Embellishing tones are non-chord tones that are still within the key or mode. Chromatic embellishments are notes from outside the key or mode. They are easy to spot because they sound characteristically “weird”, or, at least, more colorful than the other notes around them. Thus the “chromatic” part – the word comes from chroma, the Greek word for color.
Here are some examples from different genres and eras. Continue reading “Identifying chromatic embellishments”
Phil Lesh’s passing hit me harder than I expected, probably because I’ve been so immersed in the Dead lately anyway. I persuaded MusicRadar to let me write a column about my favorite Phil basslines, one of which is “Cumberland Blues.” Phil co-wrote the tune, and I assume he was responsible for its moments of intense musical oddness. Here’s the studio version from Workingman’s Dead. It includes Jerry’s only banjo performance on a Grateful Dead song, aside from the last few seconds of the “Dark Star” single.
There is a real Cumberland mine in Pennsylvania, and another in Kentucky. In his collected lyrics, Robert Hunter says in a footnote to this song: “The best compliment I ever had on a lyric was from an old guy who’d worked at the Cumberland mine. He said, ‘I wonder what the guy who wrote this song would’ve thought if he’d ever known something like the Grateful Dead was gonna do it.'” I half suspect that Hunter made this story up, but the lyrics do sound legitimately folkloric. In his Pitchfork review of Workingman’s Dead, Steven Thomas Erlewine compares Hunter’s lyrics on the album to Robbie Robertson’s, because both of them have that plausibly timeless Americana quality.
Today in pop aural skills, we identified suspensions, that is, melodies that place unexpected non-chord tones on strong beats, before resolving to the expected chord tones. These are melodic suspensions, which are not the same thing as sus4 or sus2 chords, but they are related concepts.
Western European classical theory has a lot of clear and unambiguous rules for suspensions. Pop follows those rules to varying extents, but not strictly. There is less of an expectation that the chord tones will be on strong beats in the first place, or that the chord tones are even the main melody notes. So some (maybe all) of these examples are debatable.
RIP Phil Lesh, who passed on while I was writing this.
In the first part of this post, I analyzed the Live/Dead recording of “Dark Star” and compared it to several other versions. In this part, I survey the academic literature about the tune, of which there is a surprisingly large amount.
First, let’s consider the phrase “dark star” itself. It’s widely used in non-Grateful Dead contexts. It’s a theoretical predecessor to black holes, a so-so Crosby, Stills and Nash song, a science fiction movie by John Carpenter, a company that makes concealed carry holsters, a company that makes marble countertops, and many other random things. I guess the phrase is just very evocative.
Just after I posted this, I learned that Phil Lesh died. RIP Phil.
See also the academic literature review in part two.
Space: the final frontier. “Dark Star” is the ultimate Grateful Dead jam vehicle, and the purest experience of the band, at least as far as the true believers are concerned. The song also represents everything that nonbelievers find annoying about them. Brian Marchese satirizes the attitude: “deedle deedle noodle noodle wanky wanky crash boom dum dum da da noodle noodle Dark Star something/ space rock lyrics total dork fest doodle dee smoke another, dude, stoner twirly spinny dancer psychedelic space rock…” I have felt this way myself at times. But if you are in the right frame of mind, “Dark Star” can be a magical journey.
I first heard the tune on What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been, the studio recording that the band (very optimistically) released as a single in 1968. It sold a few hundred copies and vanished.
If you know “Dark Star” by reputation as a long and unfocused jam, this two-and-a-half-minute recording will be quite a surprise. I have a special place in my heart for it, because while it’s silly in some ways, I admire its creative ambition. The stereotypically hippie-ish tambura drone has not aged well, but the last few seconds are really special: the Lydian ending chords fade into Robert Hunter reading a nonsensical poem, which in turn fades into a tiny snippet of Jerry playing uptempo bluegrass banjo. The Dead gave up on that kind of studio adventurism quickly, but I appreciate it while it lasted.
I met Dr Jim Frankel, the founder of MusicFirst, back when I was a grad student. We have been mutual admirers in a passive way since then. It was a pleasant surprise when, over the summer, he asked me to contribute to their new Modern Band curriculum, specifically, the music theory component. It’s now being used in schools across the US. Read more about it here.
Back in the twentieth century, there was no easy way to find out what a song was about unless its lyrics were self-explanatory. Grateful Dead lyrics are rarely self-explanatory. I always enjoyed “He’s Gone”, but had the feeling that it was a bunch of inside references that I wasn’t privy to. I turn out to have been right.
This is a break from my usual topics to let you know that my friend Hannah Gersen recently published her second novel. I am about a third of the way in, and I can already tell you that you should read it. The story concerns the US military’s surprising interest in new age medicine. The narrator (like the author) shares my climate despair.
Hannah has a straightforward and undemonstrative prose style that gets at big emotional and political themes without melodrama. If I wrote novels, this is how I would want to write them. Also, Hannah has a suggested reading list to go along with the book. I have read a few of the titles on it, and that makes me want to read the rest of them.
The other night at Rosh Hashonah dinner, my stepbrother was playing my guitar and found his way into “Black Peter.” This was not because he had ever sat down and learned it, but because it’s embedded so deeply in his unconscious that he could teach it to himself in real time. This is yet another Dead tune that I loved as a kid without knowing why, and then didn’t think about for several decades. But now that it’s back in the front of my mind, I figured I would work it through.
Like all the best Jerry tunes, this is neither complicated nor difficult to play, but it is unpredictable and intriguing.
When MusicRadar assigned me to write about Oasis, I was not overjoyed. I figured I would start with the Wonderwall meme and go from there.
Once you move past the joke, though, it becomes an interesting question: why did this seemingly unremarkable song become such a standard for amateur guitarists?
