I was weirdly obsessed with this jazz tune when I was twelve

I mainly grew up in a classical radio type of household, but my folks had a couple of jazz albums too, including Duke’s Memories by Abdullah Ibrahim. It included an obscure Ellington tune called “Way Way Back.”

The melody is elegantly simple, and reveals greater depth with each listen. When I was in sixth grade, I was obsessed with this track. I listened to it over and over and over. I liked to sit and draw abstract geometric shapes and cartoon beings while I listened. I had no idea where to take this interest until years later. Evidently I had good taste as a kid! The tune is a great one, and the recording is deep in the pocket. I don’t love that 80s rubber-band-like upright bass pickup sound, but the groove is impeccable.

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Our book is out!

I wrote a book with Will Kuhn and now it exists in real life!

You can buy it from Oxford University Press, Amazon, Powell’s, Apple Books, and many other places. The foreword is by Adam Neely.

Electronic Music School is a complete guide to starting and running a creative music technology program. We include many battle-tested project plans and a methodology for designing your own projects. We also talk about equipment and budgeting, advocacy, live performance, and a progressive philosophy of music education that ties it all together. The book is anchored around our belief that general music should be taught as an art class, where students create original music in styles that are personally meaningful to them. You should read it!

The great scale flowchart

Here is a visualization of all the scales in the aQWERTYon, organized by the way I personally conceptualize them. This does not represent every scale in the world, just a broad selection of the ones in common usage in pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, jazz, and film and game music.

I group scales into three broad categories: Major, Minor, and Neither. Major scales include a pitch that’s a major third above the root, and minor scales include a pitch that’s a minor third above the root. Makes sense! The “neither” category includes scales that have both major and minor thirds (e.g., altered, diminished) or just generally exist outside the major/minor universe (e.g., blues.) I hope you find it useful! And see also a list of typical uses for all these scales.

The blues and the harmonic series

In this post, I’m going to expand on an idea in my blues tonality treatise: that the distinctive scales and chords of the blues are an approximation of African-descended tuning systems based on the natural overtone series. Gerhard Kubik argues in his book Africa and the Blues that blues tonality comes from the overtone series of I and IV, and can only be approximated using instruments tuned to standard twelve-tone equal temperament (12-TET). Let’s unpack what that means!

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Kind Hearted Woman Blues

So far, I have resisted writing about Robert Johnson on this blog. I love Robert Johnson, but it feels so corny to be yet another a white dude rhapsodizing about him. However, Robert Johnson is so sublimely great that he leaves me no choice.

Robert Johnson’s life is famously not well documented, and his fans have filled the vacuum with endless mythologizing. I find it distasteful to read about him selling his soul to the devil to get good at guitar. It’s patronizing. Doesn’t it seem more likely that he got so good by just practicing a lot? Rather than engaging with all of that nonsense, I would prefer to focus on his music. Here’s the first song Robert Johnson ever recorded.

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Blues tonality update

I have been doing a major overhaul of my blues tonality post. It now cites more literature and has a more logical structure. The post is my best attempt at a complete description of blues harmony, its history, and its role (or lack thereof) in music theory pedagogy. I hope you find it useful.

Boogie Chillen

Here’s one of the heaviest and most wonderful recordings ever made.

The song is so mysterious, so intense, so ancient-sounding yet so fresh. John Lee Hooker recorded it in 1948 at United Sound Systems in Detroit. (He re-recorded it many more times afterwards.) It went to number one on the R&B chart, which is pretty impressive for a song whose only percussion is Hooker’s foot stomping on a miked-up shipping pallet. When I was an ignorant teenager, I assumed that Hooker recorded this way because it’s how he was used to playing on his back porch in Mississippi. In fact, Hooker usually played with a band at the time, and he only recorded solo at the suggestion of his producer, the breathtakingly sleazy Bernie Besman.

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Brokedown Palace

My stepfather died a year and a half ago, but thanks to the pandemic, we’re only now able to have a memorial service for him. My sister, stepsiblings and I are going to sing a Grateful Dead classic:

For me, “Brokedown Palace” represents the high point of the Dead’s acoustic folkie side. On American Beauty, it comes right after “Ripple”, which is better known and is more of a singalong standard. I love “Ripple” too, but its lyrics aren’t about much of anything. “Brokedown Palace” has actual feelings in it. But I can see why it isn’t such a campfire song: it’s harder to play, and it’s in the not-very-folk-friendly key of F.

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Did Lorde rip off George Michael?

Lorde has a new song. If you are a George Michael fan, parts of it will sound very familiar!

The guitar part in the first verse is strongly reminiscent of the one in “Faith.”

But people seem to be mainly worked up about the similarities in the overall rhythmic groove and chord changes to the ones in “Freedom ’90.”

Let’s unpack!

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Kicking out the JAMS

That’s JAMS as in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. I wrote a review of Ableton Live 11 as a tool for musicology and education for their new issue. Email me if you don’t have university library access and I’ll send you a PDF.