I’d put “Oh Yoko” up there too. “Imagine” has a gorgeous melody, but the lyrics are like something an eighth grader would write.

Paul: “Live And Let Die”

A close second: “Maybe I’m Amazed.”

George: “I’d Have You Anytime”

Kind of a toss-up with “Isn’t It A Pity.”

Ringo: um, I dunno, maybe “Pure Gold”

Original post on Quora

Here’s the real video, which sadly I can’t embed. In its place, enjoy a fan video.

I’ve loved this song for years while barely being able to make out any of the words. I finally had to look them up on Google. MJ isn’t exactly Cole Porter, but his lyrics have nice body logic, they sound good and are super pleasurable to sing. MJ had the same songwriting strategy as the Beatles: he started with a melody over a rhythmic groove, developed using nonsense syllables. Only later, once the whole song was in place and recorded as a demo, did he find words that fit the metrical scheme.

Verse one:

Lovely is the feeling now
Fever, temperatures rising now
Power (ah power) is the force, the vow
That makes it happen
It asks no questions why
So get closer
To my body now
Just love me
‘Til you don’t know how

The melodic nut meat of this tune is on the words “lovely,” “fever,” “power,” “happen” and so on. The first syllable of these words is sung on D#, the major third in the key of B. The second syllable is on the A below, the flat seventh in B. The interval between these two notes is a tritone. It’s a sound with a richly conflicted emotional resonance. If you’re willing to follow me through a little music theory, it’ll help you understand what makes this song so awesome.

Western music theory is based on the buildup and release of tension. One of the best ways to create tension is with dissonance. The tritone is considered by European tradition to be a very dissonant interval. Every major key has a tritone in it, between the fourth and seventh notes of the scale (fa and ti, for Sound Of Music fans.) If you’re a typical western listener and you hear a tritone, your ear wants it to resolve to a less dissonant interval. You want the fa to resolve down to mi, and the ti to resolve up to do.

African-American music treats the tritone very differently. The blues uses tons of unresolved tritones. In blues, chords with tritones can functionally feel stable and resolved, “dissonant” though they may be. (The music has lots of other intriguing harmonic grittiness, like microtones, and the simultaneous use of minor and major thirds.) The blues passed the unresolved tritone on to its many musical descendants: jazz, rock, funk and so on.

MJ is squarely within his musical tradition to be basing his melody on an unresolved tritone. Still, it’s startling to hear it featured so prominently and starkly in a pop song, on the very first two notes of the vocal melody no less. It gives a jolt of intensity to what might otherwise be a harmless piece of disco fluff.

Music is fundamentally all about math. Most of the musical intervals in the western tuning system are based on simple ratios, the kinds of numbers you can count on your fingers. The interval between A and the next A up is an octave, meaning that the ratio between the two notes’ frequencies is one to two. The interval between A and E is a fifth, a ratio of two to three. The interval between A and C# is a major third, a ratio of four to five. The tritone is different. The interval between A and D# is one to the square root of two. Your ear might not know which specific irrational number it’s hearing, but it knows that something weird and complex is at work, something you can’t count on your fingers.

“Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” asserts further non-European quality in its extremely minimalist chord progression. It has just two chords, A major and B7. The A major has B as its bass note, which really makes it more of a B9sus4 chord. The music term for this kind of unvarying chord pattern is a modal groove. In this case the mode is B mixolydian.

Western music is mostly linear. The chord progression tells a story of dissonance leading to consonance, or vice versa. Modal tunes are more Eastern, trance-like and drone-oriented. They’re about creating a cyclical ambiance, a mood rather than a narrative. “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” shares its modal quality with my other favorite Michael Jackson original, “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” which he wrote around the same time.

MJ’s chorus adds to the trance-inducing vibe by repeating the same line over and over:

Keep on with the force, don’t stop
Don’t stop ’til you get enough

It’s more of a mantra than a semantic idea. It helps keep the mind clear for the business at hand, the business of getting your groove on from the waist down.

The harmony and lyrics might be static, but there’s a lot of music packed into this track. Ben Wright’s string arrangement chases up and down the chromatic scale, adding another dash of unsettling dissonance. There are multiple layers of bells, handclaps and other percussion, and the bass and guitar mostly function as percussion too. Jerry Hey’s tight horn chart makes the brass into yet another percussion element, rather than a melodic one. Check out the stab at 1:37, the end of the first chorus. Hot!

As with all of MJ’s hits, “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” has been sampled many times. Some highlights, more or less in chronological order:

• Jazzy Jay – “Def Jam”
• Public Enemy – “Can’t Do Nuttin’ For Ya Man”
• Double Trouble & Rebel MC – “Just Keep Rockin’ (Remix)”
• Slick Rick – “Impress The Kid”
• Mase ft Jay-Z, 112 and Lil’ Cease – “Cheat On You”
• Beyoncé – “Black Culture”
• People Under the Stairs – “Tuxedo Rap” (the sample is pitch-shifted way down, cool)

Purists might find it jarring, but I’m enjoying this remix with Jay-Z.

Here’s my own contribution:

MJ Makossa

mp3 download, ipod format download

Don’t stop!

The phrase is a play on the opening of Carl Perkins’ Blue Suede Shoes, as made famous by Elvis:

One for the money, two for the show
Three to get ready, now go, cat, go

For the hip-hop world, the main reference point seems to be Spoonie G’s “Spoonin’ Rap” from 1979. Old school! Spoonie’s line is enigmatic in its meaning.

You say one for the treble, two for the time
Come on y’all, let’s rock the [whistle]

Spoonie’s Rap inspired some other early hip-hop artists. Two years later, Grandmaster Flash opened “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel” with a scratch of Spoonie G. West Street Mob starts “Break Dance Electric Boogie” with Spoonie too, though they interject a word of their own — “You say a-one for the treble, two for the time, come on y’all, let’s BREAK DANCE” (said in vocoded robot voice.)

Other songs that quote or reference “Spoonie’s Rap:”

• Kurtis Blow – “Under Fire“
• Common – “Food For Funk” (not on Youtube, sadly)
• DJ Khaled ft. Ja Rule, Fat Joe & Jadakiss – “New York Is Back” — combines Spoonie G with Carl Perkins, “One for the treble, two for the show.”

The other big hip-hop reference point is Davy DMX, who uses a different variation of the phrase in his song “One For The Treble.”

One for the treble, two for the bass
Come on Davy D, let’s rock this place

This song, and Spoonie’s, both really signify for Mos Def, who quotes them on at least three of his tracks: “Undeniable,” “Hip Hop” and “Oh No” ft.Pharoahe Monch & Nate Dogg.

A Tribe Called Quest quotes Davy DMX about a minute into their song “Oh My God” featuring Busta Rhymes:

Other people quoting Davy DMX:

• Brand Nubian – “Steal Ya Ho“
• Aceyalone – “Treble And Bass“
• Snoop Dogg – “Can I Get A Flicc Witchu“
• Tech N9ne – “Bout Ta’ Bubble“
• Sergio Mendes ft. Erykah Badu and Will.i.am – “That Heat“

This couldn’t possibly be all the instances of this meme out there. If there are more interesting ones, let me know.

Update: hear a Spotify playlist with most of the songs mentioned here, and in the comments.

There’s much to love about this album beyond its joyously ridiculous science fiction theme. There are the deft, bebop-flavored horn charts by James Brown’s trombonist Fred Wesley. There are the irresistible beats by Jerome Brailey, who laid the rhythmic foundation of hip-hop (along with Clyde Stubblefield and the Incredible Bongo Band.) And there are the squiggly Moog synths by Bernie Worrell.

Bernie’s hottest lick out of many on this album is the one that kicks off “Do That Stuff:”

Bernie’s little synth phrase has had a long musical life outside its original context. Nice And Smooth used it as the hook for their classic “Funky For You.”

“Funky For You” made a big enough impact on hip-hop to have been sampled itself quite a few times. Red Hot Lover Tone used it on “Wanna Make Moves,” featuring Greg Nice himself.

The sample works just as well outside hip-hop. Röyksopp used it just last year in their delightful dance track, “Happy Up Here:”

The most exciting part of this track for me is the bridge, when Röyksopp transposes the sample to fit over a dramatic chord progression. I love it when samplers do this kind of adventurous reharmonizing, it brings electronic music closer to the intellectual spirit of jazz.

George Clinton has always been enthusiastically positive about the use of P-funk samples in hip-hop and elsewhere (though the owners of his copyrights aren’t nearly so open-minded, sadly.) Clinton’s pro-sampling attitude makes sense, given that he sometimes sampled from himself. “Do That Stuff” recycles a riff he used in an earlier song, “You Can’t Miss What You Can’t Measure” by Funkadelic.

Hear a mashup of all the tracks mentioned above:

Do That Stuff Megamix by ethanhein

The Clones Of Dr Funkenstein as a whole has been a rich source of inspiration for electronic musicians. Here’s a map of all the noteworthy samples; click through to see it bigger.

Bernie Worrell’s keyboards have had a bigger footprint in my music-listening life than just P-Funk and the many hip-hop songs sampling them. In the early eighties he was a regular guest member of Talking Heads. He plays on The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads, Speaking In Tongues and Stop Making Sense. His plangent keyboard melody in “This Must Be The Place” is just begging to be sampled. Pretty much everything he’s put down sounds as fresh now as the day it was recorded. I want to go back and get more of that funky stuff!

The Apache break is an especially interesting sample, because there’s a yawning gap between its lame original context and the diversity of uses that musicians have since put it to. More than most samples, the Apache break has enormously transcended and eclipsed its original context. “Apache” was first written as fake Native American music by Jerry Lordan in the late fifties, inspired by a cowboys-and-Indians movie. How such a lame song became a cornerstone of electronic music is a long and convoluted story. Here are two good tellings: an essay called All Roads Lead To Apache, and a followup New York Times article.

Here’s the story of “Apache” in network diagram form:

“Apache” has been sampled uncountably many times. The first noteworthy example is “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.”

In a similar vein, check out Double Dee & Steinski’s “Lesson” mixes. They’re must-hears if you care about the art of the mashup.

In keeping with the old-skool flavor, here’s West Street Mob’s “Break Dance Electric Boogie,” which uses some of the horn parts from the Incredible Bongo Band recording in addition to the percussion break. Got to love those vocoded robo-vocals.

The first song to sample Apache that landed on my consciousness was probably “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…” by C+C Music Factory:

Drum n bass producers love the Apache break. Instead of just looping the sample, they like to slice and dice it into new, more complex beats. Goldie’s “Inner City Life” is a high-profile example. I admire the drum n bass guys conceptually, but when it comes to day-to-day listening I’ll take hip-hop every time. Nas uses the Apache break on “Made You Look” — I think he even paid for it.

I have some friends who like hip-hop as music but are uncomfortable with the practice of sampling. They have this idea that sampling is a form of stealing. These friends tend to rally around the Roots, who play hip-hop on live instruments. The thing is, even though the Roots’ Questlove is one of the best drummers in the world, he also programs and uses samples in his production work. Hear Roots MC Black Thought do one of his hottest rhymes over Apache on “Thought@Work”:

When the Roots play this live, Quest and the percussionist re-create the break in the manner of The Sugarhill Gang’s “Apache Rap.” Missy Elliot sampled the Sugarhill Gang remake in “We Run This.”

Electronic music undermines the western concept of the composer. For any track based on the Apache break, who composed it? Jerry Lordan wrote the song but you’d never guess a connection between his original recording and anything that samples the Incredible Bongo Band. Should the composer credit go to the Incredible Bongo Band? Or just their rhythm section? Should it go to Kool Herc or whichever DJ first had the idea to loop the break by itself, or the producer who did the sampling? What’s the connection between Jerry Lordan’s song, the Bongo Band version, the Sugarhill Gang’s recreation of it and Missy Elliot’s song sampling the Sugarhill Gang? To me, the question becomes meaningless. Music emerges out of collective cultural practice more than any single person’s mind.

Asking what the origin is of a given piece of music is like asking what the origin is of my blue eyes. The gene/musical meme analogy is a useful one. James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” has dominant hip-hop genes. The roots of hip-hop are obvious in this song, since JB is literally rapping over a funk beat. It’s like the way my mom has blue eyes — there’s no big mystery where that gene came from in me. My dad had brown eyes, though; the blue-eyed gene was recessive in him. The hip-hop gene is recessive in the Bongo Band’s “Apache”, and more recessive still in Jerry Lordan’s original.

Hit me in the comments for noteworthy Apache mixes. I’m working on a mix of my own, I’ll post it when it’s done.

MJ never made a video for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” leaving a vacuum that the fans are only too happy to fill. This video even includes footage of MJ’s video game.

This MJ song has inspired a lot of fan art, maybe because it is itself fan art. The music industry likes to send lawyers after people who make fan art, which is dumb and self-destructive on their part. No fan art, no art.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is my favorite Michael Jackson song, against much stiff competition. Several of MJ’s most famous songs were written by Quincy Jones or Rod Temperton, but MJ wrote this one himself. It’s serious and personal. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s long, respectful article in GQ talks about MJ’s process:

By 1978, the year of “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” — co-written by Michael and little Randy — ”Michael’s methods have gelled. He starts with tape recorders. He sings and beatboxes the little things he hears, the parts.

No wonder hip-hop musicians love MJ. Improvising into recording devices is where hip-hop comes from. MJ’s music is very electronic. There are places in “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” where different pieces of the lead vocal overlap, making it impossible for one person to really sing it live. All the backing vocals on the final version are overdubbed MJ.

Some of the things Michael hears in his head he exports to another instrument, to the piano (which he plays not well but passably) or to the bass. The melody and a few percussive elements remain with his vocal. The rest he assembles around it. He has his brothers and sisters with him. He conducts.

If he were a young guy now he’d probably be recording his siblings on his laptop using Pro Tools.

His art will later depend on his ability to stay in touch with that childlike inner instrument, keeping near enough to himself to hear his own melodic promptings. If you’ve listened to toddlers making up songs, the things they invent are often bafflingly catchy and ingenious. They compose to biorhythms somehow. The vocal from Michael’s earlier, Off the Wall-era demo of the eventual Thriller hit “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” sounds like nothing so much as playful schoolyard taunting.

The final version is produced by Quincy Jones, though MJ probably did most of the arrangement. The groove is based on a drum machine loop, with some Brazilian percussion on top. Three different guys are playing synths. The top-notch horn section plays with a perfection that makes them sound sequenced, but with full analog fidelity.

“Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is a close musical cousin to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” They were written around the same time. DJs like to run them together at the peak of the night. Harmonically they’re extremely minimalist, using static mixolydian mode for the entire length of the song. That minimalism makes both songs sound fresher and more contemporary than MJ’s other disco material.

“Don’t Stop” has upbeat party lyrics that match its sound. “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is musically exuberant too, but the lyrics are mostly very dark and intense.

I said you wanna be startin’ somethin’
You got to be startin’ somethin’
I said you wanna be startin’ somethin’
You got to be startin’ somethin’

The tone goes from confrontational to helpless.

It’s too high to get over (yeah, yeah)
Too low to get under (yeah, yeah)
You’re stuck in the middle (yeah, yeah)
And the pain is thunder (yeah, yeah)

I took my baby to the doctor
With a fever, but nothing he found
By the time this hit the street
They said she had a breakdown

Someone’s always tryin’
to start my baby cryin’
Talkin’, squealin’, lyin’
Sayin’ you just wanna be startin’ somethin’

Normal pop songs were mostly not this serious in the early eighties.

You love to pretend that you’re good
When you’re always up to no good
You really can’t make him hate her
So your tongue became a razor

Someone’s always tryin’
to keep my baby cryin’
Treacherous, cunnin’, declinin’
You got my baby cryin’

This is the verse that gives me the most pause.

You’re a vegetable, you’re a vegetable
Still they hate you, you’re a vegetable
You’re just a buffet, you’re a vegetable
They eat off of you, you’re a vegetable

There’s the mysterious guest appearance by Billie Jean.

Billie Jean is always talkin’
When nobody else is talkin’
Tellin’ lies and rubbin’ shoulders
So they called her mouth a motor

This verse is probably directed at MJ’s father, who told the family around the time of this song’s writing that he had been having an affair and had fathered a child with his lover.

If you can’t feed your baby (yeah, yeah)
Then don’t have a baby (yeah, yeah)
And don’t think maybe (yeah, yeah)
If you can’t feed your baby (yeah, yeah)

You’ll be always tryin’
To stop that child from cryin’
Hustlin’, stealin’, lyin’
Now baby’s slowly dyin’

After all this anguish, MJ is still determined to keep a brave face, and for you to enjoy yourself. So he ends with uplift.

Lift your head up high
And scream out to the world
I know I am someone
And let the truth unfurl

No one can hurt you now
Because you know what’s true
Yes, I believe in me
So you believe in you, help me sing it

And finally, the famous chant.

Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa
Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa
Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa
Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa

The chant is an approximate quote from a song by Manu Dibango called “Soul Makossa.” Manu Dibango’s song is mostly playfully riffs around the word makossa, a Cameroonian dance style. MJ was sued for the quote, but he probably didn’t mean any harm. The chant is a work of Manu Dibango fan art. Rihanna’s “Please Don’t Stop The Music” is fan art based on fan art. You could add another layer of recursion by doing a fan remix of the Rihanna song.

Plenty of people have sampled and quoted both Manu Dibango’s song and MJ’s.
The Rihanna song is especially interesting to me because it doesn’t just quote the chant, it reharmonizes it. MJ’s song is in E major. Rihanna’s song is in F# minor. This technique of taking a well-known melody line and writing a radically different harmony for it is widely used in jazz. The B minor and F# natural minor chords from Rihanna’s song are from the same E mixolydian scale as the E7 and D major chords in MJ’s, but they have a totally different emotional effect. (If you strum B minor and F# minor on guitar along with the end of MJ’s song, it sounds amazing.) Rihanna’s song is tragic and anxious. It picks up on the underlying tragedy and anxiety of MJ’s song. That’s quality fan art.

Here’s a mashup of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” and “Soul Makossa” with many related and derivative works.

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

This is a continuation of a post about Rhymefest’s MJ mixtape. The thought continues in a post about who owns the chant.

The compilation is named for a breakdown section that appears in “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” James Brown quiets the band down to handclaps, footstomps and congas played by Johnny Griggs. After he raps a little, James Brown cues drummer Clyde Stubblefield back in, followed by bassist Bootsy Collins and the rest of the band.

James Brown wasn’t intentionally trying to create a perfect batch of hip-hop samples in the late sixties and early seventies, but he couldn’t have succeeded any better if he had been. The “Give It Up” breakdown has been sampled by everybody from Public Enemy to Doug E Fresh to NWA to Big Audio Dynamite to Miles Davis. It takes a powerful piece of music to inspire so much new work in such a variety of styles.

There’s an ugly history of racial slurs for African-Americans around jungles. James Brown made it a point to reclaim jungle imagery in a context of joyful pride. He has several songs that include a break where it’s just the congas and his chanting about being in the jungle, brother, swing on the vine, check out your mind. The history of agriculture and high tech societies is short. The stone age was long. We’ll never know exactly what music sounded like in the stone age, but I’d guess that James Brown’s jungle breakdowns give a good idea.

It’s wrong of white racists to degrade black people by comparing them to monkeys because it denies the fundamental similarities that we all share with our primate cousins. As I try to imagine how our more monkey-like ancestors first started inventing music, I think it’s reasonable to assume they started with rhythm, with clapping their hands and stomping their feet. I’m convinced by Steven Mithen’s theory in The Singing Neanderthals that dance was the precursor to walking on two feet.

Rhythm is the most fundamental component of music. Every other aspect emerges from it. Pitches are very fast rhythms. If you play a series of clicks faster and faster, eventually they appear to fuse into a whir, then a thrum, then a low-pitched tone. The faster the clicks, the higher the pitch. Combining different pitches gives you melodies and harmonies.

Clapping your hands, stomping your feet and chanting are the easiest entry points to music making, and they never get old. With all of our technology, we still aren’t tired of that stone age sound. I’m thinking about Queen and “We Will Rock You”, about Lil Mama and “Lip Gloss”, Michael Jackson and the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.” Swing on the vine, check out your mind!

Here’s a mashup of “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose” with “Clapping Music” by Steve Reich.

Clap Your Hands by ethanhein

Probably my favorite Miles album out of many great ones is In a Silent Way. It’s from early in his jazz-funk period, when his music consisted more of open-ended grooves than traditional songs. Each side of In A Silent Way is a single long track, pieced together by Miles and producer Teo Macero from excerpts of long improvisations. Earlier Miles albums had used tape editing to create seamless suites and to composite different takes of the same tune together, but In A Silent Way was the first to use the mixing desk as a fundamental compositional tool. Miles and Teo remixed the improvs into something unambiguously new.

The live performances were recorded in a single day in February of 1969 by a top-flight band, a veritable who’s who of jazz fusion. Wayne Shorter played soprano sax, in a style closer to Coltrane than Kenny G. The teenaged John McLaughlin played electric guitar — he had met Miles for the first time the night before, and he gave the performance of his career. The rhythm section was another pair of teenagers, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Tony Williams. Both of these guys were already dazzling virtuosos, but Miles had them play extremely simple, repetitive, uninteresting parts. Had this album been made twenty years later, my guess is that he probably would have used sampled bass loops and a drum machine. In another particularly futuristic choice, Miles included three keyboard players: Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, both on electric piano, and Joe Zawinul on organ.

The suites on each side of In A Silent Way each contain three sections. The first and last sections are identical copies of the same stretches of tape. This decision was prompted by the original edit being too short for a full album. The duplication was a lazy solution, but sometimes the lazy solution is the right one. In this case, the move transformed In A Silent Way from a pleasant jazz fusion album into a milestone of electronic music production.

Repetition of musical material is nothing new. Mozart used the “A, B, A again” structure for dozens, if not hundreds, of his compositions. What’s new about In A Silent Way is that the A sections are perfectly identical copies, not just repeat performances of the same score. Copying and pasting recordings has become a common music production technique in the computer era, but there was nothing ordinary about it in 1969. And while copying and pasting has become a mainstream idea, contemporary producers usually copy and paste single phrases. It’s rare to duplicate such long passages.

In 2001 Columbia released the unedited recordings from the Silent Way sessions. Miles nerds got to hear firsthand what had gone into the album and what got cut. Side one, “Shhh/Peaceful”, was originally a conventional sixties jazz tune by Joe Zawinul, a complex melody played in unison on the horns, followed by a solo section. The final edit cuts the melody entirely, jumping from a short ambient intro right into the first beat of the solos. Poor Joe Zawinul was probably pretty upset at having his entire composition wind up on the cutting room floor. In interviews he also griped that Miles reworked the solo sections, replacing their chord progression with a simple, open-ended D pedal. Listening now, I side with Miles. The frenetic density of Zawinul’s writing hasn’t aged well. To my ears it sounds anxious and underdeveloped. Miles made the tune more spacious, groove-oriented and repetitive, more like modern dance music than sixties jazz. The original composition was severely dated, but the groove it inspired is timeless.

My single favorite trumpet-playing moment of Miles’ career occurs at around 4:18 into “Shhh/Peaceful.” He’s playing a phrase that winds up and down the chromatic scale. You expect it to land on the tonic D, but instead he plays E flat, the most dissonant possible note in the western tuning system. You think it might be an accident, but then Miles deliberately repeats the E flat and holds it out. What begins as hair-raising dissonance ends up convincing you of its exotic beauty.

The groove segment of side two, “It’s About That Time”, is hardly even a tune at all. It’s comprised of two riffs, a dreamy six-bar chord figure and a funky four-bar bassline. It sounds less like a jazz composition and more like the kind of thing you’d put together with a loop sequencer like Reason or Ableton Live. This is the kind of forward thinking that keeps electric Miles albums sounding so much fresher than anything by his peers.

Miles’ interest in electronic music has made him a beloved figure among younger musicians who aren’t much interested in bebop. Bill Laswell did a pretty cool remix album of In A Silent Way and the electric funk-oriented albums that followed called Panthalassa. There are also some classic hip-hop tracks that sample Miles, like the trumpet scream in OutKast’s song “Ain’t No Thang.”

I wish every jazz musician would get on board with electronic music production techniques the way Miles did. The harmonic and rhythmic training you need to play jazz can enrich your ambient groove playing tremendously. Electronica producers tend to love jazz; I wish the love was more mutual.

Here’s a documentary about the wah:

Cry Baby: The Pedal That Rocks The World from Joey Tosi on Vimeo.

Combined with a guitar, the wah can do more than vowel glides. When you mute the strings and strum through a wah, you get a percussive sound ranging from “chicka chicka” to “chucka chucka.” By filtering the overtones differently, you can make other vocal sounds too. I have a digital effects unit that can make the guitar say the word “yeah” pretty convincingly. These kinds of effects give a guitarist the emotional immediacy of the voice combined with the guitar’s wide range of pitches and richness of harmonic possibility.

The guitar isn’t the only instrument you can use with a wah, and it wasn’t the first. The pedal was invented somewhat by accident when the Thomas Organ Company was developing a tone modifier for amplifiers. The first instrument they tried with it was an amplified saxophone, and the company thought they might market it for wind instruments in big bands, as an electronic version of the Harmon mute. A guitarist who worked for the company named Del Casher heard the possibilities of the new tone modifier, and he was the first person to make a recording of it in 1966.

Frank Zappa was an early adopter, and he introduced it to Jimi Hendrix, who would be the first to break it into mass consciousness with “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” Jimi also introduced the percussive “chicka chicka” on “Little Miss Lover.” Jimi’s solos on “All Along The Watchtower” is another distinctive early adventure with wah. Plenty of other hippie rockers followed suit. George Harrison has a song called “Wah-Wah” on All Things Must Pass, named both for the pedal and for the Beatles’ whining during their final sessions together. Eric Clapton uses wah with Cream on “Tales of Brave Ulysses” and “White Room”.

Pop culturally, wah is most associated with seventies funk and soul, like on “Theme From Shaft” by Isaac Hayes, with Charles Pitts on guitar. Curtis Mayfield also had a distinctive and much-imitated wah style. From blaxploitation soundtracks it was a short jump to the porn movies that imitated them, which is why funky wah guitar is an effective comedy shorthand for getting busy. But wah doesn’t have to be seductive. Eddie Hazel of Funkadelic used it for a dark, spacey cry on “Maggot Brain.” Click here to listen to some standard wah techniques on electric guitar. The wah pedal sounds especially good on E9, the mother of all funk chords.

Hard rock and metal guitarists have found a vocabulary for wah drawing more on Hendrix and Zappa than on funk. Zappa used it less like a speech effect and more like a simple adjustable filter. He would leave it partially open to filter the high frequencies over the course of an entire song. Distortion exaggerates out the guitar’s upper harmonics and other partials, and the wah makes a great envelope controller. Jimmy Page used it on Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “No Quarter” and “Custard Pie”. Slash used it with Guns N’ Roses, and Kirk Hammett leans heavily on it with Metallica.

Bassists sometimes use the wah too, especially in the funk and soul world. Michael Henderson played with one on Miles Davis’s album On the Corner. Other wah-loving bassists include Metallica’s Cliff Burton and Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler.

Electric pianos and harpsichords operate in very much the same way as electric guitars, so it was only a matter of time before keyboard players started investigating guitar effects. Clavinet with wah sounds so much like guitar that it’s hard to tell them apart. Garth Hudson plays some pretty groovy clav with The Band on “Up On Cripple Creek”, but nothing is as funky as Stevie Wonder on “Superstition,” “Higher Ground” and his other seventies classics. Electric piano also sounds great through wah, again because of its guitar-like tone when played through an amp with distortion. Richard Wright uses it on Pink Floyd’s “Money”, and it’s on tons of Miles Davis electric recordings, especially the ones with Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea.

Any instrument that’s amplified can be played through a wah. Miles Davis got a devastating trumpet tone with wah on Live-Evil and his other darker funk records. A few saxophone players have experimented with it too, as the pedal’s original inventors intended. David Sanborn played with one on the David Bowie album Young Americans, and Dana Colley used it with Morphine.

Violin sounds great with wah. The leading practitioners are Jean-Luc Ponty in the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Boyd Tinsley in the Dave Matthews Band. Pink Floyd even tried some wah on an acoustic piano in their song “Echoes”, which also includes wah guitar made to sound like crying birds. I myself have found that wah sounds terrific on mandolin. I’ve also tried it on harmonica, but there it’s redundant since you can do the wah effect so easily with your mouth.

Wah is just one flavor of the envelope filtering you can do with a synthesizer. A lot of the craft of electronic music comes down to creative rhythmic use of the filter. A standard technique is to get a repetitive loop happening and then sloooowwwly open and close the filter over the course of a phrase or section. Since a sequencer or computer can play the actual synthesizer notes, it frees up the musician’s hands for complex multi-parameter filter control using knobs or touchscreens. We’re only at the beginning of our collective exploration of the artificial vowel glide in music.