Have You Met Miss Jones and the rest of Virtuoso by Joe Pass

[pamosmusic]

Here’s my try to analyse the first page of Miss Jones. What would you change or add?

Attachment 122360


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Im not sure how much help you need.

The analysis isn’t what I’d do in places, but you obviously know what you’re doing.

The places that it doesn’t make a lot of sense (ii V I in C major) are context related — get the tune on iReal or whatever and write the basic changes in above the measures. He is playing the form in time so that should work.

What exactly do you need help with, if you don’t mind my asking?

[BartLutsch]

Im not sure how much help you need.

The analysis isn’t what I’d do in places, but you obviously know what you’re doing.

The places that it doesn’t make a lot of sense (ii V I in C major) are context related — get the tune on iReal or whatever and write the basic changes in above the measures. He is playing the form in time so that should work.

What exactly do you need help with, if you don’t mind my asking?

I feel like I miss a lot of things. I’m also not sure if what I write makes ant sense. Also, I have difficulties to incorporate these ideas into my own playing.


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[Tal_175]

I feel like I miss a lot of things. I’m also not sure if what I write makes ant sense. Also, I have difficulties to incorporate these ideas into my own playing.

I've always had the problem of putting too much on my plate all at once. I've been more disciplined about incorporating one idea at a time in the last couple of years. It's not only more effective to work this way, but it also makes the process more fun in my experience. That "one thing" can be a specific device (approach chords) or an isolated area (like expanding minor chord vocabulary for horizontal movements). The trick is to stick to them and apply them to tunes until you get to a point where you have to make a metal efford to cut down on using them during performances, lol.

[pamosmusic]

I've always had the problem of putting too much on my plate all at once. I've been more disciplined about incorporating one idea at a time in the last couple of years. It's not only more effective to work this way, but it also makes the process more fun in my experience. That "one thing" can be a specific device (approach chords) or an isolated area (like expanding minor chord vocabulary for horizontal movements).

Yeah I’d agree with this.

Not being able to incorporate it into your playing isn’t an issue of analysis. There isn’t a correct analysis that will get it into your playing.

The thing that makes all the analysis possible is knowing the tune itself though. If you know the tune you don’t need tons of analysis — like oh hey .. this is D7 but Joe plays Am D7 Ab7 … so any time I see D7, I could do that. From there you can say any time you see a dominant chord you can put the same chords in relative to that dominant chord. But the written analysis isn’t even super necessary to get you there. It’s just a way of helping you make those leaps.

But for actually getting it into your playing, it’s getting it off the page. Pick one manageable thing and do that one thing every where over blues and rhythm changes and every tune you play for two weeks and then see where you are.

[Tal_175]

One can extract several ideas from the analyzed section of the tune that's in the pdf file. I have worked on many of these ideas in the past in isolation.
It maybe helpful the separate ideas into different categories. For example:

-Textural ideas: The rhythmic separation of bass notes from the rest of the chords. Alternation of single note lines and chord stabs.
-Harmonic ideas: Creating movement inside a chord by the use of dominant passing chords and functional subs. Eg. Fmaj Bb7 Amin Bb7 Amin. (The Amin7 in the second bar is just Joe's rubato playing taking liberties with the time signature. I would label the first bar as 5/4 time).
-Rhythmic ideas: The use of quarter note triplets.
- Embellishment ideas: Chromatic approach to the bass notes. Joe Pass did that a lot in his chord melodies. (eg. C, C# approach to the D of D7 in the second bar)

I mostly agree with the analysis. There are just a few minor things I'd label differently.

[starjasmine]

I've deleted my recent post, as it really didn't pertain to what you asked: how to understand what Joe plays on this track. I sort of went off on a tangent about how to improvise. Rereading your posts, that's not what you are asking.

Let me try to answer your specific questions:
- learning a complex arrangement takes a lot of time and repetition. One key to memorization is working on the tune daily. If you work on something every day for two weeks, you only have 24 hours since you last played it to forget something. If you wait two weeks to work on it again, yeah, you'll forget things.
- As for the "how to understand this" part, that gets back to an understanding of jazz harmony, which is why I asked about modulations and such in a previous post. You seem to understand a lot at the detailed level, but (please don't take this negatively) what's missing is the big picture. For example, the whole A section is in F major. It's basically I vi ii V I followed by a ii V I with some back-cycling (see the Real Book chart below) that creates iii vi ii V I. If you can fit the analysis at the micro level into the big-picture analysis in terms of key centers, you'll have a way to map Joe's creativity onto the foundation he started from.

Example: Why does Joe harmonize the D-C-D in bar 1 the way he does?
- The first note of the tune, A, is diatonic to the chord in the chart: it's the 3rd of Fma7.
- If we were going to apply standard diatonic harmony, D-C-D could also be harmonized against Fma7, as degrees 6,5 and 6 of the F major scale. But... that's pretty static (no harmonic movement) and not as interesting as picking some other chords to use there.
- Why Bb7 to harmonize D, Am7 to harmonize C and then Bb7 again for D... all leading to harmonizing melody note C against Am7? Let's work backwards: C is written as the melody note and Am is written as the vi chord that harmonizes it. So all Joe is doing there is following the chart ... but how does he GET to Am7? Of all the chords he could choose, why Bb7? One way to look at it is that Am (ACE) is the upper partials of Fma7, so harmonizing Am instead of Fma7 is the same chord... just a different voicing. Adding the 7th gives a little extra tension but not a distracting amount (the 7th of Am,G, is the 9th of Fma.) So we can look at most of this first bar as two interchangeable chords or voicings of the same chord. Not much mystery there.
- The Bb7 is where we get some mystery! Let's get right to that: a chromatic harmony class or jazz harmony teacher would have you recognizing that Bb7 as the tritone sub of E7 instantly. But where does E7 come from?
- If we look at the upper partials of Ami7 (ACEG) we see a minor third based on E. Extend that Am7 to Am9 (of course jazz players extend harmonies all the time... ) and we now see that Am9 (ACEGB) contains an E minor triad in its upper partials. Thus jazz players can substitute Em for Am freely. Now... Em is the 5th of Am; if we wanted to do so, we could build a secondary dominant on E, and that E7 would lead us to Am. The tritone sub of E7 is Bb7. And that's where Joe's choice of a Bb7 likely comes from: We know there is an Em in the upper partials of Am and we use the TT sub of that chord. Which highlghts another common jazz-theory trick: modal interchange, which is borrowing chords from another key or mode. Modal interchange can allow us to hear a chord that is not a dominant function like it is a dominant. In this case, our ears are so used to hearing that half-step bass movement as TT sub that we hear the Bb7 work like a TT sub for E7... even though there's no E7 in the progression!
- Another reason that Bb7 works is that Bb is the IV of Fmaj, and our basic diatonic harmony rules tell us that we can go from I to IV (a plagal cadence) as a way to create some harmonic movement in place of a static I chord. Of course the m7 in Bb& is non-diatonic so we don't really have a true diatonic plagal cadence, but, again, our ears are used to hearing I - IV - I as no big change, so it's another reason they accept the Bb7 harmonization without it seeming too weird.
- This isn't exactly a "pivot chord modulation" because we never really leave F major to go to another key center, but the Bb chord is functioning in two ways: both as the IV in our sort-of-plagal-cadence and the TT sub of that E- in the upper partials of an implied Am9. Tricking the listener's ear in two ways like this makes it a really strong choice.
- Why another Bb7 as the last note of bar 1? Hey, Joe's improvising. He probably made it up on the spot, this was easy to grab, and it sounded OK. There are certainly other choices for harmonizing that note. For example Eb7 or E would have been equally easy to grab... and Joe probably never played any tune the exact same way twice. This is what he did on that day for that take...and it's what got frozen on record and in this transcription.

Quite a screed, eh? And that's just the first bar of the tune....which is why I suggested that this kind of analysis comes much more easily if you have the whole framework of chromatic harmony in your head. If there aren't any teachers in your area, you might be able to find some harmony classes online... or even just try to read a harmony book, especially if you can find a sight-reading piano-player friend to play the musical examples for you. Hearing the musical examples is critical to understanding the conceptual explanations. And hearing is what turns these concepts from things you read on paper into things you can understand when you hear them and things you can incorporate into your own playing without thinking about them too much.

The learning-more-chromatic-harmony aspect aside, it is always helpful to go back to the original version of the tune, analyze that, and then try to look at Joe's ideas as reharmonizations and variations on that original context. The Real Book is not always faithful to the original versions, but it is often a good starting point.

[Tomcat]

I made some time ago a harmony analysis of Joe's Blues in Bb: maybe it helps, there's pdf with all 12 keys of that blues harmony to dowwnload.

[Mick-7]

Ralph Patt's Vanilla Changes....

Have You Met Miss Jones (Key of F - 4/4)

[: F | F#dim | Gm7 | C7 | F | Dm7 |
1._________________________
| Gm7 | C7 :]
2._________________________
| F Bbm | F F7 |

| Bb | Abm7 Db7 | Gb | Em7 A7 | D | Abm7 Db7 | Gb | Gm7 C7 ||
| F | F#dim | Gm7 | C7 | D7 | Gm7 C7 | F | F ||


Versus: Real Book Enhanced Chords Edition version....




May the best chord win!

[BartLutsch]

One can extract several ideas in the analyzed section of the tune. I have worked on many of these ideas in the past in isolation.
It maybe helpful the separate ideas into different categories. For example:

-Textural ideas: The rhythmic separation of bass notes from the rest of the chords. Alternation of single note lines and chord stabs.
-Harmonic ideas: Creating movement inside a chord by the use of dominant passing chords and functional subs. Eg. Fmaj Bb7 Amin Bb7 Amin. (The Amin7 in the second bar is just Joe's rubato playing taking liberties with the time signature. I would label the first bar as 5/4 time).
-Rhythmic ideas: The use of quarter note triplets.
- Embellishment ideas: Chromatic approach to the bass notes. Joe Pass did that a lot in his chord melodies. (eg. C, C# approach to the D of D7 in the second bar)

I mostly agree with the analysis. There are just a few minor things I'd label differently.

Thanks for your answer!

I’m tackling playing like this now: pick a standard and analyze and learn the chords and the melody. Then I try to introduce ideas I’ve noticed in my favourite players playing to the chords of the standard. I hope I will become a better player if I do this for some years


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[BartLutsch]

I've deleted my recent post, as it really didn't pertain to what you asked: how to understand what Joe plays on this track. I sort of went off on a tangent about how to improvise. Rereading your posts, that's not what you are asking.

Let me try to answer your specific questions:
- learning a complex arrangement takes a lot of time and repetition. One key to memorization is working on the tune daily. If you work on something every day for two weeks, you only have 24 hours since you last played it to forget something. If you wait two weeks to work on it again, yeah, you'll forget things.
- As for the "how to understand this" part, that gets back to an understanding of jazz harmony, which is why I asked about modulations and such in a previous post. You seem to understand a lot at the detailed level, but (please don't take this negatively) what's missing is the big picture. For example, the whole A section is in F major. It's basically I vi ii V I followed by a ii V I with some back-cycling (see the Real Book chart below) that creates iii vi ii V I. If you can fit the analysis at the micro level into the big-picture analysis in terms of key centers, you'll have a way to map Joe's creativity onto the foundation he started from.

Example: Why does Joe harmonize the D-C-D in bar 1 the way he does?
- The first note of the tune, A, is diatonic to the chord in the chart: it's the 3rd of Fma7.
- If we were going to apply standard diatonic harmony, D-C-D could also be harmonized against Fma7, as degrees 6,5 and 6 of the F major scale. But... that's pretty static (no harmonic movement) and not as interesting as picking some other chords to use there.
- Why Bb7 to harmonize D, Am7 to harmonize C and then Bb7 again for D... all leading to harmonizing melody note C against Am7? Let's work backwards: C is written as the melody note and Am is written as the vi chord that harmonizes it. So all Joe is doing there is following the chart ... but how does he GET to Am7? Of all the chords he could choose, why Bb7? One way to look at it is that Am (ACE) is the upper partials of Fma7, so harmonizing Am instead of Fma7 is the same chord... just a different voicing. Adding the 7th gives a little extra tension but not a distracting amount (the 7th of Am,G, is the 9th of Fma.) So we can look at most of this first bar as two interchangeable chords or voicings of the same chord. Not much mystery there.
- The Bb7 is where we get some mystery! Let's get right to that: a chromatic harmony class or jazz harmony teacher would have you recognizing that Bb7 as the tritone sub of E7 instantly. But where does E7 come from?
- If we look at the upper partials of Ami7 (ACEG) we see a minor third based on E. Extend that Am7 to Am9 (of course jazz players extend harmonies all the time... ) and we now see that Am9 (ACEGB) contains an E minor triad in its upper partials. Thus jazz players can substitute Em for Am freely. Now... Em is the 5th of Am; if we wanted to do so, we could build a secondary dominant on E, and that E7 would lead us to Am. The tritone sub of E7 is Bb7. And that's where Joe's choice of a Bb7 likely comes from: We know there is an Em in the upper partials of Am and we use the TT sub of that chord. Which highlghts another common jazz-theory trick: modal interchange, which is borrowing chords from another key or mode. Modal interchange can allow us to hear a chord that is not a dominant function like it is a dominant. In this case, our ears are so used to hearing that half-step bass movement as TT sub that we hear the Bb7 work like a TT sub for E7... even though there's no E7 in the progression!
- Another reason that Bb7 works is that Bb is the IV of Fmaj, and our basic diatonic harmony rules tell us that we can go from I to IV (a plagal cadence) as a way to create some harmonic movement in place of a static I chord. Of course the m7 in Bb& is non-diatonic so we don't really have a true diatonic plagal cadence, but, again, our ears are used to hearing I - IV - I as no big change, so it's another reason they accept the Bb7 harmonization without it seeming too weird.
- This isn't exactly a "pivot chord modulation" because we never really leave F major to go to another key center, but the Bb chord is functioning in two ways: both as the IV in our sort-of-plagal-cadence and the TT sub of that E- in the upper partials of an implied Am9. Tricking the listener's ear in two ways like this makes it a really strong choice.
- Why another Bb7 as the last note of bar 1? Hey, Joe's improvising. He probably made it up on the spot, this was easy to grab, and it sounded OK. There are certainly other choices for harmonizing that note. For example Eb7 or E would have been equally easy to grab... and Joe probably never played any tune the exact same way twice. This is what he did on that day for that take...and it's what got frozen on record and in this transcription.

Quite a screed, eh? And that's just the first bar of the tune....which is why I suggested that this kind of analysis comes much more easily if you have the whole framework of chromatic harmony in your head. If there aren't any teachers in your area, you might be able to find some harmony classes online... or even just try to read a harmony book, especially if you can find a sight-reading piano-player friend to play the musical examples for you. Hearing the musical examples is critical to understanding the conceptual explanations. And hearing is what turns these concepts from things you read on paper into things you can understand when you hear them and things you can incorporate into your own playing without thinking about them too much.

The learning-more-chromatic-harmony aspect aside, it is always helpful to go back to the original version of the tune, analyze that, and then try to look at Joe's ideas as reharmonizations and variations on that original context. The Real Book is not always faithful to the original versions, but it is often a good starting point.

Thanks so much for your elaborate answer! It’s really inspiring to read this.

I have The Jazz theory book by Marc Levine. Do you think it’s useful to read it? Or is it better to ‘discover’ the theory song by song?


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[lawson-stone]

Thanks so much for your elaborate answer! It’s really inspiring to read this.

I have The Jazz theory book by Marc Levine. Do you think it’s useful to read it? Or is it better to ‘discover’ the theory song by song?


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There's no reason why you can't do both. Read Levine. It's a very fine book. Play the examples, get the sound in your ear and the idea in your head and fuse them. But also dive into playing tunes too. It's not "either-or"

[starjasmine]

I have The Jazz theory book by Marc Levine. Do you think it’s useful to read it? Or is it better to ‘discover’ the theory song by song?

I've never read it, but I've heard good things about it.

As Lawson says, you can do both. Really, you HAVE to do both. Reading the book won't teach you tunes, and learning individual tunes is not the same as learning an overall system that helps you to make sense of ANY tune.

Hopefully, the book presents an overall picture of how harmony works. That's critical to understanding jazz harmony; otherwise, you're just trying to patch together different ideas here and there, stumbling through the woods on your own. If you have a map, you have an idea of where you are and where you want to go.

[lawson-stone]

I've never read it, but I've heard good things about it.

As Lawson says, you can do both. Really, you HAVE to do both. Reading the book won't teach you tunes, and learning individual tunes is not the same as learning an overall system that helps you to make sense of ANY tune.

Hopefully, the book presents an overall picture of how harmony works. That's critical to understanding jazz harmony; otherwise, you're just trying to patch together different ideas here and there, stumbling through the woods on your own. If you have a map, you have an idea of where you are and where you want to go.

The great thing about this book is that almost every musical example is actually from a tune or famous solo.

[RLetson]

"Miss Jones" gets called with some frequency by the band I sit in with, largely because the guitarist is also a very accomplished singer. And when it's finished, everybody will go "whew," including the pianist, who will point out that the bridge was one inspiration for Coltrane's "Giant Steps." So the tune is pretty gnarly to begin with. (Not unlike some Jerome Kern compositions.)

I am not at all a technical guy--I can't even read standard notation--but I do enjoy getting through an interestingly structured tune, and I do it by hearing the melody via the lyrics and following the best chart-with-chords that I can find, which is often in one of the Mantooth collections. (I would not start with a complex, sophisticated performance, no matter how much I might admire it--it's the bones of the tune I'm after.) I sing along with a skeletal/minimal chordal accompaniment, while the detailed chart shows me the extensions that often provide the song's interesting features or melodic surprises.

Once I've done this, I feel ready to accompany a singer, though my technical limitations mean that I am not about to attempt a solo--though late at night, alone on the sofa, I might tinker with a baby-steps chord-melody arrangement.

This is, of course, the process that one might expect of an untutored ex-folkie, but it has the small virtue of being ear-led. Better prepared players can zoom through most of what takes me a long time to understand. And some things I will never be able to explain, even when I can hear them clearly.