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Great shout.... speaking of Ahmad
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11-08-2020 03:31 PM
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Also a tune like When or When, has a very floating quality even though the changes are not word per se, those chords are really dwelt on.
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Benny Carter's original changes for When Lights Are Low are pretty distinctive for the time. The song was published in 1936, a year before Have You Met Miss Jones and has a bridge that moves through a cycle of minor 3rds (as opposed to HYMMJ's major 3rd cycle bridge). A year after that, we get Ray Noble's Cherokee with its bridge descending by whole tones so there was definitely something in the air!
Maybe Baubles, Bangles and Beads was the missing link for Coltrane's Giant Steps? The whole composition rather than just the bridge is built around sections that lie a major 3rd apart. I don't think 'Trane recorded or spoke about either BB&B or HYMMJ but it seems unlikely that he wasn't familiar with both tunes.
Isn't it an interesting exchange that around the late '50s as tertian cycles became more regularly adopted, harmony itself became more quartal?
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Christian mentioned Strayhorn earlier, so let's add Daydream with its descending semitone bridge to my late '30s list.
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Originally Posted by PMB
BTW I just want to say most jazz musicians of what constitutes ‘functional harmony’ is kind of limited.... and I don’t think it really matters, because jazz musicians don’t play music functionally anyway.
Most jazzers use ‘functional’ to refer to ‘stuff I am familiar with and practice blowing on’ (such as ii V Is) and that’s absolutely fine. I think a deep theoretic understanding of what is or isn’t ‘functional harmony’ is unnecessary for our purposes.
If you are unfamiliar with earlier styles of harmony, the original changes of many familiar tunes may look dauntingly unfamiliar but of course those tunes remain functional from a theoretical perspective.
BTW with earlier rep rapid modulation to other keys often a third away is not an unusual feature, sometimes without a tonicisation. Japanese Sandman goes direct from Eb to G for instance. It’s tempting to call many of the Ellington progressions quasi non functional too.Last edited by christianm77; 11-09-2020 at 05:48 AM.
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Isnt it tempting to call the first few chords of Limehouse Blues non functional? Db7 Bb7 Ab?
But would tend to assume it was functional because it’s, you know, early.
But the guy who wrote that tune was a classically trained composer influenced by Debussy.... so .... it’s not simple.
(the first time I started playing Gypsy jazz I was struck by how unfamiliar and strange a lot of the chord progressions seemed. Of course I rapidly learned that eras cliches - I bVI7 I for example. but even so there’s some interesting stuff going on.)
I think people sometimes assume that jazz repertoire developed in its own little bubble, and while that’s sort of true it’s also true that both jazz musicians and Tin Pan Alley songwriters were always plugged into musical developments elsewhere. I mean Sandole was teaching Webern and Ragas in the 1940’s....
Wayne Shorter OTOH was heavily influenced by Vaughan Williams, and while that seems strange at first if you just know the Tallis Fantasia, it makes more and more sense, especially if you listen to VWs 6th symphony, which prominently features saxophone and paid tribute the great black band leader Snakehips Johnson, killed in the Blitz.
And i hear the Dorian/pentatonic lines and sus arpeggios of the Lark Ascending in Wayne’s music.Last edited by christianm77; 11-09-2020 at 06:02 AM.
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Originally Posted by Babaluma
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Stella by Starlight is practically proto-Shorter.
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Nah
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If we're talking about standards, written by the tin pan alley dudes, as opposed to jazz standards, written by jazz musicians, you could check out tunes like "My Reverie" which was just lyrics to a Debussy piece.
They did the same with Ravel, putting words to the middle section of "Pavan For a Dead Princess", and coming up with "The Lamp is Low"
Kurt Weill's "Speak Low" has a bridge that I can't remember without looking at the music. He was writing Neo-classical music while in Germany, so he was capable of anything.
When I told my sister that "Invitation" was actually a movie theme with lyrics, she couldn't believe it.
She had a recording of it by Trane, and she thought he wrote it (she babysat for and took bass lessons from Jimmy Garrison, so she was a real Trane freak), when it was actually written back in the 50s or so.
I think of "Stella" as pretty functional. "Spring is Here" also started on a i dim. chord. It was a common trick used by Tchaikovsky and other Romantic Period composers.
AFA jazz musicians writing non-functional tunes back in the 20s, Bix Biederbecke was fascinated by the Impressionists, and wrote tunes like "In a Mist" and others, which do away with functional harmony. Even Django wrote that one fast tune that sounds like a train speeding up (one of his Improvisations?) that was a bunch of non-functional 9th chords.
There were others.
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"Even Django wrote that one fast tune that sounds like a train speeding up"
I havent listened to Django in yrs due to gypsy jazz burnout but think you mean Mystery Pacific
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Though a summary of Djangos ‘non functional’ moments could fill its own thread.
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Originally Posted by christianm77
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^
That was great! Thought I'd heard everything he recorded.
I thought this was the one referenced...
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Originally Posted by christianm77
I have this on CD, but when I moved my CDs to my computer and other digital devices, this song wasn't moved.
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I think it's cool. It reminds me a bit of Raymond Scott's stuff
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Rhythm Futur is awesome.
I feel like Django and Monk were kindred spirits.
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This is also a quite an odd record, definitely more in the 'errrr... ok' field to me..
But people were into weird shit quite early. Progressivism in jazz didn't start in the 1950s....
Anyway here's Monk's teacher
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I was gonna post that Norvo set piece, I think it's great!
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I have this 10" lp
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Originally Posted by christianm77
"Scott believed in composing and playing by ear. He composed not on paper but "on his band"—by humming phrases to his sidemen or by demonstrating riffs and rhythms on the keyboard and instructing players to interpret his cues. It was all done by ear with no written scores, a process known as head arrangements). Scott, who was also a savvy sound engineer, recorded the band's rehearsals on discs and used the recordings as references to develop his compositions. He reworked, re-sequenced, and deleted passages, and added themes from other discs to construct finished works. During the developmental process, he let his players improvise, but once complete, he regarded a piece as relatively fixed and permitted little further improvisation. Scott controlled the band's repertoire and style, but he rarely took piano solos, preferring to direct the band from the keyboard and leave solos and leads to his sidemen. He also had a penchant for adapting classical motifs in his compositions."
Then he made an album in 1957 with sidemen like Kenny Burrell, Eddie Costa and Milt Hinton called "The Unexpected". He called the band The Secret Seven, and refused to reveal their identities, but someone found them out somehow. This was the only album he made where he didn't follow the process above, and allowed the band to improvise in the usual way. I love the guy's music.
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big raymond scott fan...he was way ahead of his time
music for babies!! hah
cheers
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11-26-2020, 07:56 PM #49joelf GuestOriginally Posted by Babaluma
I don't know that I'd make that particular leap of faith myself. Stella is a through-composed tune, and IMO it looks back as much---probably more---than 'ahead'. There's no ambiguity either, to my ears at least. It all hangs together and VOICE LEADS very logically, if not predictably. I say this since you mention Wayne Shorter, who's somehow been tagged as 'non-resolving' and other $5 words, when he's perfectly traditional, just in his own way. (Like the man sang: Nothing from nothing makes nothing).
Take Wild Flower: It has a repeated melodic strain with a shifting harmony (where Stella has a 'climbing' melodic architecture). That rising figure in bar 17 (if I counted right) rises a bit higher toward the end---then that 1st melodic strain repeats verbatim, again with a different harmony.
They're both well-made, well-thought-out tunes. But I wouldn't say Stella 'foreshadowed' Wayne's or other post-'60s jazz composers. I DO hear your point about 'twists and turns'---but that could be said of many standards like, say, I Cried For You. It may be simpler, but it still has a through-composed frame, and, like Stella by Starlight, no bridge as such. (Interestingly: of these 3 Wild Flower is the one with the bridge---or the material I alluded to from bar 17 on. Let's call it 'bridge-like').
Guess all I'm really saying is: no going forward without looking back. The soil and roots in songs go far---and deep...Last edited by joelf; 11-27-2020 at 12:02 AM.
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