You can listen to the Grateful Dead for the songs, or you can listen for the jams. I love the songs as songs, but the Dead do not always do their own material much justice, especially when it’s time to sing a three-part harmony. The jams are less immediately accessible, but it’s what the band …
Category Archives: Improvisation
Inside the Beautiful Jam
The Grateful Dead are most (in)famous for their collective improvisation. Sometimes that improvisation happened within the confines of a song: unstructured arrangements, solos, preset groove sections. Sometimes it happened during semi-composed transitions between the parts of a suite, like Help/Slip/Frank. The most exciting and unpredictable jams happened in transitions between songs, or just out of …
What does Jerry Garcia play on “Eyes of the World” and why does it sound so cool
What makes Jerry Garcia’s guitar style so magical? What makes a person like me slog through so much indifferent-to-terrible Grateful Dead music to hear it? Rather than try to understand the whole corpus at once, I think it makes more sense to zoom in on specific phrases and passages and see how they work. In …
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Exploring Hip-Hop Pedagogies in Music Education
Over the weekend I went to a hip-hop education panel organized and moderated by my fellow white hip-hop advocate Jamie Ehrenfeld, featuring four of the brightest lights in the field: Jamel Mims aka MC Tingbudong (rapper in English and Mandarin), Dizzy Senze (devastatingly great freestyle rapper), Regan Sommer McCoy (curator of the Mixtape Museum), and …
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Freedom Jazz Dance
A friend texted me to tell me that he was listening to a jazz show on public radio in Denver, and that they referenced an old blog post of mine about “Freedom Jazz Dance” by Eddie Harris. That was a pleasant surprise, and it made me want to go back to the post and freshen …
Check out this excellent blue note
I got a question from a Twitter friend: Oh @ethanhein, a blues tonality Q for you: On Muddy Waters’s “Double Trouble,” on the LP Sings Big Bill, James Cotton opens his harp solo w/a note so ripe it almost derails the record —yet somehow it works. My Q: what makes that note so bracing? Link: …
Dorian mode
Dorian mode is such a cool scale. It evokes medieval chant and the blues. Its characteristic minor sixth chord is almost a diminished chord. And it’s unique among the diatonic modes for being symmetrical, meaning that it uses the same sequence of intervals going up and down. When you write Dorian on the chromatic circle, …
Mixolydian mode
If you flatten the seventh note of the major scale, you get Mixolydian mode. It’s like a bluesier version of major. Mixolydian is a medieval mode that fell out of favor with “art” music composers during the Baroque era. However, it stayed alive and well in various European folk traditions before having an explosion in …
Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues
There is a fascinating moment in “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin where Robert Plant plays a very flat ninth on the harmonica. I love this note, because there is so much music theory and history encoded within it. Listen at 0:41. Before we can get into the details of this note and what …
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Burning Down The House
Here is the closest Talking Heads ever came to a legitimate pop hit, their only song to crack the Billboard Top Ten. It isn’t as conceptually or musically groundbreaking as “Once In A Lifetime“, but it contains depths of its own.