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.

The Lost Legacy of Daniel Hecht

The sole reason I know about Daniel Hecht is because he was an old friend of my stepfather. Growing up, I'd been to his house for dinner and I'd seen strange black & white photographs of Daniel looking very much like a cross between a model and a rock star, and then there was that thing...

I actually spent some time playing around with the monstrous hydraulic "custom capo" system you see in that video. It had grown bigger since this video was shot. It was also no longer attached to a guitar and I had no context whatsoever -- as best I understood it, the device was a crude prototype of a robot hand. "Robot Hands" was something I could definitely get with at the time...two hand tapping routines and open chord voicings, not so much.

At his model/rockstar peak, Daniel Hecht was signed to Windham Hill records and leading the vanguard of the "New Age" movement and the steel string renaissance underway in those days. He also played a Somogyi guitar, which cost more than most houses even then. He released three albums then vanished from the scene, a disappearing act that reality could never full adjust for. Today he's basically unknown and I was stunned to find actual video evidence of his existence on The Youtubes. It made something pretty clear to me: this is history that needs to be documented. I aim to do exactly that. Expect to see an interview with the man here in the next few weeks.

Carl McTague's "6 Integers"

In the course of tackling Oltremare and several Toumani Diabate pieces, I have consistently hit brick walls of my own poorly organized design. Oltremare, for instance, currently consists of about 30 scattered pages of byzantine notes, a crude amalgam of tabulature, notation and what looks like a chess match from an alternate dimension: E4 ==> F#4 ==> G4 ==> G3 and so on. I will probably procure Sibelius, but I am interested by an unorthodox alternative: Wolfram's fully functional Tower of Babel, Mathematica.



Meet Carl McTague, a cat so fascinating he can quote Ayn Rand and I don't even flinch. McTague is a composer and a good deal more: he's developed something he calls the Hierarchical Functional Inheritance Model, which strikes me as a modern mutant of George Russell's classic work in Lydian Chromatic Concept. I am aware that McTague and Russell have very different systems they arrived at by very different means, but both of them are obtuse & complex theories which, despite being top heavy on abstraction, yield remarkable music in practice. Case in point: 6 Integers, which was executed in Mathematica. I was not expecting it to be nearly so interesting, and I recommend checking out both versions. The first gives you a clearer sense of the logic at work, and the second really fleshes out the prog-rock wankery in the middle.



I am still unpacking all the information in McTague's notes for "Music Through Computation," and will be for quite some time. I have never minded being in over my head, and it was worth the confusing initial read just for the "Helix of Fifths" -- which is a small fraction of what this 88-slide presentation outlines. While computer generated algorithmic music goes back to 1991 and further, McTague is doing unique and impressive work.

Related Reading: The Sound of Numbers: A Tour of Mathematical Music Theory by Rachel Wells Hall.

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

Debussy, Composition, and Guitar

"The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams." - Claude Debussy



It was the Albany hip hop producer Daimyo who first introduced me to this mesmerizing gem. In discussing Oltremare, I wandered into timbre, formants, and most of all, music visualization. The system that you see above was developed by Stephen Malinowski, and the color-coding and linear connects make it the most instructive and useful way to visualize a musical score I've found so far. Debussy is not a mess of notes, there is a geometric motion and internal logic to the Arabesque that this animation captures nicely.

The opening revolves around E major but colors all over those lines, bringing out some wild overtones with pentatonic riffs. It makes sense I would be drawn to this: it's the common ground between Slayer and Djelimady Tounkara. The hook, without question, is those gorgeous descending lines that come in at the 0:23 mark, a dancing counterpoint that triggers some serious synaesthesia. That's the result of syncopation at work, a brain-tickling perceptual illusion triggered by playing the descending triplets over the sweeping 8th notes of that bass arpeggio:



Debussy: "The musical arabesque, or rather the principle of ornament, is at the basis of all forms of art. The divine arabesque was used by Palestrina and Orlando. They discovered its principle in Gregorian Chant and provided support for its interlaced designs with strong counterpoint."

Throughout his career, Debussy was always quick to give credit to his predecessors and inspirations, and this rich lineage has given music critics a great deal to write about. (Here's one very intense example.) As you can imagine, though, there is little to be said about Debussy that's as interesting as the music itself.

It was the horizons that Debussy was most interested in, the inherent possibilities of music. He was fascinated by iteration and permutation, and wrote with a very long-term legacy in mind. For illustration purposes, here's a valuable comparison: "Reverie" performed by two masterful players, one behind a piano and the other gently fingering a guitar...





Both of these "Reverie" performances are compromises & interpretations. Deric Bownds brings what he wants out of the composition, and if you peruse the comments, you'll see a lot of folks chiding him for rushing the tempo and taking liberties -- but this unfaithful adaptation is precisely what makes his version work. Which brings me to the real point of this: what makes Debussy work so well in the first place?

There's a lot of myths about the Golden Ratio being encoded throughout the scores of Debussy, but evidence is mixed at best. In fact, it's the gently broken nature of his work, his willingness to push out into dissonant spaces, that keeps me so compelled by his music, so he obviously deviates from the pure harmonies of Pythagoras. Both his contemporaries and his subsequent biographers have noted that Debussy was unusually preoccupied with something that also happens to obsess me: timbre, the distinct tonality of instruments, rooms and equipment.



Consider Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, something I strongly advise taking in at high volume and on sparkly drugs. Incorporating bassoons, clarinets, flutes, oboes, harps...note the plural usage. Throughout the piece, you hear Debussy pushing the instruments to make sounds only they can make and hold notes that resonate with the physical instrument. He also takes advantage of the fact there's at least two of everything, unleashing all manner of minor key intervals that straddle the harmony/dissonance gap and, again, emphasize resonance.

Debussy's interest was artistic and philosophical, but in 2012 the principles of resonance and dissonance are fully weaponized concepts, manifested as the LRAD crowd control unit. None of this is obscure or academic.

It can be beautiful, though. Here's contemporary songwriter David Rawlings, talking about his own love of dissonance and the unique timbre of a perfectly shitty guitar...



So: back to our beautiful Arabesque. In the Malinowski animation this all began with, it's being performed on solo piano, a devilishly impressive feat considering most piano transcriptions are written for "Four Hands." Still, as the video makes clear, the layout of the song is a counterpoint conversation between the bass and treble. The raw complexity is similar to the classic crab canon, Bach's The Musical Offering, but far looser -- Debussy was writing soundtracks prior to the invention of cinema. Here's a charmingly goofy example of how the duet format opens the piece up: a classical guitar and an accordion.



As the man himself noted, "works of art make rules, but rules do not make works of art." He had a rare ear for beautiful riffs from far outside traditional music theory, and he also had a mathematician's patience, tinkering with orchestrations until he found arrangements that clicked, building without blueprints.

I have been tinkering with the first Arabesque on guitar for months now and I'm starting to view it as a mathematical object like the Mandelbrot set. There's a tremendous amount of ideas packed into an apparently breezy little exercise, and a playful self-similarity I recognize from natural fractals. There is ultimately such an abundance of math inside the Arabesque it becomes a sort of Rorschach test. Some folks see parallel chord movement and other see bitonal architecture and nobody is exactly wrong.

Meanwhile, I keep trying to find all the sweet spots.



"An examination of the harmonic techniques out of their context has all too often led to misleading terminology such as 'static' or 'non-functional' as a description of Debussy's harmonic methods. Viewed as a whole, however, the tonal coherence of his music depends upon a carefully calculated and often dramatic interaction of these various harmonic 'types' with each other and with orthodox diatonic harmony. The result is a tonal language, but one which is fundamentally different in concept from classical tonality. The detailed classifications of harmonic events is no longer possible in Debussy's music where the central tonality of a work emerges only through a constant focusing and re-focusing on harmonic types." - Jim Samson



"Search for a discipline within freedom! Don't let yourelf be governed by formulae drawn from decadent philosophies: they are for the feeble-minded. Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind..." - Claude Debussy, 1862-1918

Arranging for Solo Guitar: The Queen Titles by Edgar Cruz

If you're smart enough to be a Queen fan, this is a goldmine. Cruz is a serious talent and an effortless teacher. The music is gorgeous and the arrangements will really give your chops a workout. Turns out Brian May is a big fan of this, too -- definitely a good sign.

Four tracks get featured here. Might not sound like much on paper, but of course that adds up to a huge amount of instruction because the techniques involved get so beautifully complicated. The lineup: Killer Queen, We Are the Champions, Crazy Little Thing Called Love and best of all, Bohemian Rhapsody.



As you can see, the technical toolkit here is heavily classical, skewed towards flamenco and jazz chord voicings. Those are all Very Good Things if you're into exploring the instrument. Just as a riff generator, this material has been a valuable tool even when I'm not focusing on learning whole passages.

VERDICT: 9/10 As a lesson in composition and dynamics, this is hard to beat. Cruz is masterful and this DVD is a gem.