It’s hard to figure out what key a piece of music is in. There are a lot of conflicting answers from different music theory texts. To make matters worse, it’s not at all unusual for a song to change keys, even within a section or phrase. Even rock songs written by totally naive songwriters can …
Tag Archives: jazz
Check The Rhime
The other night Anna and I went to see Beats, Rhymes And Life: The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest.
How is it possible to compose jazz when improvisation is an essential component?
Typical jazz compositions are written expressly as vehicles for improvisation. Mainstream jazz tunes since the 1940s take the form head-solos-head. The head is a written melody, and the solos are improvised around the chord changes of the head. Scores for these kinds of tunes take the form of lead sheets, like the ones found in …
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Reggie Watts
Back in June we went to see the incomparable Reggie Watts perform at Central Park Summerstage. I think Reggie is one of the most exciting artists of our time, but it’s difficult to verbalize exactly what he does. His performances combine improvisational music and absurdist standup comedy into a free-associative yet oddly coherent and impactful …
It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing
Today is the Fourth of July, and I can’t think of anything more patriotic than a post about our most significant contribution to world musical culture: swing. The title of this post refers to the classic Duke Ellington tune, sung here by Ray Nance. Check out the “yah yah” trombone by Tricky Sam Nanton. The …
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What are all the genres of Western music and their typical characteristics?
To answer your immediate question, the best thing to do is to go through a well-established music database and listen to representative tracks from each genre: Amazon, the iTunes store, Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify if you’re in Europe, SoundCloud, take your pick. Figure out who the ten or twenty most popular and influential artists are in …
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Harmonica guide
I started learning harmonica in high school. It was the first instrument I learned voluntarily, not counting my ineffectual middle school attempt at classical cello. As a teenager, my obsession with the Grateful Dead was at its high water mark. The Dead’s first frontman, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, was a more than respectable blues harmonica player. …
Interviewing Leo Ferguson
My friend and sometime musical collaborater Leo Ferguson is releasing an album of his adventurous jazz compositions and arrangements. Leo Ferguson Ensemble (2011) by Leo Ferguson As part of the album’s extended liner notes, I interviewed Leo on May 5, 2011. Here’s an edited transcript; you can also hear the audio on Leo’s site.
Diminished chords and the blues
The blues is a good entry path for beginner guitarists. If you learn the standard fifteen chords and the blues scale, you’ll be well on your way. However, there’s one crucial piece of additional music vocabulary you need to fully inhabit blues tonality, and that is the mysterious diminished seventh chord. To make a diminished …
The freakiness of melodic minor
My last post on minor keys covered the three scales you need for most situations in rock, pop, and film scores: natural minor, harmonic minor, and Dorian mode. There’s also the blues scale, which sounds good in any key, major or minor. For musical Jedi masters, there’s one more valuable minor scale. It’s called the …