"Goodbye Porkpie Hat" - Greg Howard

Yesterday I posted an interview with Emmett Chapman, the inventor behind the cleverly named Chapman Stick. Branding mistakes aside, the man is a genius luthier and a remarkable musician in his own right, too. Still, I was unimpressed by the Stick for years simply because I never liked what people played on it.

It was Eric Hoffer who said "I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind" -- an insight he apparently arrived at without the benefit of growing up in Vermont. Classical music sounds far better on a damn acoustic guitar, and the lightspeed legato progressive-rock stuff bores me to tears...tears of blood. Charles Mingus, on the other hand? Yes, sing to me.

Greg Howard also excels as a teacher: start here. He's developed a whole personal Academy, from rigorous practice routines to a hybrid notational system to communicate the intricacies of Stick playing on paper. More importantly, though, he brings a fascinating new angle to Goodbye Porkpie Hat in this grainy video right here. Dig it.

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.

Ed Byrne on the Limitations of "Jazz Theory"

"It is helpful to understand a little music history in order to better understand the various styles that emerged. In a nutshell, it goes like this: In the West, the music was modal until the late 17th century, at which time the music became tonal (based on chord progressions aimed at culminating in a cadence to the tonic chord). The tonal system prevailed until the Twentieth century, when much of the music tended towards atonalism (no primary key). In atonalism, chords are arranged in successions that have no functionality in a tonal sense, but are used for their color and interest alone. Jazz, however, is basically still rooted in the harmonic practices of the classical and romantic periods (18th and 19th century harmony).

The Berklee system of applying chord scales and modes to chord progressions makes it necessary to theorize in order to arrive at which of these (arbitrary at best) scales are to be applied. In this way, Greek modal names are applied to a tonal chord system that is in no way modal. Indeed, the European composers, whom jazz musicians emulate, rarely employed modes in tonal music: they used non-harmonic tones to propel their lines forward.

This is, I hope, an interesting tidbit of history: A few years ago, while writing my doctoral dissertation, I interviewed Jerry Coker, who was one of the very first to hold a full-time positon as Jazz Professor in a college or university. He admitted to me that he used this modal system--with its Greek names--to impress the classical administrators that dominated the music department—so that they might take jazz education seriously. (They have been in the colleges for well over 100 years, while jazz education was only begrudgedly admitted fewer than 50 years ago.)

Coker explained that had he taught a more direct, common sense traditional approach to this extemporaneous art form, it would have gone right over their heads. They don't like us. The only reason jazz exists in higher education is because of enrollment: Students demand jazz courses.

My method is based on reducing the melody to its essence, and learning the guide tone line and the root progression. I then systematically apply non-harmonic tones. Added to this is a systematic development of the song's rhythms. I find that this approach gets my students and me to the heart of the subject matter--with no unnecessary terms and theories.

A voicing is a voicing; a chord is a chord; a progression is a progression. In tonal music there obviously are only so many ways to make a progression, and the musical elements adhere to general concepts. But these jazz theory books imply that Major seventh b5 (#11) chords, or a Dominant seventh +9 chord, for two examples, are jazz chords. They are not.

To learn what Miles Davis thought of his music from his modal period (circa 1958-63), the best source is Davis' autobiography, Miles: The Autobiography, in which he states that he was prompted into this style of improvising on fewer chords by Gil Evans' arrangements of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. He also states that George Russell recommended pianist Bill Evans (no relation) to Davis around the same time period (1958) for his LP Kind of Blue on the strength of Evans' knowledge of the music of French Impressionist composers Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Davis subsequently became infatuated with Revel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, and spent roughly the next 13 years incorporating the latter composer's devices from that particular piece into a distinctive Davis style of what some historians (Winthrop Sargeant, for example) termed Impressionist Jazz: unresolved melodic tensions, quartal harmony, non-functional chord successions (as opposed to progressions), extended pedal points, bi-tonality, and other salient early Twentieth century characteristics.

Having said all of this, however, I must point out that jazz is not modal, including Davis' music of the period in question. Jazz scholar Barry Kernfeld, for example, calls this music Davis' Vamp Style, explaining that this style does not fulfill the musical characteristics which scholars attribute to modal music. Check out the New Groves Dictionary of Music and the New Groves Dictionary of Jazz. In brief, modality is a medieval style based on melody--not chords, unlike Mozart's music, whose melodies are guided by and outline chord progressions which move forward through the circle of fifths towards cadences in tonal keys. True modal music is a melodic rather than a harmonic concept. Even when harmony is introduced to modality, it does not guide its behavior. Moreover, the mere absence of chord progressions--or the presence of pedal points--does not constitute modality.

Since Davis' music was beautiful by most standards, it is beside the point that he misunderstood the term modal. While it has no impact upon the success of his musical statements that he thought of it as such, it nonetheless can be asserted that regardless of the fact that he thought of his music as modal, it doesn't make it so.

This misunderstanding of modality has had a profound effect on jazz improvisation pedagogy. The prevailing approach in modern times is to arbitrarily assign modes to each chord in a tonal progression that was designed to accompany a tonal melody. The larger problem with this approach, however, is that it fails to address the primary stuff of the composition on which one should improvise: melody, guide tone lines, root progression, and melodic rhythms. Moreover, to assign three different Greek mode names to a tonal ii7 V7 IMA7 (D Dorian, G Mixolydian, C Ionian) cadence, for example, is tedious and misleading. That progression is in the key of C Major, and if you combine the three modes, you come up with the obvious: a C Major scale; and in this context it is also less restricting to think globally through the key, rather than locally from chord to chord."

--Ed Byrne

Furtherology: Functional Jazz Guitar | Linear Jazz Improvisation: The Method

Wes Montgomery - "Impressions" Live in '65

For my meager money, Wes Montgomery was one of the all-time greatest artists to touch the fretboard. This live footage is a particularly tasty slice of work, and something I'd never seen until this evening.

The thumb technique is incredible. His attack is so casual and his playing is so accurate that the actual notes seem to become invisible even when the camera is directly centered on his right hand. For further reading, here's a long-form article I was obsessing over many years ago: Wes Montgomery Unedited, presented here courtesy of the Internet Archive's very awesome Wayback Machine.

Learn to Play Django-Style Gypsy Jazz Guitar by Paul Mehling

Paul Mehling is a master player and this series of lessons is a bargain. This is a meticulous examination of Django's work and Mehling is careful to strick strictly to the original voicing...and even tone...based on surviving recordings of Gypsy King at work.

Mehling is a solid teacher. He exceeds at teaching you how to hear Django's work effectively. He explains the shadings and embellishments individually until all the complexities gypsy chord progressions start to make playable sense.

VERDICT: 10/10 This two volume set represents a pretty total instruction in an insanely complicated & ornate style. This is one of the best challenges you can take on.