Erroll Garner meets the Carpenters

Posted byEthan

When I teach remixes in music tech class, I like to make the analogy to radical jazz arrangements of standards. Technically, John Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things” is not a remix of the version from The Sound of Music, but it occupies the same cultural role as a remix. (In fact, I just accidentally typed it as, John Coltrane’s remix of “My Favorite Things” is not a remix. There you have it.) One of my favorite ever jazz “remixes” is Erroll Garner’s version of “(They Long To Be) Close To You” by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, which the Carpenters had a number one hit with in 1970.

Tom Breihan’s essay about the song in The Number Ones sums up precisely how I feel about it:

There are harps. There’s a flugelhorn solo. There are backup singers echoing Karen’s lines. And it’s too much. All those melodies are toothache-sweet and impeccable to the point of being antiseptic. And the song itself is simple and repetitive enough that it can’t support all those pillowy embellishments.

The one thing that really works about the song is Karen. She’s got this warm, controlled delivery, and she manages to get across both sadness and silliness with a lot of subtlety. 

I agree with all of this. Karen Carpenter is a magnificent singer, but the arrangement just kind of sits there. I will say this for the tune, though: it inspired one of my favorite ever nerdy jokes.

Several people had recorded “Close To You” before the Carpenters got to it. I like Dionne Warwick’s version, which is slower and saucier. It’s also interesting to hear Dusty Springfield’s recording, with a completely over-the-top arrangement and weird doubletime guitar.

Anyway, those are all very interesting, but now let’s get to Erroll Garner’s recording. (Thank you Wayne Marshall for bringing it to my attention.) It’s on the last album that Garner recorded before his death. Look at this cover. Wouldn’t you give anything to hear the story he’s telling? I bet it’s filthy and hilarious.

The album features a breathtakingly great rhythm section: drummer Grady Tate, bassist Bob Cranshaw, and conga player José Mangual.

The Carpenters do the tune in G. Garner takes it a major third lower in E-flat. The Carpenters’ tempo is medium slow, 90 beats per minute with a broad eighth note swing. Garner plays at 120 beats per minute, quite a bit faster. He uses straight eighth notes subdivided into lightly swung sixteenth notes. Here’s a guide to the structure:

  • 0:00 Intro – Garner loved to use jaggedly abstracted intros, and this one is no exception. I had a hard time counting through it until I figured out that the fourth bar is in 9/8.
  • 0:16 First A section – “Why do birds suddenly appear…” Garner reorders the rhythms of the melody, funking them up considerably. He adds some new harmonic twists too, like the nifty chromatic walkdown in the fourth bar. And instead of ending on a tonic major seventh chord like the Carpenters do, he ends on a much bluesier tonic seven sharp nine.
  • 0:32 Second A section – “Why do stars fall down from the sky…” Same as the first A section.
  • 0:47 B section – “On the day that you were born…” Garner throws the rhythm of the original out the window completely, replacing it with a steady eighth note boogie of his own invention.
  • 1:02 Third A section – “That is why all the girls in town…” Same as the first two A sections. However, the last Eb7#9 continues seamlessly into the next section.
  • 1:18 Break – A new section added by Garner, a blues groove on Eb7#9. In retrospect, the last two bars of the previous A section are actually the first two bars of this break.
  • 1:29 Solo: first A section – Garner’s piano solo begins over the hottest polyrhythmic groove I have ever heard in my life. I discuss it in detail below.
  • 1:44 Solo: second A section – The polyrhythmic groove continues. Garner’s constant vocalizing (“yeah”, “uhh”) tells you how hard he is feeling the funk.
  • 1:59 Solo: B section – The polyrhythmic groove gets a little looser as Garner moves accents around in the moment.
  • 2:14 Solo: third A section – The groove tightens back up into the main polyrhythmic pattern.
  • 2:29 B section – This is a kind of “shout chorus“, with Garner simulating the effect of a horn section playing in unison with two-handed block chords. This melody is entirely of his own invention. The polyrhythmic groove resumes in the second half of the section.
  • 2:44 B section – Another “shout chorus”, same as the previous one.
  • 2:59 B section – Garner plays a very loose and groovy version of the original B section melody.
  • 3:14 B section – Yet another “shout chorus”, with a tag on the end. Usually the B section ends with a Fm7-Bb7-Eb, but this time, Garner does a standard turnaround figure, Fm7-Bb7-Gø7-C7b9. Then he does another Fm7-Bb7  which finally resolves back to Eb at the beginning of the next section.
  • 3:32 Outtro groove – Another new section of Garner’s invention. The progression is a classic blues trope: Eb7, Eb°7, Abm6/Eb, Eb7. This progression will repeat for the rest of the tune. The polyrhythmic groove cooks along underneath, with occasional variation.
  • 3:47 Outtro groove – The funkiest section of an outrageously funky recording.
  • 4:02 Outtro groove – Garner pulls the dynamics back, like putting a lid on a furiously boiling pot of water. You can feel the boiling is still going on, it’s just contained now.
  • 4:17 Outtro groove – The groove continues unabated even though Garner is now playing extremely quietly. He comes to a sudden stop on the second to last bar, taking the bassist a bit by surprise.

Jazz complicates the concept of musical authorship considerably. How much of Erroll Garner’s four and half minute performance of “Close To You” is actually the song? He only plays the written melody for the first minute, and then only gestures at it obliquely after that. He follows the chord progression for the first three minutes, but he adds some new chords and extends the existing ones too. He creates a completely new rhythmic feel. His improvisation is his own original material, but he also adds lots of new “composed” material too. I would say that less than half of his recording is “by” Burt Bacharach and Hal David in any meaningful sense.

The most startling addition that Garner makes is the polyrhythmic groove in the solo section. He plays chords with his left hand every three sixteenth notes. It’s not uncommon for a jazz musician to play a three-against-two or three-against-four pattern, but usually it “resets” back to the main four-based meter at the end of the bar. Also, usually jazz musicians play groups of three eighth notes, not three sixteenth notes. Garner’s groups of three are at a finer subdivision level than you’d expect, and he sustains that three-based pattern over each two-bar hypermeasure. It is intense! In the image below, the brown outer ring shows a simplified version of Grady Tate’s drum part: ride cymbal outside, snare in the middle, kick on the inside. The green ring shows the rhythm of Garner’s left hand chords, going in and out of phase with the drum groove. The inner blue ring is the audio waveform.

In his paper A Platonic Model of Funky Rhythms, Richard Cohn argues that the key generative concept in Afrodiasporic grooves is this idea of triple against double, of conflicting prime factors that don’t mutually evenly divide. I don’t know whether this idea really sits at the root of the entire rhythmic tree, but it certainly is a widely recurring one, and it is a bottomless source of inspiration for my own music.

So far, we have only been talking about a simplified abstraction of Garner’s rhythm, the version that could be represented in MIDI events on a grid, or in Western notation. However, Garner’s rhythms don’t all sit exactly on the grid. He also uses conspicuous Dilla time: multiple conflicting rhythmic feels simultaneously. Dan Charnas cites Garner’s ability to maintain different swing feels in each hand as a key predecessor of J Dilla’s style. In “Close To You”, Garner plays his left-hand offbeat sixteenth notes consistently late. This isn’t surprising; it’s the definition of sixteenth note swing. However, some of the left-hand eighth notes are a little early, and they create noticeable friction. Meanwhile, Garner plays his right-hand sixteenth notes mostly straight, but way behind the beat. Ironically, this makes the offbeat ones line up with the swung grid anyway – “straight and late” is a swing feel that other jazz musicians use too. I haven’t mapped out all the microrhythms in Garner’s playing on this tune, or how they interact with the rhythm section. But the closer I look, the more layers of structure I find.

It is not necessary to intellectually understand Garner’s groove to enjoy it. (You don’t have to understand harmony to enjoy his chords either.) But I do think it’s valuable to be able to put into words why this recording is such a killer, why specifically it sounds as great as it does. Some of this is just practical. I would love to be able to make music like this, either on an instrument or in the computer. Now I know that it’s a good idea to combine dotted eighth note hemiola, sixteenth note swing, anticipated eighth notes, and straight-and-late sixteenth note melodies, and it’s something I’m eager to try. Being able to verbalize these ideas also makes it possible to teach them. Rather than just telling students, “Hey, check out this sweet groove”, I can unpack the specific reasons for its sweetness. Developing this kind of vocabulary is a necessary step toward bringing the study of rhythm into parity with the study of harmony. Rhythm isn’t any less deep, profound or complex than harmony, and it certainly isn’t less important. But in American music schools, hardly anyone teaches rhythm in any significant way. Even in jazz programs!

Music education still operates under the atavistic European belief that harmony is “intellectual” while rhythm is “bodily.” I had a commenter on this blog argue about it with me just a few days ago. Beyond the white supremacist/colonialist underpinnings of this belief, it also doesn’t align with how music cognition actually works. Descartes was wrong. There is no mind-body split. Your entire brain is involved in all of music cognition: harmony, melody, rhythm, everything. Your motor cortex plays a surprisingly large role in understanding music, even when you’re sitting in a chair, because your brain relies heavily on spatial metaphors for understanding abstract concepts. When you are dancing, it’s not like your brain is suddenly inactive. The brain is an organ of your body, and it can’t operate independently of the body that it’s in. Dancing and rhythm entrainment are just as much cognitive functions as math and logic. It’s all just wet biochemistry.