Tuesday, November 1, 2011
For me it’s a tie between two John Coltrane recordings. First, the Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings, featuring some of Eric Dolphy’s finest work.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
The bassline is neglected by most non-musicians. But if you want to write or produce music, you quickly find out how important it is. The bassline is the foundation of the whole musical structure, both rhythmically and harmonically. The best basslines interlock with the drums and other rhythm instruments to propel the groove, without you [...]
Filed in Composition, Dance, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged 808, art blakey, bass, beatles, black sheep, bootsy collins, charles mingus, daft punk, dance, digable planets, duke ellington, electronica, funk, groove, herbie hancock, hip-hop, james brown, janet jackson, john coltrane, kanye west, ladysmith black mambazo, looping, michael jackson, miles davis, morphine, paul simon, pop, rock, sequencing, talking heads, teddy riley
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Wednesday, August 31, 2011
When I was a kid, I’d listen to music and wonder, why is this chord progression so much more satisfying than that one? Now I know the answer: secondary dominants, chords that temporarily change the key in a logical-sounding way. If you want to take your songwriting in a more sophisticated direction, you definitely want [...]
Filed in Composition, Music, Music Teaching, Music Theory
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Also tagged alicia keys, bob dylan, cadences, chords, circle of fifths, Composition, country, elizabeth cotten, harmony, i got rhythm, jay-z, Music Theory, neil young, ragtime, secondary dominants, tritones
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It’s hard to figure out what key a piece of music is in. There are a lot of conflicting answers from different music theory texts. To make matters worse, it’s not at all unusual for a song to change keys, even within a section or phrase. Even rock songs written by totally naive songwriters can [...]
Filed in Music, Music Theory
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Also tagged blues, classical, hall and oates, harmonic minor, keys, major scale, melodic minor, Music Theory, pop, rock, scales
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My friend Leo has a new jazz quartet. At their debut performance a couple of weeks ago, they ended the show with a mashup of “Solar” by Miles Davis and “Freedom Jazz Dance” by Eddie Harris. “Freedom Jazz Dance” is a favorite of mine, and a lot of my fellow jazz nerds agree. People love [...]
Filed in Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged digging the crates, ed og, eddie harris, fu-schnickens, funk, hip-hop, mashups, miles davis, nas, Sampling
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The other night Anna and I went to see Beats, Rhymes And Life: The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest.
Filed in Key Musicians, Music, Sampling
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Also tagged a tribe called quest, cassettes, digging the crates, documentaries, fugees, hip-hop, lil wayne, masculinity, minnie riperton, movies, nineties, q-tip, Sampling
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Typical jazz compositions are written expressly as vehicles for improvisation. Mainstream jazz tunes since the 1940s take the form head-solos-head. The head is a written melody, and the solos are improvised around the chord changes of the head. Scores for these kinds of tunes take the form of lead sheets, like the ones found in [...]
Filed in Composition, Improvisation, Music
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Also tagged benny goodman, Composition, dizzy gillespie, duke ellington, Improvisation, john coltrane, miles davis, quora, thelonious monk
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Back in June we went to see the incomparable Reggie Watts perform at Central Park Summerstage. I think Reggie is one of the most exciting artists of our time, but it’s difficult to verbalize exactly what he does. His performances combine improvisational music and absurdist standup comedy into a free-associative yet oddly coherent and impactful [...]
Filed in Hardware, Improvisation, Key Musicians, Music, Race and Identity, Recording, Sampling
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Also tagged comedy, hip-hop, Improvisation, jake lodwick, looping, reggie watts
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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 [...]
Filed in Dance, Emotion, Music, Music Teaching
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Also tagged america, charles mingus, classical, count basie, drum machines, duke ellington, ella fitzgerald, funk, hip-hop, janet jackson, louis armstrong, ray nance, rhythm, soul, swing, syncopation, tchaikovsky, time, tricky sam nanton
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To answer your immediate question, the best thing to do is to go through a well-established music database and listen to representative tracks from each genre: Amazon, the iTunes store, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify if you’re in Europe, SoundCloud, take your pick. Figure out who the ten or twenty most popular and influential artists are in [...]