Identifying phrase structure

It’s easy to understand what a section of a song is: an intro, a verse, a chorus, a bridge. It is less easy to understand phrases, the components of a song section. Usually a song section contains between two and four phrases. But what is a phrase? No one seems totally sure. This is important to figure out, because if you aspire to write or improvise music, having control over your phrasing might be the most important thing you need. If you can organize your phrases, you can have limited technique and knowledge of theory and still sound good. If you can’t organize your phrases, all the technique and theory in the world won’t be much help.

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Things I wrote in 2023

This year I wrote a bunch of groove pedagogy, including a book proposal and related materials aimed at future publications and teaching. So far, the only published part of all that work is 5 Pop Grooves for Orff Ensembles, a collection of educational music that I composed with Heather Fortune. But lots more is coming, hopefully this year. More on that below.

The two most significant things that I actually completed this year were the syllabi for two New School classes, The Song Factory and Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling. Many of this year’s blog posts were motivated directly or indirectly by those classes.

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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.

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Rap before hip-hop

For the hip-hop unit in the Song Factory class at the New School, I want to start things off by clarifying the difference between hip-hop and rap. People use these terms interchangeably, but they really describe two different things: hip-hop is a culture, and rap is a musical expression of that culture. But rapping is also a musical technique, one that long predates hip-hop. Rap appears in every style of popular music descending from the African diaspora. I list examples from several of those styles below. You might debate me on whether some of these examples count as “rap” or not. Is it rap when you sing rhythmically on one pitch, or on a narrow range of pitches? Rap more often uses wider pitch contours. Are we counting any spoken word with musical accompaniment, or does the speaking have to be rhythmically structured in a specific way? Does it have to rhyme? We will be discussing all that in class.

Blues

John Lee Hooker – “Boogie Chillen” (1948)

Hooker raps a couple of short verses amid a mostly sung tune, and they are haunting. He is not exactly following the rhythm of the guitar part, but he’s also not using natural speech rhythm; it’s somewhere in between.

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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?

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Little Simz and Ramsey Lewis

In 1973, the Ramsey Lewis Trio performed their arrangement of “Summer Breeze” by Seals and Crofts on German television. This performance has been viewed an astonishing 1.6 million times on YouTube.

I learned that fact from Paul Thompson‘s analysis of the performance, which includes transcriptions of several of Cleveland Eaton’s basslines. Paul’s YouTube channel is one of the most valuable music education resources on the internet.

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Eye Know

Next fall, I’m teaching a class on musical copyright, ownership and borrowing at the New School. I will for sure be talking about De La Soul’s creative use of samples, including a deep dive into “Eye Know” from 3 Feet High and Rising.

This magnificent groove was stitched together from five different records. I list them here in their order of appearance in “Eye Know.” Continue reading

Building Hip-Hop Educators – new book chapter abstract

Oliver Kautny, a professor of music education at the University of Cologne, Germany, and founder of the Cologne Hip Hop Institute, invited me to contribute a chapter to a book that the Institute is planning to publish, an edited volume on hip-hop and music education as an open access book by Transcript Publishing. I’m co-writing my chapter with Toni Blackman, a central figure in my dissertation. Our working title is Building Hip-Hop Educators. Here’s the abstract.

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Don’t Sweat the Technique

I did not expect to hear a classic Eric B & Rakim track on The Crown, but at the end of season five, episode five, there was Dominic West as Prince Charles, dancing to this:

There is a lot going on here! The track opens with an upright bass and a drum kit playing a lightly swinging Latin rhythm. It sounds up close and full. After it plays twice, an entire funk band horn section riff enters, sounding like it’s being played on a small radio hanging from a nail on the wall. Then that same radio plays a riff from a single saxophone while Rakim’s voice, loud and clear, intones, “Don’t sweat the technique.” So that’s the first eight seconds. Next, a red hot distorted breakbeat enters, while the Latin bass/drums groove and the tinny radio sax riff continue looping. You would have no way of knowing that the breakbeat and the saxophone riff are sampled from the same recording, because they are mixed and processed so differently. This new groove plays four times, and then the saxophone riff switches to an angular and unpredictable funk riff using upper extensions of the Eb minor chord. All this before the first verse even starts. It’s a lot!

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