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What does the real jazz experience feel like?
I don't
know of a better answer than this:
“...My
first impression of The Lion - even before I saw him -
was the thing I felt as I walked down those steps. A
strange thing. A square-type fellow might say, “This
joint is jumping,” but to those who had become
acclimatized - the tempo was the lope - actually
everything and everybody seemed to be doing whatever
they were doing in the tempo The Lion’s group was laying
down. The walls and furniture seemed to lean
understandingly - one of the strangest and greatest
sensations I ever had. The waiters served in that
tempo; everybody who had to walk in, out, or around the
place walked with a beat...”
Duke
Ellington on Willie “The Lion” Smith, in Music is My
Mistress
How is jazz built?
A jazz
performance can sound so complicated that it’s difficult
to follow what’s going on - but if you know what to
listen for it’s possible to make sense of it, and to
begin to use what you hear in your own playing.
A
typical jazz group is made up of a rhythm section
and a front line.
The
rhythm section comprises the drums, the bass
(which may be an acoustic double bass or an electric
bass guitar) and a chord-playing instrument, typically
piano (but could be guitar, electric
piano, synthesiser or organ).
The
front line may be trumpet and/or saxophone
(horns) or other lead instrument.
A jazz
performance is layered, each member of the band
supplying one or more thread and the whole thing weaving
together in an intricate way; but while the complete
sound may be complicated, the individual layers can be
quite simple. Here is a very common structure used in
middle-of-the-road jazz performances.
The
drummer uses his foot-operated cymbal (hi-hat) to
play on beats 2 and 4 in every 4-beat bar - | * 2 *
4 | * 2 * 4 |...and so on.
At the
same time he plays a continuous pattern on his ride
cymbal (doing several things at once is an important
skill that jazz drummers must
have):
| 1 2-and 3 4-and | 1 2-and 3 4-and |...etc.
The bass
will play a note on every beat (called a walking
bassline), though a good player every now and then
will introduce a little skip into his walk, just to keep
things interesting.
The
walking bassline was one of the crucial innovations that
took jazz from the traditional to the modern
era. It frees the drummer from the job of keeping
the pulse of the music, allowing him to punctuate, add
accents and generally become more inventive and musical.
It also
relieved the chord-playing instrument in the rhythm
section of the need to pound out the beat. So the older
style of piano in which the left hand went oom-pah
oom-pah, alternating bass note and chord (stride
piano), gave way to comping - more irregular
accompaniment (and also more complicated harmonies).
So a
front line player may be improvising a complicated
melodic line as he reels off his solo; underneath him,
the piano will be comping out harmonic and rhythmic
punctuation; the drummer will be urging him on with
accents and fill-ins; simultaneously, the ride cymbal
and hi-hat will keep a steady pattern; and the
foundation of it all, the engine-room, is the walking
bassline.
Try to
listen for these layers in real performances, and try to
get the idea of walking bassline - hi-hat - ride cymbal
running through your head as you practice (listen and
practice - the best way to learn jazz).
What's a head?
Like any
trade, jazz has its jargon. Here are some of the common
expressions jazz musicians use to describe what they're playing.
The
head is the melody that the band plays at the
beginning and end of the piece. It acts like a map or
blueprint for the variations that the soloists will
improvise. If the head is a well-known song or jazz
composition, it would be called a standard.
Many
jazz musicians carry around a mental library of several
- maybe even hundreds of - standards. This means that
they can get together for an impromptu performance, or
jam session, without any written music if it's based on
standards.
Most
musicians also possess some kind of written collection
of standards, in case a tune comes up that they don't
remember too well or that is more than averagely
complicated. Such a collection is sometimes called a
Fake Book.
Eventually the core repertoire of standards was been brought
together from this scattering of individual fake books
into the jobbing jazz musician's bible, the
Real
Book (in reality this now extends to three or
four thick volumes). Over the years there have been
various legal disputes about the copyright status of the
Real Book, but these days it can be obtained over the
counter where before it used to circulate on a bootleg
basis.
The Real
Book presents each standard as a written head with the
harmonies represented as chord symbols. This is often
called a lead sheet and is generally enough to
allow the jamming musician to put together a performance
on the fly.
Once
through the head, or the corresponding section of an
improvisation, is called a chorus. Sometimes
musicians will agree on the length of improvised solos
in terms of "you do three choruses and I'll follow with
two" and so on.
A
musician turning up with a new composition that isn't in
the Real Book would be expected to provide lead sheets
for each musician. Since different instruments have
different pitches (alto sax in Eb, trumpet in Bb,
guitar in concert pitch and so on) it's expected that
the corresponding lead sheets have been transposed into
the right keys.
What does a jazz musician mean by chord progressions
or changes?
Harmonies in jazz are represented by a kind of code made
up of chord symbols.
A chord
symbol will generally take the form of a note (D, or Ab,
or F# for example) followed by an indicator of the chord
type and/or a number.
So C-7
would be the symbol for the chord of C minor seventh.
With experience, the musician recognises this as a
particular combination of notes with a particular
harmonic function at that point in the music.
Again,
with experience, the musician can identify not just
single chords but sequences of chords that
describe the harmony for that section of the piece.
During an improvisation, this information enables her/him
to create a new melodic line that "fits" the harmony.
The
complete set of chords for a particular head is often
referred to as its chord progression or
changes.
It's
often possible to include a lot of harmonic detail in
the changes by using complex chord symbols with
lots of added numbers and so forth. This can give
information that might help the player of a comping
instrument like a piano to use particularly rich or
exotic chord voicings, or a soloist to use interesting
or further-out note-runs.
But
usually players prefer to be given progressions in the
most basic, simplified forms and to make their own
decisions about how elaborate the harmonies and lines
are that get built on these foundations. The expression
often used in such cases is the Vanilla Changes.
So there's a band, and a head, and some changes - what
next?
The band
is ready. Someone says "Let's play Como en Vietnam".
The guitarist knows it. The bassplayer quickly turns to
the page in his copy of the Real Book. The pianist sort
of knows it and quietly checks a couple of the harmonies
with the guitarist. The tenor sax player finds it
(suitably transposed for a Bb pitch instrument) in his
Fake Book. The drummer counts in...
First
there's an intro - a two-bar latin rhythm vamp
started by the piano, picked up by the bass and cycled a
few times as everyone gets set.
The horn
(all front-line instruments like trumpets, saxes etc are
called horns) and guitar blow (everyone blows
when they play, even pianists and drummers) the head.
In this case twice, with the intro vamp in between the
two melody choruses.
And
we're into the first solo. The chord progression
on the lead sheet gives the sax player the information
he needs to create what is in effect a new melody
sharing the same harmonic framework as the head.
A good
soloist will structure his improvisation so that it
feels like a narrative, maybe starting quietly
and comparatively simply and then as one chorus follows
another building in intensity or complexity to some kind
of climax, finally coming back in to land, and all the
time relating the improvised line to the changes that
the rhythm section lay down underneath.
The
first soloist hands on to the next, who hands to the
next and so on. Sometimes the handover is
clearly signalled, or if the musicians are experienced
it happens intuitively.
In some
performances two or more musicians may share choruses.
If one improvises for four bars and another solos over
the next four bars and so on, this would be called
trading or exchanging fours. Quite often the other
musicians will trade alternate fours with the drums. It
doesn't have to be fours - it could be as many bars as
the musicians agree.
In
the end the head is restated, and the performance comes
to an end, maybe with an outro (in this case
fading out on the latin vamp, for example) or a clean
stop (sometimes called a brick-wall ending).
What do I
need to know about scales?
What is
a soloist doing when s/he translates a chord progression
into an improvised line?
For each
chord or sequence of chords it's a process of building a
melodic phase by choosing notes from a particular set
that "fits" the harmony.
Each set
of notes can be thought of as a stepwise succession that
leads upward until you get back to the same notes 1, 2,
3 etc octaves higher. Scales in other words.
One of
the skills a jazz musician develops is to assimilate the
connection between a particular progression of chords
and the corresponding scale or scales.
When
this ability is fully internalised and the right scales
can be called up more or less instantly as the changes
go past, then the improviser has the materials s/he
needs to create what is, in effect, a new melody built
on the chords of the head.
How many scales are
there?
Now
there's a question. The authoritative answer is given
by Nicholas Slonimsky, whose
Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns (NY:
Scribner, 1947) goes into this in encyclopaedic detail.
John
Coltrane is famously said to have absorbed just about
all of the material in Slonimsky and to have been able
to call on it at will while soloing.
For
mortals, and for the sake of practicality, Slonimsky
isn't to be recommended. Apart from the sheer volume of
stuff in there, according to Slonimsky and others, a
scale can include intervals wider than a major or minor
second between adjacent elements (the harmonic minor
scale is a familiar example).
As a
resource for voicing or improvising, such scales aren't
as practical as a sequence of seconds with no holes.
Most of the trouble in jazz voicing and improvising
comes from the information gap between chord symbols
(usually built from thirds) and the parent "scale"
(built from seconds).
Out of
interest, I worked out that,
even if you limit the definition of scale to include
only those made of whole tones and/or semitones, there
are 95 different forms available to the improviser.
If
you're disciplined and systematic enough to work through
all 95 until you achieve Coltrane-levels of efficient
recall, good luck to you. As discussed below, others of
us may prefer a different way.
What's a chord
substitution?
The
changes represent the direct route for the journey
through each chorus of a jazz performance. But as in
any journey, there can be alternative routes and
diversions that get you there just the same but take in
new scenery on the way. These harmonic byways are
signposted by chord substitutions.
In some
circumstances, knowing your substitutions is a badge of
credibility for a jazz musician and there is even quite
a lot of satisfaction to be gained by testing to the
limit the degree to which one can wander away from
mainline harmony and still retain musical coherence.
The
tritone substitution is one of the commonest you'll hear
mentioned. As the name suggests, the tritone is the
name given to the interval between two notes three whole
tones apart.
So D and
Ab are an example of a tritone relationship. Ab is
three tones above (or below) D and D is three tones
above (or below) Ab. Every note has its tritone
partner.
In many
circumstances (particularly where the chords are from
the dominant 7th family) a given chord in a progression
can be substituted by the same chord type based on the
tritone. Thus Ab7 will substitute for D7 and
vice-versa.
This
increases the range of chords and voicings available to
a comping instrument, and also extends the scope of the
scale materials available to the soloist as s/he creates
the improvised line around such harmony.
What do
they mean by playing outside?
The
relationship between the chord changes and the
improvised melodic lines based on them can be highly
conservative - for example where vanilla changes
support lines built from closely-associated scales.
Chord
substitutions, such as the tritone, can allow the
improviser and accompanist to move further out
while retaining close logical contact with the vanilla
core.
But
improvisers have always pushed the limits of this
relationship further and further, and harmonic/melodic
theories have been developed to rationalise this trend
to become detached from the simplicities of basic
structures.
Improvisers whose lines seem to inhabit a parallel
harmonic and melodic universe are said to be playing
outside.
Many
good soloists vary the extent to which they go outside.
Weaving inside and outside the changes is sometimes
called side-slipping.
How do I learn which scale fits a particular chord?
First,
learn the notes that make up a given chord. It's
always been a surprise to me how many musicians
interested in playing jazz really couldn't tell you that
Gmi7 is made of the notes G Bb D and F. Until you know
this for all the important chords in all keys, scales
and the like are meaningless.
Next,
look at the notes in the chord and ask what are the
notes that logically come in between them. So
for Gmi7, something must come between the G and the Bb.
Well, if the chord comes in a piece that's in the key of
F, say, then it's probably an A. But if you're in the
key of Ab major, it's likely to be an Ab. Similarly the
hole in between Bb and D can be filled with a note
logically related to the key you're in, and the same
goes for the space between D and F.
After a
while you may find yourself asking, well, what's to stop
me building some kind of weird scale around Gmi7
- for example G Ab Bb B C Db D E F or something. This
will fit Gmi7, and gives me a selection of other notes
to make interesting-sounding improvised lines. This is
one way to edge towards "playing outside".
Finally
comes the realisation that actually there's a scale that
fits any and every chord - the chromatic. At
first this doesn't seem like a very useful conclusion,
being a recipe for musical gobbledegook. But actually,
as George Russell says, once your harmonic-melodic
journey brings you back here, you have discovered the
Chromatic Universe and all the mysteries of jazz are
solved.
It's zen,
really. Sun-faced Buddah, moon-faced Buddah.
How do I find which chords fit a particular scale?
I've
suggested you can take a chord and build a scale from it
sticking closely to the key centre or venturing away
from it as your taste and ear guide you. You can
invert the process - that is, take a scale and
extract notes from it in any combination your harmonic
sense can tolerate, and that will be a voicing of a
chord that relates to that scale.
In
fact, it's a voicing of any and all chords you
can extract from the same scale. So you really don't
need to build chords the conventional way only by thirds
or fourths - anything is fair game. You could even
plonk down all the notes in the scale in one go.
For
example, a nice chewy chord from the whole-half
diminished scale is one that has everything in it, thus
-
Db E G
Bb C Eb Gb A (this is the Swiss Army Chord, to be
used when all else fails).
In many
ways the distinction between scales and chords is highly
artificial. You could think of a scale as a broken
chord by seconds, and a chord as a compacted scale with
holes.
Why shouldn't I just play the blues scale, which
seems to fit everything?
My
answer to this is highly personal, probably prejudiced
and a bit of a rant, but since you ask...
Confession of a jazz musician: I have relationship
problems with the blues scale.
Why is
this? Two reasons. One comes from experiences trying
to teach people about jazz in workshops and one-to-one.
I'm too polite to say it out loud but it's a sorry fact
that anyone coming to jazz from blues/rock too often
arrives with a blues scale addiction. If you
can't break the blues scale habit, it's almost
impossible to become a real jazz musician.
The
other reason is that I don't understand the blues scale,
though I use it without too much trouble. But I'm the
kind of musician who can't feel comfortable with a
concept or a tool unless I can fit it into some kind of
rational framework or musical world view. Intuition is
nice, but mostly I have to manage without it.
So I
brood on the blues and here are some conclusions.
First,
there's this thing with blue notes. Where do
blue notes come from? One answer was suggested by André
Hodeir, who proposed that the African experience of
scales is, like that of many non-European cultures,
strongly rooted in the pentatonic.
C D F G
A C is the pentatonic related to the major scale C D E F
G A B C. Hodeir imagined that, to African slaves
arriving in America, the major scale would have been an
alien cultural experience. To make sense of the major
scale they filled in the gaps in the familiar pentatonic
scale with notes they got by fishing around between D
and F and between A and C. The results of microtonal
fuzziness in these regions of the scale are the blue
notes - somewhere around, but not exactly, Eb and Bb.
Not everyone accepts this ingenious idea, but it sounds
plausible to me.
I also
wonder if there might be an influence from the
differences in intonation - the commas - between
rational and tempered scales. For example the syntonic
comma, the difference between four justly tuned perfect
fifths and the nominally enharmonic two octaves plus a
third, is around a fifth of a semitone. I can imagine
that this is the kind of microtonal environment in which
Hodeir's Afro-Americans went fishing.
Which
takes us to the blues scale. To a classical musician
like Leonard Bernstein (albeit a pretty funky one), the
blues scale is simply the major scale with the 3rd, 5th
and 7th flattened. As often as not the 2nd and the 6th
seem to go missing for some reason and C blues ends up
as something like C Eb F Gb G Bb.
(I've
seen this referred to as the C minor blues scale, while
C D D# E G A C is the C major blues scale. You're
confused? I'm confused).
Thinking
about all this led me to wonder whether there might be
some kind of relationship between the blues scale and
the bebop scale.
Bebop
scales are like regular scales but an extra chromatic
note is slipped in. This has an important rhythmic
effect, since the resulting 8-note scale fits better
with the accents in standard 4/4 time. Bebop scales
(sometimes called diminished 6 scales) are the basis of
a whole system of harmony and improvisation, developed
by people like Barry Harris and Dave Baker.
Bb major
bebop is Bb C D Eb F Gb G A Bb. Surprisingly (well, it
surprised me when I first realised it), C blues turns
out to be a mode of Bb major bebop, starting on
the 2nd step.
But
we're still missing the major 3rd. This has to
be in there somewhere, if only to validate perhaps the
iconic blues chord, that of the 7 9# (much used by Jimmy
Hendrix and the like). Going back to the microtonal
origin of blue notes, I suspect the blues scale (and
associated chords) include both the major and minor 3rd
because they are groping for a note somewhere in
between.
Thus we
arrive at the kitchen sink blues scale: C D Eb E F Gb G
A Bb C. And now the source of its horrible hypnotic
power becomes clear. From the 2nd to the 5th (D to G in
the example of the C blues scale) is conventionally
notated as a chromatic sequence. But in reality this
region is actually a more or less continuous splurge
of every frequency. It includes all the intermediate
microtones so that sonically it resembles one of those
quantum models of the atom in which the positions of the
electrons can only be represented by fuzzy probability
fields.
No
wonder noodling around with the blues scale makes an
improvised line that seems to fit any and every chord
progression.
The
positive side is that it is a marvellously expressive
and exotic ingredient in the general jazz mix,
and it opens up interesting and unusual possibilities
for chord voicings and playing outside.
But it
should be just that - an ingredient. I mean, garlic's
an essential constituent of many dishes, but you
wouldn't want to make a meal of garlic and nothing else
- and neither would anyone close enough to have to share
your environment.
And
that's the negative side: for anyone wanting to progress
to real jazz, the blues scale is (to move on to a new
metaphor) a prison and if you can't break out, or
earn parole, you'll never be a real jazz musician.
I've heard and read references to harmonizing the
scale - what's all that about?
One way
to find which chords a given scale relates to is to
harmonize the scale, which means taking each note of the
scale, finding the scale note a third higher,
then another a third higher again and so on. Identify
the chord you've built and you have automatically
related it to the original scale.
Here's a
nice jazz scale - the whole-half diminished
(sometimes called WH for short) starting on C:
C D Eb F
Gb Ab A B C
It's
called whole-half because it's built from notes that are
alternately one whole and one half-tone apart.
Amongst
the embedded chords you can find in C WH are, for
example D Gb (or, enharmonically, F#) A C, which is D7,
or even D F# A C Eb (D7 b9) and D F# A C F (D7 #9). C
Eb F# B gives a rootless D13 b9.
In the
same way, F7/13/b9/#9, Ab7... and B7... are all in the
same scale, so C WH will fit all these chords.
Incidentally this works backwards in the sense
that, because they share a parent scale, these 4 chords
are (within the limits of the melodic line) harmonically
interchangeable.
See how
they make a diminished series (D F Ab B)? It's
interesting that the tritone substitution for 7th chords
(D7 and Ab7 in this case) is a basic part of jazz
harmonic theory but it's uncommon to see it explained as
just part of a cycle of diminished substitutions
(associated with F7 and B7).
Harmonising diminished scales also produces interesting
complex chords outside the usual min/maj/7/dim/aug core
of standard harmony. These in turn also function as
substitutes for other embedded chords such as the 7s
already mentioned.
And of
course there is always the great cataclysmic
all-the-notes-in-the-scale Swiss Army chord consisting
of the two dim chords that make up the scale stacked one
on the other:
C Eb Gb
A B D' F' Ab'
Where can I find out
more?
Follow
the links on these pages:
Harmony
Improvisation
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