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.

Vocabulary: Part I

The importance of vocabulary to an improviser can be highlighted with a simple comparison to everyday speech (this metaphor has become commonplace by know, so if you know it and don't feel like hearing it again, skip this paragraph...). Verbal interaction between humans combines impromptu structuring ability and the recall of thousands of memorized phrases. Think back on the conversations of your day – even the passing greetings – and consider the amount of original material that any of the participants offered; you'll quickly see that at least 95% of these interactions contain mostly stock phrases that you've used countless times in the past. What changes from instance to instance is the context and stimulus for the conversation, both of which narrow down the selections of acceptable phrases to the few you consider at the moment. If this wasn't the case, merely ordering your lunch would be an almost insurmountable task. Now, return to our comparably more concrete world of jazz. Here the context is the chord being played by the piano player and the stimulus is the style of the song: ballad, medium swing, bossa nova, etc. In order to construct a coherent solo that capably stretches over multiple choruses, the experienced soloist draws upon the melodic material they've already learned to apply to these situations. In this sense, solos are constructed like a photo-montage, piecing together ideas of contrasting qualities to create a greater whole.

With that in mind, one of the first goals for a beginning improviser should be the establishment of a basic vocabulary. In this process, let your first rule be given to you from the possibly-apocryphal sayings of Pablo Picasso, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Pick up your favorite album by your favorite artist – it doesn't matter if he or she plays the same instrument as you – and transcribe everything you can. For harmonic reference, it helps if you know the song that's being played, but if you don't, you can work on your ear training by figuring out the chords progressions in the song. If you don't already have it, the program Transcribe! – available at www.seventhstring.com -- is invaluable in this process and worth far more than its $50 price tag. Similarly, a notation program like Finale, Sibelius, or Guitar Pro will help you keep your notes neat and readable. Once you've got a good amount of material, find a way to separate and organize it: the simplest way would be to categorize by chord type or progression. The more systematic you are in your approach to this, the faster you'll see results; it's best to start a notebook to keep your material together for quick study.

The material you gather in this way will serve as the basis for everything you do after this. Memorization of the melodic patterns you transcribe will provide you with material to play over the chords in the songs you know. If you think this process leads to unoriginality, remember that Charlie Parker memorized the solos of Lester Young, Cannonball Adderly quoted the songs of Charlie Parker throughout his solos, and even in the composed world of classical music, Beethoven quoted Bach throughout his piano sonatas. But, in the end, your suspicions are correct; the material you gather through transcription functions best as a body of examples with which you can model your own ideas. Look at the licks you like best and ask yourself a series of questions: when do they use chord tones? When are upper extensions of the chord played? What kind of rhythms are used? What kinds of intervals are used? Once you've figured out the answers to these questions, you can begin to create original material with what you've learned. When you reach this point, you'll be able to return to the songs you know with the beginnings of a functional language and play better, more structured solos.

Composition in Jazz: An Introduction

Despite the efforts behind modern jazz education, the myth of spontaneous improvisation still dominates the perception of jazz. While it's true that the greatest players are known because of their soloing ability, the idea that the best of the best are able to magically conjure hundreds of measures of originally melody is provably false; one only needs to transcribe the solos of Charlie Parker to find an abundance of material that is repeated verbatim, showing that he'd practiced it thousands of times before the recording date or the gig. On some levels, this myth has been propagated not by the musicians, but the writers who write about the music, who, in their intentions to glorify their heroes, exaggerate aspects they don't really understand.

Simultaneously, people rarely broach the subject of composition when discussing about jazz. If Parker didn't come up with his ideas on the spot, he must have written them out before hand; while not composition on the symphonic level that people are trained to recognize it, Parker's success with this process shows that writing is a fundamental part of jazz – or really, any music – and might even be interchangeable with improvisation. Similarly, why is Thelonious Monk the only player truly able to sound naturally on his songs? Even with the best of players, there tends to be a break in continuity from the melody to the solos. It's simple: the idiosyncratic melodic language of Monk's heads is the same language he fills his solos with.

The next series of articles in this blog will focus on a wide array of the implications and applications of composition in jazz, ranging from the basic development of vocabulary, to the reconstruction of standards, to chromatic harmony and altered chords as they appear in the music of the 50's and 60's, to the use of composition in the process of generating a unique overall musical voice. Hopefully, this will provide some with the inspiration to put down their instrument and sit down at the piano (a difficult process for you piano players: you'll have to forget how to play for a few hours). Not having taken lessons in composition shouldn't stop anyone from writing their own music: Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker never had these, and for that matter, neither did Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, or Milton Babbitt.

The Lost Quintet

It's quite possible that the peak of Miles Davis's musical power will forever remain out of print. This 1969 live recording of the Mile Davis quintet at the Antibes Jazz Fest was last printed on CD in 1995, and at this time, is only available as an import from third-party sellers online. The music found on this recording reveals Davis in a transitional period that, in a way, embodied everything he had done and would go on to do. Recorded with what has become known as the “Lost Quintet” – for reasons that become evident if you reread the first sentence of this entry – this album shows Davis's full control of the free jazz concept, his virtuosity on the trumpet in a way rarely seen elsewhere, his nascent vision of jazz-rock fusion, and his emotional ties to the body of work that had made him famous. The band itself was a rare mixture of the past and the future. Of the Second Great Quintet, only Wayne Shorter remained in the band by this time. English bassist Dave Holland had replaced Ron Carter, Chick Corea – playing electric keyboard – took Herbie Hancock's place, and the powerful drummer Jack DeJohnette filled the gaping hole left by the departure of Tony Williams.

Of the songs played on this concert – “Directions”, “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down”, “Milestones”, “Footprints”, “Round Midnight”, “It's About That Time”, and “Sanctuary” – two dated from the 1950's, two came from the period of the Second Great Quintet, and two would soon appear on the landmark albums In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew (strangely, “Directions” would remain unreleased until 1980). Yet all are approached from the same free-jazz-plus-rock-intensity angle. In all of the pieces, Jack DeJohnette has the burden of time-keeping taken away from him, allowing him to accompany in a frenetic style. The keyboard solos of Chick Corea frequently ignore the song-forms entirely, instead focusing on the creating soundscapes with the new instrument. Shorter, playing soprano sax on many songs, plays with an energy and complexity rarely found on any of other recordings, channeling the voice of the recently deceased John Coltrane in his solos. True to the band's concert practice of the late 60's, the songs are played without break, creating one hour-long suite that could well be considered one of the greater long compositions of the 20^th century.

As for Davis's playing on the concert, a transcription of his solos would suffice as an encyclopedia of everything he would ever do on the trumpet. The bulk of the material he plays remains in the chromatic style he developed during the time of the Second Great Quintet – which itself recalled his early bebop playing with Charlie Parker – but echoes of other times appear throughout the concert. His solo on “Milestones” recalls his original recording of it, as well as the light, melodic style he played in with the First Great Quintet, but his playing on the long stretches of A minor that make up the bridge could have come right off of “Flamenco Sketches”. The solo on “Footprints” begins in the slow, bluesy world of the song, but ends with what may be the longest lines he ever recorded. The new melodic material he had developed in the recording sessions of In a Silent Way – a style that wouldn't be heard on recording until later collections of the studio sessions would be released in the 80's – is on full display here, with its frequent use of long chromatic scales and a rhythmic shift towards the sixteenth note.

There is one commercially available recording of this band – Live at the Fillmore East: It's About That Time – and really, the only bad thing that can be said about it is that it's not the recording of the Antibes Jazz Fest. The same level of intensity is maintained throughout the concert, which is about 45 minutes longer than the 1969 recording. If you can't find the Festival De Juans Pins recording anywhere, this is as close of a substitute as you'll be able to find.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

But all great things must come to an end. By the end of the decade, the members of Davis's band found themselves in the same position that those that came before had. Each of the band members had launched successful solo careers years before and found themselves in periods of artistic change. Shorter's compositions moved closer and closer to free jazz, with his 1969 Super Nova even including free versions of three earlier songs, “Water Babies”, “Capricorn”, and “Sweet Pea”. Tony Williams took an increasing interest in rock music, eventually founding Lifetime with guitarist John McLaughlin and organist Larry Young and releasing the group's first record – arguably the first jazz fusion album – in 1969. Carter and Hancock had ample job opportunities elsewhere as well, Hancock eventually going on to form Headhunters and fuse more modern African-American music with jazz.

The jazz scene in the late 60's was undergoing drastic change as well. The death of John Coltrane in 1967 is undoubtedly one of the largest events in the history of American music. Coltrane's unflinching dedication to pursuing the freedom of expression he saw in free jazz made him a hero to a younger generation of players that felt his interest endorsed their work. While his death certainly did not end this musical trend, it marked a point of divergence, after which many musicians had difficulty finding their own way. Simultaneously, rock music took more and more young listeners away from jazz, the rise of the Beatles signaling the fall of almost every jazz musician's career. While by this point, Davis had succeeded in making himself a pop culture icon who had to worry less about fleeting trends, even he realized that in order to remain culturally relevant, he'd have to draw inspiration from this new music.

Elements of this change appear before the impending break-up of the Second Great Quintet. The final albums the group released, Miles in the Sky and Filles De Kilimanjaro, introduced electric keyboard and bass to the instrumentation and experimented with long, open-ended jams as song form, pulling from rhythmic styles of the pop world. While traces of the spirit remained, the music on these albums demonstrated very readily that the character of the group had begun to move away from the brooding, chromatic post-bop world it defined into something new. Yet this material is still transitional, the full introduction into Davis's next period had yet to come, and the almost forgotten “Lost Quintet” had yet to solidify as a group.

The Side Men

A better view of the Second Great Quintet can be established by looking over the output of the group's sidemen in the period of its existence. Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Tony Williams all released albums as leaders during their stint in the band, and Ron Carter can be found on countless Blue Note albums throughout the 60's. These releases show the band members released from the creative direction of Davis, free to pursue their own interests. Simultaneously, the music on these albums provides a control group for understanding the music of Davis during this period.

Both Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage and Empyrean Isles predate Shorter's involvement in the band, and both essentially recreate the band of Miles Davis with the trumpeter replaced by the then up-and-coming Freddie Hubbard. Both also show Hancock's experiments with the mixture of modal and free jazz. Maiden Voyage has rightly come to be considered one of the greatest jazz albums of the 60's. Filled with all-original material, the playing on this album is remarkable for its fluidity in style. The texture of the music changes fro solo to solo, and the impression of a larger compositional structure is suggested when the pieces are considered from beginning to end; this is especially true on the more modal pieces “Maiden Voyage” and “Survival of the Fittest”.

While at times more adventurous than Maiden Voyage – it played home to the entirely improvised piece “The Egg” – Empyrean Isles was the first appearance of the now-popular tune “Canteloupe Island”. The band was reduced to a quartet for this album, leaving Freddie Hubbard as the only horn player. With only four tracks on the album, the music makes up in intensity what it lacks in length. The other two songs, “Olilqui Valley” and “One-Finger Snap” continue to explore modal composition, putting long harmonic stretches up against fast moving chords. Some of Hubbard's finest playing can be found in his solos on this album.

Tony Williams released two notable albums in this time period, Life Time and Spring. While reviews of these albums remain mixed even today, they are important for hearing the creative directions of the then-18-year-old drummer. Both feature all-star casts, with Spring being the only album to contain both Sam Rivers and Wayne Shorter. The music found on these albums remains in the hard-bop/free jazz style of the bands that Williams was playing in at this point in his career, and while none of his compositions are ground-breaking, it's worth hearing the drummer in this setting before he veered off into his other interests, more pop-influenced interests.

On the other hand, Wayne Shorter's acoustic releases from the 1960's have become canonical jazz albums and some of the most influential recordings made after World War II. I've already discussed his compositions in detail, so I'll just cover these briefly. In order, these albums are Night Dreamer, JuJu, Speak No Evil, the Soothsayer, The All Seeing Eye, Adam's Apple, and Schizophrenia. Each has its own flavor, with a general movement from pentatonic, popular music in the earlier albums to dark, chromatic music in the later ones. Ensembles vary from album to album as well, with the most notable example being the band on JuJu: McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Jimmy Garrison from the John Coltrane Quartet filled in as Shorter's rhythm section, making any references to the other tenor player in Shorter's music even stronger.

Ron Carter recorded few albums as a leader in this period, but together with Jimmy Garrison and Richard Davis, he filled the bass role on a vast majority of the albums released in the 1960's. The recordings of all of these band members are worth investigating, still readily available, and most often fairly low in price. Each of them also played too many roles as sidemen to really list off, but together with their own releases, the four of them did much to shape the sound of the younger generation of jazz musicians recording in the 60's.