The Mind Left Body Jam

You can listen to the Grateful Dead for the songs, or you can listen for the jams. I love the songs as songs, but the Dead do not always do their own material much justice, especially when it’s time to sing a three-part harmony. The jams are less immediately accessible, but it’s what the band does uniquely well. I especially like “thematic jams”, as the gloriously obsessive Grateful Dead Guide calls them. These are spontaneous quasi-compositions like The Beautiful Jam. Sometimes the themes recur across multiple shows, even across multiple years, and eventually become the basis of new songs. My favorite recurring theme is called the Mind Left Body jam. It’s important enough in the lore that it has a Dead cover band named after it.

Here’s an hour-plus-long MLB jam supercut, with identifiers and timestamps in the description.

If you would rather listen one at a time in chronological order, the invaluable Save Your Face Blog has an exhaustive compilation of neatly edited MLB jams.

Continue reading “The Mind Left Body Jam”

Inside the Beautiful Jam

The Grateful Dead are most (in)famous for their collective improvisation. Sometimes that improvisation happened within the confines of a song: unstructured arrangements, solos, preset groove sections. Sometimes it happened during semi-composed transitions between the parts of a suite, like Help/Slip/Frank. The most exciting and unpredictable jams happened in transitions between songs, or just out of the blue.

The ability to create musical ideas in real time can seem like a miracle, both to non-musicians and to classical players. It isn’t; it’s a skill that can be learned and practiced, and there are usually some unspoken shared assumptions holding everything together. The Dead practiced their collective improvising extensively, at least early on, and their large memorized repertoire gave them plenty of shared raw material to draw on.

To illustrate how full-band improvisation works, I’m going to do a close look at one of the most beloved transitional jams, from February 18th, 1971. The Deadheads nickname this the “Beautiful Jam”, and the band officially released it with that title on the So Many Roads box set.

Continue reading “Inside the Beautiful Jam”

Touch of Grey

The Grateful Dead sold a lot of concert tickets and a respectable number of albums, but it took them more than twenty years to have a top ten hit. When “Touch of Grey” broke out, it inspired a debate among the Deadheads: on the one hand, its popularity ruined the experience of going to shows, but on the other hand, it’s an absolute banger, and the video is fun too.

The problem with the single version is that it omits Jerry’s exquisite guitar solo. The album version is the one I grew up on.

Continue reading “Touch of Grey”

The harmonica as a metaphor for pop music theory

This is a reworking of an old post with clearer language and better examples

Last semester was my first time teaching aural skills in NYU’s new popular music theory sequence. This semester will be my first time teaching a full-fledged theory class in the sequence. When I have taught music theory in the past, I have always used a lot of examples from Anglo-American pop, but it’s nice to be in a program that is committed to putting that music front and center. This raises a question, though: what is “popular” music theory? Isn’t music theory just music theory? Why should NYU create a whole alternative theory sequence for pop? The short answer is that Anglo-American popular music operates by very different rules and conventions than Western European tonal music.

It’s a cliche to say that American music is a combination of European harmony and African rhythm. However, a substantial amount of Anglo-American pop harmony is African-descended. The blues has especially strong African retentions. (It’s a problem that theory curricula are so heavily weighted toward harmony and voice leading. We need to include much more rhythm, form and timbre in theory class! But that is a discussion for another post.) You can understand the difference between blues harmony and Western European harmony by looking at the evolution of blues harmonica.

Continue reading “The harmonica as a metaphor for pop music theory”

C-flat and B-sharp

This post is a continuation of my explainer on the difference between F-sharp and G-flat. To sum that one up: in our present-day standard tuning system, F-sharp and G-flat sound the same; the only difference between them is notational. In historical tuning systems, however, they sounded quite different. Tuning is hard!

In this post, I address the deeper mystery of the notes C-flat and B-sharp. Are these real notes?

Continue reading “C-flat and B-sharp”

MusicRadar column on three songs from Brat by Charli XCX

I have now written three MusicRadar columns in a row on current pop smashes by women. This wasn’t planned; it’s just the way the songs of the summer have played out. I didn’t know much about Charli XCX before I wrote this, beyond the fact that she sang some hooks on some radio hits. I’m glad to have had a reason to dig into her music, she is delightful.

This fall I’m teaching theory and aural skills classes in NYU’s new popular music sequence, and I have a feeling these three songs are going to be making appearances.

Maceo Parker’s blue notes in a James Brown classic

I got interested in tuning theory because of the blues. The first instrument I learned to play well was the harmonica, and an essential part of blues harmonica is bending notes to make them go flat. The same is true for blues guitar, though there you are bending notes sharp rather than flat. For several years, I bent notes because it sounded good and didn’t think too much about why. But the more I learned about Western music theory, the more mysterious the blues became. It’s hard enough to understand how a minor third could sound so right on top of a major chord; but then why should it sound even better to deliberately play an out-of-tune minor third? It’s not like every out-of-tune note sounds good in blues-based music. The Grateful Dead combine a lot of objectionably sour vocal harmony with Jerry’s deliciously sweet bent notes on guitar. What’s the difference, aside from intention?

I don’t have a definite explanation of the blues’ flexible use of certain pitches, and I certainly don’t know the best way to teach this idea. My approach is to present students with specific blue notes from well-known songs and see what we can figure out. James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” from 1965 is an especially clear example.

Continue reading “Maceo Parker’s blue notes in a James Brown classic”

F-sharp vs G-flat in just intonation

As I gear up for teaching music theory in the fall, I’m still refining my explanation of Western music’s arcane naming system for enharmonics. Why is the note between F and G sometimes called F-sharp and sometimes called G-flat? Why do we sometimes call the interval between that note and C an augmented fourth, and sometimes call it a diminished fifth? What difference does it make if they sound the same?

I had a major “aha” moment when I learned about the history of Western tuning systems, and found out that F-sharp and G-flat were originally two different and non-interchangeable notes. I have enjoyed seeing that same “aha” look on my students’ faces when I explain it to them. But tuning systems are hard to understand, and my explanation still requires a lot of refining. This post is one in a series of iterations.

Continue reading “F-sharp vs G-flat in just intonation”

What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool

What makes Jerry Garcia’s guitar style so magical? What makes a person like me slog through so much indifferent-to-terrible Grateful Dead music to hear it? Rather than try to understand the whole corpus at once, I think it makes more sense to zoom in on specific phrases and passages and see how they work. In a previous post, I examined a phrase from the studio version of “The Music Never Stopped”. In this post, I look at the intro to “Eyes of the World” from 11/11/1973. 

I’m not going to talk about “Eyes of the World” as a song; I’ll save that for another post. Instead, I’m only concerned with Jerry’s solo in the first minute. Continue reading “What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool”

New book chapter with Toni Blackman

Publication alert! I co-wrote a book chapter about hip-hop in the music classroom with Toni Blackman, one of my major music education heroes and the central figure in my doctoral dissertation. It’s called “Building Hip-Hop Music Educators: Personal Reflections on Rap Songwriting in the Classroom.” It’s part of a new edited volume about hip-hop education that is freely available as a PDF, as all scholarly publications ought to be.

Continue reading “New book chapter with Toni Blackman”