The album Coltrane’s Sound begins explosively. There’s a single-note saxophone pickup, and then bang, straight into the full band playing a big, bright latin tune. A few seconds in, the feel changes to swing, then back to latin. Sometimes the chords are pedaled, floating and modal; other times they seem like regular functional circle-of-fifths changes, …
Category Archives: Composition
How to learn to jam
Improvisation is the easiest and the hardest thing in music. Little kids do it effortlessly, while world-class performers and composers find it terrifying. I am a confident improvisor, but it took me a few decades to get here. Now I’m teaching classrooms full of undergrads to do it, which means coming up with more of …
That one weird chord in “Sir Duke”
You can feel it all over by Dr. Ethan Hein You can feel it all over people Read on Substack We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life’s release, and I plan to put in some quality musicology on it. I’m starting now, with a look at a single …
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
I have mentioned the Beatles on the podcast before, but this is the first episode entirely about one of their songs. It will probably be the first of many. Blackbird singing in the dead of night by Dr. Ethan Hein Take these broken wings and learn to fly Read on Substack
The Weight
Take a load off, Fannie by Dr. Ethan Hein Take a load for free Read on Substack There is a truism that art makes the strange familiar and makes the familiar strange. The Band’s biggest hit is intimately familiar to every classic rock listener, but it is quite a strange song. The lyrics seem like …
What I learned from remixing “Dreams” over and over
I was planning to talk about “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac in class when we discuss modal harmony. Music theory teachers like to bring this tune up as an example of Lydian mode, but I don’t hear it as being in F Lydian. It’s also not clearly in C major, or A minor, or really any …
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Happy In A Silent Way Day to all who celebrate
Today is the anniversary of the recording session for the best Miles Davis album, and in its honor, I did a podcast two-parter. In A Silent Way, side A: “Shhh/Peaceful” by Dr. Ethan Hein The conceptually weirdest Miles Davis album is also the best one Read on Substack In A Silent Way, side B: “In …
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Low end theory
How do you create a bassline? This question is not just for bass players. It’s for producers and songwriters, who are likely to be programming their own bass parts in their DAW. Keyboard players can do basslines in their left hand; guitarists do them with their thumbs. And even if you never create or play …
Mr Tambourine Man
I grew up with a cassette copy of Bringing It All Back Home. It was the first Bob Dylan album that I remember hearing, and I knew that my Boomer parents and classic-rock-loving peers revered it. That said, people definitely respected Bob more than they enjoyed him. I did enjoy a lot of Bringing It …
All of Me
My students and I tend to think of all pre-rock American popular songs as being “jazz”, because that’s the context in which we tend to encounter them. However, jazz was an artistic outgrowth of popular song, and it’s worth seeing how those tunes existed before jazz musicians began interpreting them. The jazz pianist, composer and …