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 …
Category Archives: Key Musicians
Jack Straw
After spending their first few years writing abstract psychedelic tunes, the Grateful Dead took a hard turn into Americana. They wrote a bunch of songs inspired by blues, country and folk, and in doing so, they massively expanded their listener base. Several of these songs involve outlaws and drifters in the Wild West. I think …
Whisper Not
When I was in college, I picked up a cassette of Legacy by Jon Faddis from the dollar bin at the record store. It’s a kind of greatest hits of jazz trumpet, and it was one of the best dollars I ever spent. The last three tunes were especially wonderful: “A Child Is Born” by …
Can I Kick It?
In order to shop at the Park Slope Food Coop, you have to do a monthly work shift. I do two a month, one for me and one for my wife, who is much too busy earning most of our money to do her own shifts. I work early mornings on the Receiving squad. As …
You’re Gettin’ A Little Too Smart
After reading Dilla Time, I did a deep dive into Dilla’s preferred sample sources, including the Detroit Emeralds. Here’s one of their nastiest grooves: I combined that opening groove with Charles Mingus and Vassily Kalinnikov to create one of my favorite of my own tracks: Mingus Kalinnikov by Ethan Hein According to WhoSampled.com, “You’re Getting …
Gladys Knight heard it through the grapevine
I am very attached to Marvin Gaye’s version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and somehow managed to not even hear Gladys Knight’s recording until late in life. I recognized immediately that Gladys’ version is a banger, but it took me a while to relax my preconceptions and warm up to it.
Exploring Hip-Hop Pedagogies in Music Education
Over the weekend I went to a hip-hop education panel organized and moderated by my fellow white hip-hop advocate Jamie Ehrenfeld, featuring four of the brightest lights in the field: Jamel Mims aka MC Tingbudong (rapper in English and Mandarin), Dizzy Senze (devastatingly great freestyle rapper), Regan Sommer McCoy (curator of the Mixtape Museum), and …
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Freedom Jazz Dance
A friend texted me to tell me that he was listening to a jazz show on public radio in Denver, and that they referenced an old blog post of mine about “Freedom Jazz Dance” by Eddie Harris. That was a pleasant surprise, and it made me want to go back to the post and freshen …
Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing
Every ten years it occurs to me to learn this tune, and then I come up against the fact that it’s in E-flat minor, I get discouraged, and I give up. Well, not this time! This time I decided to take the coward’s way out: I put the tune in Ableton and transposed it up …
Pusherman
I am always on the lookout for clear examples of blue thirds, pitches in between the standard equal-tempered major and minor thirds. I heard Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” recently, and the vocal melody grabbed my ear. (Be advised that the first verse uses the n-word.) You can hear the pitches in the vocal melody even more …