Identifying embellishing tones

We’re getting started on melody in pop aural skills by talking about embellishing tones. The word “embellish” is from the Old French embelliss-, meaning to make something beautiful by ornamenting it. To understand what embellishing tones are, you first need to know about the tones they are embellishing. In Western tonal music and (non-blues-based) Anglo-American pop, the main melody notes are (usually) found within the underlying chords. For example, if the song has a C chord, then the main melody notes over that chord will (probably) be the notes C, E, or G. Any other melody note will be an embellishing tone.

There are many different kinds of melodic embellishments, but we will be dealing with just four: passing tones, neighbor tones, appoggiatura, and escape tones. Continue reading

Lil’ Darlin’

I finally got around to watching Tár. Early in the movie, Lydia helps her wife Sharon through a panic attack by dancing with her to one of my favorite jazz recordings, Neal Hefti’s tune”Lil’ Darlin'” as recorded by Count Basie. Lydia says, “Let’s bring this down to sixty beats per minute.” Sharon corrects her: “Sixty-four.”

That is incredibly slow! Neal Hefti intended the tune to be played at more of a medium swing tempo, but Basie was right to play it as a ballad. A guy on this trumpet forum thread describes it as “grown folks tempo.” A less skilled jazz ensemble would find it hard to resist the urge to speed up, but the Basie band actually slows down slightly over the course of the performance. That is incredible control.

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Swing primer

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah doo-wah” – Duke Ellington

Hear a seamless collage of several varieties of swing:

Aside from the blues, swing is the United States’ most significant musical innovation. People typically associate its rubbery, sensual feel with jazz, but swing is everywhere in the musics descended from the African diaspora: ragtime, blues, musical theater, country, R&B, rock, funk, reggae, hip-hop, electronic dance music, and so on. The best way to learn about swing is through aural and hands-on experience. The Groove Pizza is a good way to get started.

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Songs vs Grooves

Anne Danielsen’s book Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament is one of my favorite works of musicology. In the book, Danielsen distinguishes between songs and grooves.Yesterday” by the Beatles is a song. “The Payback” by James Brown is a groove.

In structural terms, a groove is a small musical cell that repeats indefinitely. A song is a hierarchical organization of smaller cells that form a linear sequence with a beginning, middle and end. The lack of large-scale structure in a groove makes it effortlessly malleable and extensible. Want to make it thirty seconds longer? No problem. Want to make it thirty minutes longer? No problem. Songs are not so flexible. If you wanted to make “Yesterday” longer, would you… make up more verses? Repeat the bridge again?

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It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing

Today is the Fourth of July, and I can’t think of anything more patriotic than a post about our most significant contribution to world musical culture: swing. The title of this post refers to the classic Duke Ellington tune, sung here by Ray Nance. Check out the “yah yah” trombone by Tricky Sam Nanton.

The word “swing,” like the word “blues,” has multiple meanings, depending on context. Swing is both a genre and a technical music term describing a certain rhythm. The two are related, but the rhythm has long outlived the genre.

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Coltrane was an analog remixer

If you’re in a band, chances are you feel like you’re supposed to be writing your own material. If you write your own songs, you can make more money from the publishing rights in addition to your album sales (should you, improbably, be selling albums.) But writing your own songs isn’t just a financial consideration. The influence of Bob Dylan and the Beatles created the expectation that popular musicians should be doing originals.

Before the mid-1960s, it was a different story. Pop and jazz artists mostly interpreted existing, familiar material, and only rarely wrote new stuff. Even the most prolific and brilliant jazz composers like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk devoted album after album to arrangements of standards. Nobody arranged standards more radically and personally than John Coltrane.

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