Chain of Fools

“Chain of Fools” by Aretha Franklin is a song I loved for many years just for listening and enjoying, but then I started to love it even more as a music theory teaching example. It’s emblematic of blues tonality, one-chord changes, and groove structure.

The released version is edited down from its original arrangement, which is longer and has a free-rhythm blues intro:

Don Covay wrote “Chain of Fools” for Otis Redding, but producer Jerry Wexler thought Aretha would be a better fit. The tremolo guitar on the intro is by Joe South. (He’s also the bass player on Blonde on Blonde!) Jimmy Johnson, a ubiquitous session cat, plays the other guitar part. Spooner Oldham plays Wurly, Tommy Cogbill plays bass, Roger Hawkins plays drums, and Cissy Houston is one of the backup singers. That is a lot of musicianship in one room!

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Oye Como Va

Santana’s recording of “Oye Como Va” is one of the most outrageous grooves I’ve ever heard. David Welna describes it as “a Cuban cha-cha composed by a Puerto Rican New Yorker and performed by a Mexican immigrant and his San Francisco rock band.” It’s red-hot from its opening seconds. As the organ starts the montuno, someone in the band says “Brrrrrr, sabor”, meaning flavor, and that is definitely the word.

The song is a cover of a 1950s cha-cha-chá by Tito Puente.

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Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor

A passacaglia is a Baroque dance that is a lot like the chaconne. One of Bach’s greatest hits is his Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Like the Chaconne, the Passacaglia is a long series of variations on a short, simple dance form. Also like the Chaconne, it’s pretty awesome.

Bach got the first half of the theme from André Raison’s Trio en Passacaile from Premier livre d’orgue. He took it a lot further out, though.

Before we go any deeper into the music, let’s talk about this instrument. Each pipe in a pipe organ plays a single note with a particular timbre. There are multiple pipes for each note, each of which produces a different blend of overtones. The knobs all around the keyboards on the organ are called stops, and they activate and deactivate different banks of pipes to produce different timbres. A big organ will have multiple keyboards, one of which is a set of foot pedals, and each keyboard controls its own array of banks of pipes. Furthermore, each keyboard can have different stop settings, effectively making each one a separate instrument. If you think about it, that makes a pipe organ the mechanical equivalent of a modular analog synthesizer.

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What if the Bach Chaconne was modal jazz?

As I struggle my way through the Bach Chaconne on guitar, I’m having to work around the fact that I am great at music theory but terrible at note reading. So before I could play the piece, I had to completely understand it and be able to feel it by ear. The only way I could make the score useful to me was to go through the entire thing and write in jazz-style chord symbols. I know that this approach is “wrong,” because Bach didn’t think about chords as independently existing entities in this way, but it has still helped me get the piece under my fingers. Another “incorrect” but practically useful way for me to think about the piece is as a collection of scales and modes.

The scales approach can not explain everything that happens in the Chaconne. There are a few places (marked pink in the video) where the harmony emerges out of chromatic voice-leading that can’t be meaningfully described in terms of scales. Still, those moments are infrequent, and otherwise the scales approach has been very helpful.

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Deep dive into the Bach Chaconne

You can now read this post in Spanish on Deviolines

I have been spending much of my free time during the pandemic learning how to play the Bach Chaconne on guitar, drawing heavily on Rodolfo Betancourt’s transcription. Here’s Christopher Parkening doing my favorite interpretation by a guitarist (I do not sound remotely like this):

This journey has been one long reward for the obsessive-compulsive side of my personality. As of this writing, I can stumble through the whole piece, and can get through the first half in a way that sounds almost musical. If you want to try too, here’s a violin score. Also, here are measures 81 through 117 of the Chaconne from Bach’s manuscript:

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Green Onions

Is this the coolest music that has ever been recorded? I don’t mean cool in the sense of fashionable (though it is) or appealing (though it is), I mean it in the sense of laconic confidence in its bad self.

Booker T and the MGs recorded the tune without a title, and then when the record started to blow up, they had to name it in a hurry. They were considering calling it “Onions” or “Funky Onions” to honor its intense stank, but they were worried that might be off-putting, so they opted for a milder vegetable. Guitarist Steve Cropper tells the story of the recording here; he’s so Southern it hurts!

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Conversation with Jim Frankel on the MusicFirst podcast

The Electronic Music School promotional tour kicks off with an appearance on the MusicFirst Podcast, hosted by our old friend and MusicFirst founder Dr Jim Frankel. Enjoy the mellifluous sound of my new Shure SM7B.

 

Music is not a universal language and this klezmer song proves it

My man Adam has a word:

I can prove this with an example from my own life. When I was younger I got interested in my Jewish heritage and spent a couple of years playing klezmer music (shout out to F Train Klezmer!) There’s a beautiful tune called “Der Gassen Nigun”, in a minor key, with a moderate lurching waltz tempo and a dirgelike wailing melody. Here’s a lovely recording of it, by Harry Kandel and his Orchestra.

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Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus XI

Here it is, the most stupendous entry in The Art of Fugue. Its three themes are inversions of the ones in Contrapunctus VIII, meaning that they have the same rhythms and intervals but are upside down. Bach also added lots of subthemes and counterthemes. I used Ableton Live to visualize Angela Hewitt’s recording, drawing extensively on Dennis Collins’ analysis in Music Theory Online. I didn’t color-code every little thing that happens, just enough to show the major events in the piece.

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