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 it up. So here are some new thoughts about what is arguably the weirdest jazz standard.

To be clear, there are many weirder jazz tunes than this, but not in the core repertoire. Also, “weird” does not mean “complex”. This tune is radical in its simplicity. In fact, it is so radically simple that usually when other people play it, they insert more structure into it. It illustrates the surprising fact that the simpler a tune is, the harder it can be for jazz musicians to improvise on it. We will get to this idea in more depth below.

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Artificial intelligence in music

We are kicking off my Musical Borrowing class at the New School with a discussion of artificial intelligence in music. I decided to start here because 1) we are covering concepts in reverse chronological order; 2) the students are going to want to talk about it anyway; and 3) this is the least interesting topic of the course for me personally, so I’d prefer to get it out of the way. To get everybody oriented, I assigned this mostly optimistic take on AI music from Ableton’s web site. Then we did some in-class listening and discussion.

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Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing

Every ten years it occurs to me to learn this tune, and then I come up against the fact that it’s in E-flat minor, I get discouraged, and I give up. Well, not this time! This time I decided to take the coward’s way out: I put the tune in Ableton and transposed it up to the much more guitarist-friendly key of E minor. 

Yusuf Roahman plays shaker and Sheila Wilkerson plays bongos and güiro, and Stevie plays everything else: piano, (synth) bass and drums. I assume that Stevie put down the piano first and then they overdubbed everything on top?

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Musical Borrowing syllabus

This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School for the first time. Here’s my syllabus. It will probably evolve as we go, but this is the initial plan.

This course on “non-original” music explores how frequently existing compositions have been appropriated and adapted into new works, and how these borrowings challenge conventional notions of originality and authenticity. The course provides historical perspectives on musical borrowing from the Renaissance through 19th-century paraphrases and 20th-century cover versions to debates about sampling and plagiarism cases today. It explores the evolving cultural, philosophical, legal, and economic considerations around the phenomenon of musical borrowing. Students engage with these topics through guided listenings, readings, response papers, quizzes, class presentations, and creative projects, with a final research/analysis paper on a recent/current case of musical borrowing. A basic knowledge of music theory and some ability to read music notation are helpful but not required for this course.

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Dies irae

This fall I’m teaching Musical Borrowing from Plainchant to Sampling at the New School. For the plainchant part of that, my example is the Dies irae sequence, which is to Western European classical music what the Funky Drummer break is to hip-hop. Dies irae (Latin for “the day of wrath”) is a medieval poem describing the Last Judgment from the Book of Revelation. Its first musical setting was a Gregorian chant in Dorian mode from the 13th century.

Fun fact! In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the self-flagellating monks are chanting the last few lines of the Dies irae sequence.

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Technology in Music Education – updated syllabus

This fall, I am teaching Technology in Music Education at Western Illinois University. The students are in-service music teachers who are working toward masters degrees. Here’s my syllabus.

I have left out administrative details and university boilerplate. Feel free to use any of this as you see fit, but if you do, please tell me, I’m always interested to hear.

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If I Fell

Is this the coolest pre-Revolver Beatles song? In terms of notes on the page, it very well could be.

My daughter and I managed to sing the harmony parts together the other night. She has a good ear for a seven year old, but also, the harmonies in that song are so clear and intuitive, it’s like they want to help you sing themselves.

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Bach’s Duet in E minor BWV 802

I did a bunch of posts on here a while back about how I like it when Bach gets chromatic and weird, and ever since then, people have been recommending me more of his weird chromatic music. Somebody on Twitter recommended that I check out the Duet No. 1 in E minor from the third volume of the Clavier-Übung III (“keyboard-practice”). Whoever you are, you were right, I do like this!

The word “duet” here does not mean that it was written for two people, but rather, that it’s a fugue in two voices. (You could certainly play it on two instruments if you wanted, though.) I like Bach’s two-voice counterpoint pieces as listening experiences because they are easier to follow and understand than the ones with more voices. The very dense ones are fascinating, but they throw too much information at me for enjoyable real-time listening.

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Pusherman

I am always on the lookout for clear examples of blue thirds, pitches in between the standard equal-tempered major and minor thirds. I heard Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman” recently, and the vocal melody grabbed my ear. (Be advised that the first verse uses the n-word.)

You can hear the pitches in the vocal melody even more clearly in the acapella.

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Lil’ Darlin’

I finally got around to watching Tár. Early in the movie, Lydia helps her wife Sharon through a panic attack by dancing with her to one of my favorite jazz recordings, Neal Hefti’s tune”Lil’ Darlin'” as recorded by Count Basie. Lydia says, “Let’s bring this down to sixty beats per minute.” Sharon corrects her: “Sixty-four.”

That is incredibly slow! Neal Hefti intended the tune to be played at more of a medium swing tempo, but Basie was right to play it as a ballad. A guy on this trumpet forum thread describes it as “grown folks tempo.” A less skilled jazz ensemble would find it hard to resist the urge to speed up, but the Basie band actually slows down slightly over the course of the performance. That is incredible control.

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