Standards, part I

You can probably learn almost all the jazz composition techniques you'll ever need to use by dissecting the standards you tire of playing. Even the cheesiest of songs (I'm looking at you, “All of Me”) has a chord progression in it that you can steal and put to work in your own pieces. While standards have been the common formal language of jazz arguably since its inception, the dominance of the American songbook took place alongside the bebop revolution. The big bands of the 30's certainly played – and even sang – them, but the role of the arranger in this setting was strong enough to consider each band's adaptations as more or less an original work. Certainly reharmonization occurred in small groups, but the repertoire was more or less shared from group to group. Unsurprisingly, these songs ended up heavily influencing the mind of the jazz composer: the common choice of a thirty-two measure song form is not an arbitrary one, nor are the AABA and ABAC forms. What this means is that a detailed approach to the analysis of standards will yield you a wealth ideas that you can fall back on, and even easily use to produce far more modern sounding material.

The first place to begin gathering information would be the harmonic structures of the songs, but first, let's talk about chess. It goes without saying that chess is a complex game, one in which the proper playing technique involves a studied approach to foresight, the memorization of common patterns, and the ability to recognize these patterns while only witnessing their initial steps. At the same time, the only information you need to simply play the game is the proper movement of all of the pieces (you'll almost certainly lose, but that's beyond the point). Composition is like chess, in the sense that to simply compose, all you need to know is how the chords move (thankfully, losing is a much more vague term in this area); in 99% of harmonic progressions, there are explainable reasons for a sequence of chords, but knowledge of them is supplementary and not necessary for the act of writing two chord symbols down on a page. Eventually, it'd be the best idea to find out why things work the way they do, but in the beginning, it's a hindrance to the creative process: again, we don't learn to play chess by memorizing openings, we just learn the way the pieces move.

Returning to the world of standards, all of the ways to sequence chords are laid out clearly in front of you in these songs. The most common of these progressions would be the ii-V-I, in both major and minor keys, with a close second being its greater structuring principle, chords moving in descending cycles of fifths – ii-V-I-IV-vii-III-vi. Just about every song you know is based on this pattern, with the distinctive qualities of the songs coming from the places it breaks the cycle of fifths. In “All the Things You Are”, the piece begins with this cycle in Ab Major, and when it reaches the IV chord, it jumps abruptly into C Major from a G7 chord. This instance can be described as a IV-VII7 progression. If you're lost, let's backtrack...

You'll need to have a basic understanding of Roman numeral notation to do any analysis. If you're not familiar with it, it's a system used to label chords in a single key in relation to the tonic, which is labeled I or i depending on if the key is major or minor. Each chord is labeled in uppercase or lowercase to signify major or minor, and the number represents the scale degree the chord is built on: iii in C Major is a minor chord – lower case – and built on E – the third note in C Major – so the chord is E minor. This system allows you to easily relate chord progressions from key to key, as well as conceptualize progressions in a general, non-key-related way (see, algebra is good for something). For our purposes, if a chord is altered – meaning, it does not fall in the original key – we'll relate to it with a # or b to locate it in relation to a scale degree inside the key, and the capitalization of the altered numeral will replace the standard chord quality in the key: bIII in C Major would be an Eb chord, not E, and a major chord, not minor. This is not the same system used in analysis of classical music -- they have their own method for labeling altered chords – but it's a useful short-hand for us. That a chord is a seven chord will be assumed, unless it is a dominant chord, with which you can attach whatever extensions the chord has onto the symbol: V7b9, V7#11, V7#5, etc. The important thing is that these Roman numerals allow us to locate more general, abstract qualities in specific songs.

So let's return to the songs. Just as you can build up a melodic vocabulary through transcription of solos, you can build a harmonic vocabulary by categorizing chord progressions you've seen. Keep a notebook set aside to put these progressions in, just as you have one for your soloing licks, and add to it every time you see something new. So far we have ii-V-I and IV-VII7, so you can put those down in your book and continue on to a different piece. Let's look at “All of Me” next. The song begins with a C major chord and is immediately followed by an E7 chord; there's a fairly simple reason why, but again, we don't care about why at the moment, just how. So considering that we're in the key of C Major, we can label this progression as I-III7. Write this down and continue on your merry way through the song. What remains is mostly a series of V-I sequences, but you might look at the F major to F minor that occurs later in the piece, which you could notate as IV-iv. Go through a few more songs and find interesting progressions and add them to your book until you've got more information than you know what to do with.

Next time, we'll discuss how to relate these progressions and build song forms out of them.

Vocabulary: Part II

While it may be the easiest to learn and the most important for a beginning improvisor, the system of vocabulary pioneered by Charlie Parker, with its catalog of stock licks, is only one of the improvisatory methods found in jazz. As the harmonic character of the music progressed, the methods used in melodic improvisation changed to suit the new styles of music. For the quick chord changes found throughout bebop, Parker's collage method functions extraordinarily well, but it seems almost out of place in the modal world of the 60's. On the other hand, starting in the early 40's, a group of improvisors known as the Tristano school promoted a improvisational method that seemed to ignore vocabulary entirely. When taken as a whole, these contrasting approaches show that the issue of vocabulary transcends short motivic ideas and is better described as a malleable set rules that govern improvisation.

Early jazz players constructed their solos by playing variations of the melody of whatever song they were playing. On the surface level, the virtuosic music of the bebop period did away with this practice, favoring intricate chromatic lines that referred only to the chord progression that the original melody was built on; but the idea of variation remained part of the improvisatory process and increased in importance as the technical fireworks of Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown came to a tragic early end. Beginning most notably in the solos of John Coltrane in the early 60's – more in his own quartet recordings than his work with Miles Davis – a method that combined stock vocabulary with variation began to appear. Transcriptions of Coltrane's solos on songs like “Impressions” will show that he works with only a handful of small melodic cells to create long passages of music; he frequently even begins each phrase with the same basic idea, tagging on new endings or changing the rhythmic character of the motive. To put this into practice in your own playing, simply pick your favorite D minor lick and play it over and over on “So What” and “Impressions”. Find out ways to make repetition of a small amount of material musically interesting: alter the rhythms of the phrase, play with longer or shorter notes, add notes in between the notes, play with a different volume level or in a different register of your instrument, etc. This technique works best in modal jazz, as the music provides you with long stretches of time to experiment in. Unsurprisingly, interviews with Coltrane at the time show that this was his primary reason for his movement into modal jazz.

While this style of improvisation was maturing from the 40's to the 60's, an entirely separate school flourished almost literally right beside it, but would become largely ignored due to its association with the less technical Cool Jazz movement. Recordings of the blind pianist Lennie Tristano are difficult to acquire these days, but his theory of improvisation, propagated by his two most well-known students Warne Marsh and Lee Konitz, provided a radically different approach to playing jazz. Though his style would become almost synonymous with pure improvisation, his teaching ironically reached back to the European classical tradition; students of Tristano studied the music of Baroque era and sight-singing, hoping to acquire a natural sense of melody that they could tap into in their solos. The resultant music drew equally from J.S. Bach and Charlie Parker.

As voiced through Lee Konitz, the Tristano school strayed from a strict vocabulary method, hoping to improvise as spontaneously as possible when on the bandstand: that is, if you were to transcribe multiple Konitz solos, no greater body of melodic patterns could be found. But Konitz still manages to sound like Konitz on all of his work, revealing that there was some system he used to create his solos. What is at work here is probably a systematic use of basic musical techniques. Simple concepts such as suspensions, chromatic leading tones, appogiaturas, and trills can go a long way in transforming basic melodic material into a finished musical product. The melodies of Frederic Chopin achieve there signature parlor-room sound by applying these techniques to what would otherwise be a old-fashioned melody. In some ways, this approach is easier to learn and to apply: memorizing the effect of a handful of choices is easy and ultimately based upon personal feeling, while the memorization of bebop vocabulary is highly mechanical and takes hours of practice. On the other hand, creating long, flowing lines with this system is incredibly challenging and requires the soloist to devote almost 100% of their attention to the moment at hand; similarly, playing a song with a lot of quick chord changes – all of the songs that the Tristano school played – becomes more difficult, as you have no prepared material to navigate tough passages. If you begin to investigate this method, you'll quickly gain an appreciation for the music that Marsh and Konitz made and learn to overlook their comparatively small repertoire.

In the end, the establishment of a personal vocabulary comes down to finding a concrete set of rules by which you'll guide yourself in solos. Coherence is key, and until you can achieve it in your music, you'll be stuck as a beginner. Any of these techniques will help you in achieving that goal. If these ideas seem restrictive to you, consider the work of avant-garde saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton: while he started as a free jazz musician, he quickly developed a compositional style with which to frame his work. Braxton's work is in no way simple, but it achieves unity by his own rules, and the adept listener can connect the dots presented by Braxton's music in his head. Remember, true freedom is found in restrictions, and everything is chaos.