Maiden Voyage: Jazz; Guitar

I was entranced by Maiden Voyage years before I knew what it was. I was living in North Carolina with drummer Ryan Hare and caught this classic Hancock tune on accident, a random scrap of debris thrown in the wake of Ryan's ongoing obsession with jazz improvisation. At the time I was making the transition from rap and metal into African and bluegrass, and now, years later, I find myself on the same stretch of path, reading through Levine's Jazz Theory Book and studying up on a solid century worth of an artform I was too conditioned to appreciate until recently.

Also: Maiden Voyage just sounds really damn pretty.

The San Francisco Jazz Collective version is gorgeous and the footage is great, too, so I had to share that. My muse for this latest journal entry, though, is precise slice of history from May 17th, 1965. The legendary Rudy Van Gelder was behind the boards and Blue Note Records was running the world. Herbie Hancock was sitting at the piano with some powerful lead sheets and one of the best rhythm sections in human history behind him, Tony Williams and Ron Carter. Jazz loves the magic and mystique of improv, but in most respects "Maiden Voyage" was clinically precise intelligent design. Classic music was a foregone conclusion before the tape even started rolling.



I was raised on jazz as background music for dinner conversation: cool, calm and polite stuff that won't compete with monologues about New Yorker articles and grown-up shit like that. Maiden Voyage works on that level, and it's also a great soundtrack for sex, but the real meat is careful, active listening which reveals the fact there are hours worth of ideas somehow crammed into eight minutes of running time here. Every soloist runs a subtle clinic on melodic improv and thematic iteration, and all of it stays, note for note, in that same perfectly restrained pocket. I've read a number of critics now referring to Freddie Hubbard's solo passage as "explosive," but to my ears his dynamics are an artful fit...just like every other detail.

The always-educational Steve Khan has contributed a detailed look at George Coleman's tenor solo -- here's the Transcription and the Analysis.

Once I started digging into the theory, though, the real fun began. It turns out there's not a lot of agreement about what those hypnotic opening chords to Maiden Voyage even are. Take the very first one, for instance. So far I have seen D7sus4, D9sus, Am7sus/D, Amin/D, and the suspiciously simple Dsus. Herbie himself allegedly thought of it as a D13sus4 and notated it on lead sheets as CMA7/D. If you're on the verge of a nosebleed, so was I. Clearly, I had discovered the edge of the Universe as far as traditional music theory was concerned. Were all these people insane? How could there be so much disagreement about an arrangement of notes?



For starters, there's a lot of clarity in the Ed Byrne piece I posted a week back, "The Limitations of Jazz Theory." The fact is simply that neither classical nor jazz "music theory" actually accounts for the available tonal space that our Western chromatic scale provides. So when Herbie Hancock goes looking for exotic voicings that evoke, in his words, "the splendor of a sea-going vessel on its maiden voyage," well...Herbie might find himself wandering right off the map. I think we can all agree that's a good thing.

When it comes to guitar translation, though, it makes communication difficult. Here's an interesting approach on a classical axe -- I'm guessing the guitar is in Drop D to accommodate that low pedal tone. The bass turnaround of the vamp can be done on open strings (A D A D) and then the high end gets articulated on the fretboard. Once he has to leave this resonant position, you'll notice the voicings sound less full and less accurate, too.



Thus far, I have not solved the mystery. I do wish I had a tidy conclusion that made me look smart. I'm still fumbling with voicings and reaching around by ear. The disagreement among Authorities is beyond surreal: just take a look at the Wikipedia page for this. Note the fact there are two diagrams, both of which claim to describe the opening chord and offer completely different names and notation.



Notation in print looks so crisp and official, doesn't it? Blinded with science. So that's a Dsus, clear as day, and matches up closely to both the original recording and the classical guitar version (D2 A2 G3 C4 E4 G4 which gets implied by D3 C4 E4 G4 on guitar) -- however, as Wikipedia goes on to explain, it's also a minor eleventh chord, specifically Am7/D. The notation spells out a different recipe, too: a tightly stacked D3 A3 C4 E4 G4.



If you have better advice, or at least more accurate cheat sheets, please get in touch. No rush, though. Fortunately, it's one beautifully dense puzzle box. I'll keep listening.