The NYU Music Education Popular Music Practicum

This year, for the first time, I’m co-teaching the NYU Steinhardt Music Education Popular Music Practicum with Dr Kimberly McCord. Kimberly is doing the first half of the semester, and I’m doing the second half. She’s covering live performance and improvisation in the rock and “modern band” idioms, and I’m doing songwriting and remixing in the hip-hop and dance music idioms. This is an opportunity to put some my long-standing theories into practice, so I am excited.

Here’s a summary of what we’re doing.

Continue reading “The NYU Music Education Popular Music Practicum”

The Roots – “The Lesson Part III (It’s Over Now)”

This is my favorite song by the Roots, and one of my favorite songs by anyone ever.

I got curious about it the last time it came up in iTunes shuffle, and did some searching. I was surprised to find out that, so far as I can tell, no one has ever written anything about this song, not in the blogosphere, and not in academic sources.

Continue reading “The Roots – “The Lesson Part III (It’s Over Now)””

Thelonius

If, like me, you are a Thelonious Monk fan, you will be sad to learn that this song has very little to do with Thelonious Monk. J Dilla compares his greatness as an emcee to Monk’s greatness as a pianist, and “Thelonious” kind of rhymes with “microphonist.” That’s the extent of the connection. Regardless, “Thelonius” is a pretty amazing track.

Common tells the story of its creation here:

Continue reading “Thelonius”

Soon may the wellerman come

For some reason, a corner of the internet has become obsessed with sea shanties, making for an unusually wholesome set of memes, a participatory music culture in action.

https://twitter.com/Beertheist/status/1348759849077714951

The tune in this delightful video is called “The Wellerman,” as sung by The Longest Johns.

Continue reading “Soon may the wellerman come”

Rhythm-a-Ning

After doing “Straight, No Chaser,” I’m now diving into another one of Monk’s greatest hits, “Rhythm-a-Ning,” at the request of Christian Gentry. Monk’s take on the ubiquitous “I Got Rhythm” chord progression has a lot in common with “Straight, No Chaser.” They both use the most generic materials possible to produce something that still sounds fresh seventy years after they were composed. The melodies are catchy enough to whistle in the proverbial bathtub, but when you dig in intellectually, they reveal endless weirdness.

The name “Rhythm-a-Ning” is probably a playful mispronunciation of “rhythm-ing”, and that deliberate stumble sums up the tune’s aesthetic. My favorite recording is the relatively sedate version that Monk did in 1963. But this is only “sedate” by Monk standards. Listen to his comping behind Charlie Rouse’s tenor sax solo; no one else plays like that.

Continue reading “Rhythm-a-Ning”

Straight, No Chaser

Thelonious Monk wrote a lot of excellent blues tunes. “Straight, No Chaser” is the weirdest and coolest one. Here’s his first recording of it, from 1951:

Here’s another good one, from his 1967 record of the same name:

Continue reading “Straight, No Chaser”

I’m doing a session for the 2021 Remixing General Music conference

You should come! It’s on Zoom. Follow some live tweeting here.

I’m going to talk about drum programming with the Groove Pizza as part of a broader philosophy of centering groove in music ed. Online conferences are good, I hope we keep doing them after the pandemic is over.

Circular chord charts

Being home with my kids all day is not very conducive to dissertation writing, but my fragmented attention is still up to the task of making infographics. I’ve been thinking about ways of visually representing grooves. Since circles work so well for rhythms, maybe they can work for harmonies too. Here’s a circular view of twelve bar blues in C:

Think of this as a chord chart wrapped in a circle rather than written in a line. Each cell is a measure. Start on the C7 at the top and move clockwise.

Continue reading “Circular chord charts”

Songs vs Grooves

Anne Danielsen’s book Presence and Pleasure: The Funk Grooves of James Brown and Parliament is one of my favorite works of musicology. In the book, Danielsen distinguishes between songs and grooves. “Yesterday” by the Beatles is a song. “The Payback” by James Brown is a groove.

In structural terms, a groove is a small musical cell that repeats indefinitely. A song is a hierarchical organization of smaller cells that form a linear sequence with a beginning, middle and end. The lack of large-scale structure in a groove makes it effortlessly malleable and extensible. Want to make it thirty seconds longer? No problem. Want to make it thirty minutes longer? No problem. Songs are not so flexible. If you wanted to make “Yesterday” longer, would you… make up more verses? Repeat the bridge again?

Continue reading “Songs vs Grooves”