This spring I’m having the pleasure of co-teaching the NYU Music Education Popular Music Practicum. This is an opportunity to enact my long-held belief that music teachers should know how to write songs. My method for teaching songwriting is to say, okay, go write some songs. But I don’t throw the students straight into the deep end; I start with a series of scaffolded songwriting challenges.
Continue reading “Teaching songwriting to music education students”
Sonny Rollins is a justifiably famous for his improvising, but he has also written several jazz standards that are as catchy as anything on top 40 radio: “St Thomas,” “Pent Up House,” “Doxy,” and the stickiest earworm for me personally, “Sonnymoon for Two.” Here’s an early studio recording:
Here’s the really famous version, from the Village Vanguard in 1957:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fC49Nqyvgs
And here’s Horace Parlan quoting it in “Jelly Roll” by Charles Mingus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGF76md7e3Q?t=104
Like harmony, melody works differently in grooves than it does in linear songs or Western classical compositions. In this post, I try to figure out what makes a good groove melody, and how to write one.
Update: Joshua Horowitz made an interactive animation of this image! It’s so cool.
David Bruce made a delightful video about the role of repetition in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
While this piece is hair-raisingly dissonant, it’s also remarkably popular (by classical music standards, anyway.) David explains this fact by showing how repetition makes the previously inexplicable seem more meaningful and less threatening. A crunchy chord might be weird and scary when you hear it once, but when you hear it repeatedly, it becomes more familiar and acceptable.
My kids have been watching The Sound of Music a lot lately. I have known many of the songs since elementary school, but I somehow never got around to watching the movie until now. Apparently it was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last musical, and boy did they leave it all on the stage. I was sitting there going, “Oh snap, that song is from this movie too?” It probably supplied half the repertoire for my elementary general music class. When I sang “My Favorite Things” all those times, I thought about the words, but not much about the tune itself.
John Coltrane, on the other hand, thought very hard about the tune, and radically remade it on his famous album of the same name. The album came out only a year after The Sound of Music debuted on Broadway. I struggle to imagine how it must have sounded back then. Like, imagine if in 2017, Kendrick Lamar had released an avant-garde thirteen-minute reworking of “You’re Welcome” from Moana, maybe that would be comparable?
It’s a delightful sensation to be watching a new Adam Neely video and then being startled by hearing my own name. A commenter says, “he just humiliates you with terminology while looking through pages of his thick clever books and then casually quotes some random guy on the internet like yeah whatever.” That random guy is ME, show some respect.
Anyway, this excellent video starts with the seemingly simple question of what key a classic Jimi Hendrix tune is in, and encompasses a wide range of music theory topic before engaging with one that’s close to my heart: blues tonality. Adam previously interviewed me for his video about cover songs in rap, and he also wrote the foreword to Electronic Music School, coming this summer from Oxford University Press.
The best guitar solo ever recorded is in Prince’s 1986 classic “Kiss.” Don’t be fooled by Wendy Melvoin’s mimed guitar playing in the video; Prince himself played the solo.
It might seem unfair that one of the best singers, songwriters, dancers, bandleaders and producers in history should also have played history’s best guitar solo, but, well, facts are facts.
See also a study of groove melody
Chords work differently in grooves than they do in songs and linear compositions. In his book Everyday Tonality, Philip Tagg proposes that chords in loops are mainly there to signpost locations in the meter. By his theory, the metrical location of a chord matters more than its harmonic function. This idea aligns with my experience of listening to and making groove-based music. I’d like to develop it further, to form a general theory of how groove harmony works.
I don’t plan to try to explain every kind of groove there is, but I do want to look for widely recurring patterns. My main goal is to save my students the many years of trial and error that it took me to figure out this vast and understudied area of musical practice.
Disclaimers: this isn’t any kind of complete theory, it’s me thinking out loud about a bunch of examples. I chose those examples because I like them and find them interesting, not because I’m trying to be systematic.
Eddie Kendricks only topped the charts once after leaving The Temptations, but when he did, it was with a doozy of a track. Tom Breihan makes the case that “Keep On Truckin’” was the first disco song to top the charts, which may well be true. He also says that it’s more of a groove than a song, which is definitely true. There’s a radio edit, but who cares? You want the full eight minute experience.
This track has been important for hip-hop for two reasons. First, it’s been sampled by Mr Cheeks, J-Lo, EPMD, Raheem, Lil’ Kim, and many other artists. Second, Eddie Kendricks is the namesake of Kendrick Lamar.
I fell down a WhoSampled rabbit hole and landed on “You Are What I’m All About” by The New Birth, produced by the great Harvey Fuqua. The album cover might suggest some kind of goth techno, but the actual music is gospel-inflected R&B.
This track has been sampled many times, mostly the clave part from the beginning. For me, though, the real magic comes when the vocals enter at 0:22. Then it suddenly becomes the most outrageous groove you’ve ever heard.
