It’s a cliché to say that jazz is European harmony plus African rhythm. For example, this lesson plan from Jazz in America says that jazz got its rhythm and “feel” from African music, and its harmony and instruments from European classical. This is not untrue, but it’s an oversimplification. A substantial amount of jazz harmony …
Tag Archives: jazz
I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free
In these troubled times, we could all use some uplift. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” is one of the most uplifting tunes I know.
Make your chord progressions less boring using secondary dominants
Diatonic harmony is boring. Random dissonance is boring too. How do you make your music less predictable, but in a logical-sounding way? Especially if you want your harmony to sound “jazzy”? One reliable technique is to use secondary dominants. The idea is to treat each chord in a key as the temporary center of its …
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An intro to counterpoint
Counterpoint is a musical technique that combines two or more independent melody lines. It’s one of the characteristic sounds of Western classical music. Bach wrote a ton of it. But counterpoint isn’t always so complicated. Any song that has a vocal melody with a bassline underneath is an example of counterpoint. If you have ever …
RIP McCoy Tyner
One of my favorite ever jazz musicians, and favorite ever musicians period. His playing with John Coltrane is obviously mind-boggling, but even if he and Coltrane had never met he would still have been a giant. My favorite McCoy moment is a four-bar phrase from the middle of his long solo on Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament.” …
How do key signatures work?
Most of my students struggle with key signatures. This is understandable! Like the rest of the Western notation system, key signatures are based on a big assumption: that all of the notes will be within one of the twelve major keys, or within some scale that can be derived from a major scale (most often, …
Donna Lee
Here’s a Charlie Parker recording that’s not widely known outside of jazz, but is absolutely foundational inside it: This recording features a very young Miles Davis on trumpet. Miles later said that he wrote the tune, and that its copyright attribution to Charlie Parker was a record label error. I believe him. It sounds more …
Naima
I’ve been doing so much explaining basic music theory that I thought it would be fun to dig into something advanced: “Naima” by John Coltrane, from his all-killer-no-filler album Giant Steps. There are as many interpretations of this tune’s chord changes as there are transcriptions of it. The ones in the Real Book are real …
Remixing Monk vs covering Monk
I love Thelonious Monk more than just about any other musician in history. I enjoy learning and playing his tunes on the guitar, where they tend to sit well. I’m especially proud of my solo guitar arrangement of “Crepuscule with Nellie.” A jazz guitarist named Miles Okazaki, who is enormously better than me, also enjoys …
The “Rockit” rhizome
I have come to believe that Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” is the most interesting musical recording of all time. It touches every form of twentieth century American music, from blues to jazz to rock to techno, and it’s one of the founding documents of global hip-hop. Not bad for a last-ditch effort to keep Herbie’s label …