This is one of those jazz theory ideas that gets explained endlessly online and in texts and is relatively rare in a typical American’s listening experience. But when you do hear it, it does sound cool. I made an interactive explainer on Noteflight, because as with so many jazz theory concepts, tritone substitutions make more …
Tag Archives: James Brown
Identifying modulations
In class we have been talking about secondary dominants, where you temporarily treat a chord as a new key center before returning to the main key. In a modulation, you move to a new key center and stay there (for a while, anyway). Modulations were a common songwriting technique in pre-rock popular music, and a …
Improvising over secondary dominants
This week in aural skills we are improvising sung countermelodies over various chord progressions. The goal is to help the students feel the voice leading, the chromatic alterations and so on. This is especially important for playing over secondary dominants or “applied chords” as classical theory folks call them. I won’t explain these chords in …
Improvising countermelodies
How do you improvise a countermelody? Listen to things in the music and respond: imitate, vary, fill in gaps. Which tracks, though? Start with music that is harmonically uncomplicated enough that you can predict where it’s going, but with enough rhythmic interest to give you something to react to. I do not recommend the blues …
Identifying song forms
Song structure is a strange music theory topic, because there is not much “theory” beyond just describing it. Why are some patterns of song sections so broadly appealing? The answer has something to do with the balancing of surprise and familiarity, of predictability and unpredictability, but if someone has a systematic theory of why some …
Identifying the diatonic modes
In Aural Skills class we continue our sprint through harmony concepts with the diatonic modes. These are an advanced topic in classical theory, but for popular music, you need to deal with them up front, especially Mixolydian and Dorian. Here are the tunes I’m giving the class to practice distinguishing the modes from each other.
Identifying added-note chords
My NYU aural skills students are working on chord identification. My last post talked about seventh chords; this post is about chords with more notes in them, or at least, different notes. My theory colleagues call them added-note chords. They are more commonly called jazz chords, though many of the examples I list below are …
Building the Funky Drummer beat
I’m developing some groove pedagogy for an instrumental method book I’m working on with Heather Fortune. The goal is to help people understand and create Black American vernacular rhythms, specifically blues, rock, funk, dance, and hip-hop. As we started collecting and transcribing grooves, we quickly ran into a problem: all the really good ones use …
There Was A Time (I Got To Move)
Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case in point. It was first released on In The Jungle Groove in 1986, but was recorded back in 1970. …
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 …