My Song Factory class is coming up on the Standards and Showtunes unit, covering the Great American Songbook. I mainly relate to these tunes via jazz.
In this post, I collect standards of the ones that appear in movie musicals, and I pair each one with a well-known jazz interpretation. (Note that most of these songs had appeared in stage musicals many years before the films were made.) Enjoy! Continue reading “Where do jazz standards come from?”
My kids are totally obsessed with the Beatles right now, much to my ongoing delight, so I’m learning how to play more of their songs. Brad Mehldau motivated me to take a look at “She’s Leaving Home”, which I learned about a thousand years ago on guitar and haven’t thought about in a while. It’s a good one! Apparently, when Paul McCartney was ready to record the song, George Martin was busy. Paul was eager to get moving on it, so he asked a guy named Mike Leander to do the harp and string arrangement. Presumably Leander transcribed Paul’s piano part and embellished from there. Harpist Sheila Bromberg was the first woman to play on a Beatles record.
The production is pretty tame by Sgt Pepper’s standards, but there are still some intriguing choices. There’s a single-tap tape echo on the harp, which is most plainly audible on the intro. Paul and John double-track their voices on the choruses, too. Those touches are just enough to keep the track in the world of psychedelia, rather than the world of fake classical like “Eleanor Rigby.” Hear the harp without the tape echo on this early take:
Brad Mehldau has a new album out of solo piano arrangements of Beatles songs (plus one David Bowie song for some reason.) It’s a good one!
This week in the Song Factory, we begin talking about the conventions of the blues. One central convention is the twelve-bar form. It’s so closely associated with the blues generally that jazz musicians use the term “a blues” to mean any tune using the twelve-bar form. However, it is surprisingly difficult to define what the twelve-bar blues actually is. That’s because there is no such thing as “the” twelve bar blues. Instead, there is a vast constellation of blues song forms that share some general structural features in common. In this post, I won’t even begin to list every variant; I’ll just give some representative examples. For the real truth about this music, you need to consult the music itself.
The Beatles are so omnipresent that it’s easy to take them for granted. I answered a question on r/musictheory about that weird chord in the chorus of “Strawberry Fields Forever” and it made me remember that the song exists, that it’s super cool, and that it would be an interesting topic both for my music tech and songwriting students.
This song was famously assembled in the studio from multiple takes, and its production is quite complicated. Like many later Beatles psychedelic masterpieces, this ended up being more a piece of electronic music than rock. But before we get into the production of the track, let’s talk about the “notes on the page” aspect of the song. John Lennon is very good at making unconventional songwriting ideas sound intuitive and inevitable.
Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case in point.
It was first released on In The Jungle Groove in 1986, but was recorded back in 1970. The strangely tacked-on intro is an excerpt from a different song, “Give It Up Or Turnit a-Loose.” Except that the specific version of “Give It Up Or Turnit a-Loose” they took the excerpt from was titled “In The Jungle Groove,” which is where they got the name of this compilation. Except that the full song “In The Jungle Groove” was not on this compilation, and has actually never been released. Like I said: confusing! Anyway, the point is, once “I Got To Move” proper starts at 0:29, it’s unbelievably funky.
Here’s a Grateful Dead song that I loved as a teenager.
As with many things I loved as a teenager, I did not know why this spoke to me. Now I do, so I get to share that knowledge with you.
I did not expect to hear a classic Eric B & Rakim track on The Crown, but at the end of season five, episode five, there was Dominic West as Prince Charles, dancing to this:
There is a lot going on here! The track opens with an upright bass and a drum kit playing a lightly swinging Latin rhythm. It sounds up close and full. After it plays twice, an entire funk band horn section riff enters, sounding like it’s being played on a small radio hanging from a nail on the wall. Then that same radio plays a riff from a single saxophone while Rakim’s voice, loud and clear, intones, “Don’t sweat the technique.” So that’s the first eight seconds. Next, a red hot distorted breakbeat enters, while the Latin bass/drums groove and the tinny radio sax riff continue looping. You would have no way of knowing that the breakbeat and the saxophone riff are sampled from the same recording, because they are mixed and processed so differently. This new groove plays four times, and then the saxophone riff switches to an angular and unpredictable funk riff using upper extensions of the Eb minor chord. All this before the first verse even starts. It’s a lot!
I have been teaching songwriting for a lot of years as a means to other ends: with my private guitar and production students, with my music tech students, with my music education students, with my music theory students. But this semester at The New School, I get to teach my first actual songwriting class whose only goal is to be a songwriting class. It’s called The Song Factory. I didn’t choose the name, but I like it.
The class is meant to both be a songwriting workshop and a survey of American popular song. My plan is to do six units. For each unit, the class will do some listening, reading and discussion, and then they will write an original song. I am requiring that these songs have lyrics, and the students must sing/rap them in class. I am not particular about how they accompany their vocals. They can play their instruments, record their own backing tracks, or use existing loops, instrumentals, type beats or karaoke tracks. We will talk about composition, arrangement and production a bit, but we will mainly be concerned with the sung/rapped aspect of songwriting.
I wrote a lot of stuff this year! First, let’s talk about the big projects that I started in previous years but finished in 2022. The biggest one was my doctoral dissertation. Read the story of it here. Now I’m in the gradual process of adapting it into a more accessible format, probably a book aimed at music teachers. That’s percolating in the background.
I also finished a book chapter about critical race theory in music education with Frank Abrahams. We started it quite a while ago, before CRT was a regular topic on Fox News and before conservative states started banned its teaching. We were still editing about a week before it went to the printers.
