Bishop. Most of her band members were meeting for the first time on stage that night. (In the jazz world this isn’t as unusual a situation as you might think.) The weather was bad, and Nicole was very late to the gig. To stall for time, the band played blues in various keys at various tempos, including “Twisted” by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and “Blue Monk” by Thelonious Monk. We were able to keep the audience from getting impatient and leaving until Nicole arrived.

There are some other widely-used blues forms other than the standard twelve-bar. Eight bar blues is the first two thirds of twelve-bar blues, as in “Bemsha Swing” by Monk. There’s also sixteen bar blues, which usually repeats bars nine and ten of the twelve-bar variety, as in “Watermelon Man” by Herbie Hancock.

Minor blues

It’s possible to play twelve-bar blues in minor keys too. Here’s a typical form.

| C-7 | C-7 | C-7 | C-7 |
| F-7 | F-7 | C-7 | C-7 |
| Ab7 | G7  | C-7 | C-7 |

“The Thrill Is Gone” by BB King is probably the best-known minor blues tune. John Coltrane loved the minor blues, and used it for some of his best compositions. My favorite is “Equinox,” which features what might well be the man’s most beautiful solo.

Lewis Porter has a full transcription of “Equinox” in his book John Coltrane: His Life And Music, an absolute must-read for jazz nerds.

Simpler blues forms

The simplest form of blues doesn’t have a formal name. I call it the “one chord blues,” an open-ended groove on a single chord, ambiguously major and/or minor. John Lee Hooker got a lot of mileage out of this form.

Coltrane played a lot of one-chord blues too, though with a very different stylistic vocabulary. Coltrane’s one-chord blues is about as intense as music gets.

Blues modules for guitar

Blues is exceptionally well suited to the guitar, since a lot of the tastiest riffs fall easily under the fingers. Here’s a standard boogie-woogie groove for blues in A. It’s a good exercise for a beginner who’s mastered the standard fifteen chords and wants to take the next step. Use your index on the second fret, your ring on the fourth fret and your pinkie on the fifth fret.

The racial politics of blues

The history of American music is largely the story of white people appropriating traditionally black forms. That’s never more true than the story of the blues. White musicians enriched rock and roll immeasurably by injecting it with big doses of blues, and some of them enriched themselves financially that way too. Some white blues appropriators have made a good-faith effort to show proper love and appreciation. Others, not so much. The Onion says it best: “Affluent White Man Enjoys, Causes The Blues.”

Blues and originality

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I take issue with the concept of originality in music. I don’t think that originality is desirable, or even possible. Long before I got involved in sample culture, I confronted the issue of originality and ownership in the context of blues. Take the guitar riff I wrote out above. Who owns that? Who originated it? If I use it in a song, am I being original?

Blues is defined by a set of distinctive cliches, interchangeable modules. Different people will combine those modules together in different ways, but everyone from Charlie Patton to Charlie Parker is drawing from the same box of legos. What’s the difference between creating an “original” blues tune and just stringing standard riffs together? If you want your blues to be recognizable as such, you have to stick close to tradition. For traditional players in the days before recordings and widespread copyrighting, there was hardly any distinction between quotation and composition. See an eloquent expression of this idea by Peter Friedman.

The key to blues playing is to not to even try to be original. Inhabit the cliches, play them in your distinctive voice, and enjoy the connection to all the other musicians who have used those same cliches. Feel the pleasure of your ego dissolving in the face of a huge and beautiful tradition, belonging to everyone and no one.

My mom is Jewish, so that’s enough for the tribe to have welcomed me as one of their own, but it’s a complex question as to what that membership means. Wikipedia has two separate articles for Judaism and Jews, to distinguish the religion from the ethnicity, and I definitely belong to the ethnicity more than the religion.

My most significant personal connection to the tribe, aside from family Passover seders and Seinfeld appreciation, has come through music, specifically klezmer music. I may not know my way around the Torah, but I know my harmonic minor modes inside and out.

Klezmer is mostly secular, for partying and dancing. Musically it overlaps with sacred Jewish music, but the subject matter tends to be a lot more earthly. A good analogy is the relationship between black gospel music and secular R&B. Jewish sacred music is sung in Hebrew; klezmer songs are usually in Yiddish. Also, klezmer songs usually have more of a dance beat, though they also sometimes make use of the rubato feel you hear in temple.

As jazz has Miles and Coltrane, and rock has the Beatles and the Stones, so klezmer has Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein. Dave is like the Beatles — polished, virtuosic, conversant with many musical styles. Naftule is like the Stones — more raw, more gutsy, inhabiting a single personal style that varies little from song to song. The best introduction to these guys is on the Rough Guide To Klezmer, which combines old-timey traditional music with newer hipster revivalists.

The first two tracks on the Rough Guide are recordings of “Fun Tashlikh,” first the 1990 version by the Klezmatics, then the 1930s or 40s version by Naftule.

The name means “on returning from the river.” “Fun” is related to the German “von,” meaning “from.” Tashlikh is the ritual of casting out your sins on Rosh Hashanah. The Klezmatics version isn’t embeddable, but it’s worth seeking out. It opens with wild shrieking bass clarinet and gets more intense from there. My Jewish relatives aren’t much given to ecstatic states, so it’s nice to hear that at least some parts of the tribe still know how to throw down.

Another standout track from the Rough Guide is “Der Gassen Nigen” by Harry Kandel’s Orchestra, from 1923. I’d love to embed it, but I can’t find it on the web. The tune sounds like a heartbreaking dirge, so I was extremely amused to learn that it’s actually a wedding processional. The name means “the street song,” and it was traditionally played as the bride and groom went back to their house from the temple where they were married. This says a lot about Jewish expectations around marriage. Kidding aside, “Der Gassen Nigun” is one of the most beautiful melodies I’ve ever heard. (The Rough Guide also includes Klezmokum’s maudlin modern version, which, meh.)

“Meron Nign (Tune From Meron)” by The Klezmer Conservatory Band is another Rough Guide standout. It kicks off with a killer unaccompanied mandolin solo that just begs to be sampled. I’ve found a lot of creative inspiration from dropping pieces of it into my tracks.

The only real-life klezmer band I’ve ever been part of was called F Train Klezmer. We weren’t very good. The high point of our performing career was at an old folks’ home in Washington Heights; otherwise we mostly just struggled through traditional material in the trombone player’s living room in Queens. I’ve tried to get various of my other bands interested in klezmer material too, without much success. I’m hoping that this post will draw more klezmer nerds out of the woodwork.

So what’s in this music for me? There’s the historical value — it’s good to know what kind of music my Yiddish-speaking great-grandparents were listening to. Getting into klez was a big bonding moment with my late grandmother, who danced to stuff like Dave and Naftule when she was young.

There’s present-day value too. I dig the sound of exotic Arabic-sounding scales over Western dance music forms. The easiest entry point into klez for Western-trained musicians is the Ahava Raba scale, also known as the phrygian dominant scale, the Freygish mode, and the Hava Nagilah scale. Jazz folks will recognize it as the fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale.

“Fun Tashlikh” uses something like diminished scale in its A section, and lydian dominant in the B section. It’s refreshing to my ears to be reminded that the major scale and its modes aren’t the be-all and end-all of popularly accessible music. Also, it’s cool to discover that flat seconds and fifths aren’t the exclusive province of highbrow artsy music. For all their exoticism, klezmer tunes are perfectly accessible to first-time western listeners.

Klezmer often gets referred to as “Jewish jazz.” This is an appealing name, and it has some basis in reality;Benny Goodman did take clarinet lessons from Dave Tarras. But jazz isn’t really the right analogy. The improvisation in klezmer is mostly variations and embellishments on the melodies, not like the harmonically-guided freeform lines in jazz solos. Klezmer is more like Jewish blues, or Jewish country. The scales are different, but the subject matter is mostly the same. Also, like blues and country, klezmer is full of soulfully expressive microtones.

Digging into klezmer also put me in contact with the music of the New York City Yiddish theater scene, which combined traditional shtetl sounds with American jazz and showtunes. You can hear this music, along with ads for various Lower East Side businesses, courtesy of the Yiddish Radio Project.

I’m especially drawn to the Yiddish vaudevillian Aaron Lebedeff. He was a comedian given to singing in “Yinglish,” going between Yiddish and English in mid-phrase. Here’s one of his big hits, lamenting how confusing America is to the newly-arrived Jewish immigrant. The chorus translates to “What can you do, it’s America.” I feel that way a lot.

My absolute favorite Aaron Lebedeff song is called “I Like She,” which I learned during my F Train Klezmer adventure. It’s pretty much impossible to find online, which is too bad because it’s hilarious. Sample lyrics:

She’s got cheeks like fresh tomatoes
She’s sweet like herring mit potatoes
I like she, and I like she and that’s all.

Klezmer is a distinctly fringe taste in America outside of Jewish hipsters in New York and their most elderly relatives. But it’s making a comeback in its original home in Eastern Europe. When I was in Krakow visiting Anna’s family, the klezmer musicians probably outnumbered the Jews significantly. My great-grandparents were mostly relieved to be putting the shtetl behind them and were eager to embrace American culture. For me, though, American culture has too many empty calories. Outsider music like klezmer, along with blues, jazz and hip-hop, feels a lot more nutritious.

I’ll close with the Klezmatics singing a traditional anthem of brotherly love, “Ale Brider.” Here’s a translation of the lyrics.

Oy, oy, oy, oy!