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

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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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 not from jazz. You could also call them extended chords, or complicated chords, or fancy chords, or cool chords. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the numbers and symbols. My preferred way to organize all this information is to think of chords as vertically stacked scales. It is intimidating to try to learn to distinguish between C7, C9, C13, C7sus4, C9sus4 and C13sus4, but they are really just different combinations of the notes in C Mixolydian mode, and they all convey a similar “Mixolydian-ness”. But before we get to those, let’s start with extended chords you can make from regular old C major.

Major scale chords

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Bemsha Swing

I have “Bemsha Swing” on the brain for no special reason. It’s one of Thelonious Monk’s most persistent earworms, and every once in a while it wakens from its dormant state to occupy my music circuitry for a week or two or three. When I am jamming on the guitar, my fingers constantly find their way into it, and I walk around humming or whistling it  too. I like to think of my relationship with the tune as more symbiotic than parasitic, but either way, the tune is well and truly embedded in me. I don’t know how it was able to take such firm root, but maybe over the course of writing the post, some ideas will suggest themselves.

Monk co-wrote “Bemsha Swing” with drummer Denzil Best. KUVO explains that they originally copyrighted it under the title “Bimsha Swing”, referring to “Bimshire”, a nickname for Denzil Best’s family home of Barbados. Monk first recorded it in 1952 with Gary Mapp on bass and Max Roach on drums. 

Shame on Prestige Records for not bothering to tune the piano! But this happened to Monk a lot in the early days. I wonder how much of his style was driven by the need to make out-of-tune pianos sound good? He always managed to make them sing. In a Yamaha showroom, I saw a demo of their Spirio system, where they had extracted the piano notes from a video of Monk playing live, and they were being played back on a Disklavier. It was uncanny to hear that distinctive Monk-ian touch on a perfectly in-tune brand new grand piano right there in the room with me.

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Where do jazz standards come from?

My Song Factory class is coming up on the Standards and Showtunes unit, covering the Great American Songbook. I mainly relate to these tunes via jazz.

There are numerous sources of jazz standards. In this post, I collect some of the ones that appear in movie musicals, and I pair each one with a well-known jazz interpretation. (Note that most of these had appeared in stage musicals many years earlier.) Enjoy! Continue reading

Blues harmony primer

For a more detailed and scholarly version of this guide with a bibliography, see my Blues Tonality treatise.

How do chords and scales work in the blues? Is there a “blues scale”, and if so, what notes does it include? What are blue notes? Why does it sound good to play minor melody notes over major chords? To answer these questions, I combine my experiences of listening to and playing the music, talking to practitioners, and reading academic sources.

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The whole tone scale

Like diminished chords, the whole tone scale is not very widely used, but when you need that specific vibe, nothing else will do. Whole tone scales are easy to understand, because there are only two of them total. Whichever key you are in, there is a whole tone scale that includes the tonic, and another one that doesn’t. I have never seen a useful naming system for these two scales, so I call them yin and yang.

Notice that the notes not found in yin are all the notes in yang, and vice versa. Another fun thing is that when you write the whole tone scales on the circle of fifths, they look exactly the same as they do on the chromatic circle – all the yang scale tones just switch places with their counterparts a tritone away. Symmetry! Continue reading

The chromatic circle and the circle of fifths

The heart of Western tonal theory is this diagram:

It’s called the chromatic circle, and it shows all of the notes you can play with a piano keyboard or guitar fretboard. It is closely related to another extremely important diagram called the circle of fifths:

In this post, I explain where these diagrams come from and what they mean.

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Sonnymoon for Two

Sonny Rollins is a justifiably famous for his improvising, but he has also written several jazz standards that are as catchy as anything on top 40 radio: “St Thomas,” “Pent Up House,” “Doxy,” and the stickiest earworm for me personally, “Sonnymoon for Two.” Here’s an early studio recording:

Here’s the really famous version, from the Village Vanguard in 1957:

And here’s Horace Parlan quoting it in “Jelly Roll” by Charles Mingus:

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