“Work Song” and blues harmony

It’s a cliché to say that jazz is European harmony plus African rhythm. For example, this lesson plan from Jazz in America says that jazz got its rhythm and “feel” from African music, and its harmony and instruments from European classical. This is not untrue, but it’s an oversimplification. A substantial amount of jazz harmony is African-derived too. Nat Adderley’s “Work Song” is a case in point. It’s one of the funkiest and most soulful jazz standards, inspired by the singing of chain gangs in Adderley’s native Florida.

The head is an archetypal example of the blues scale, and it is mostly played without chords. You need chords for the solos, though, so which ones should you use? Is the tune major, or minor, or modal, or what? There is no consensus in the jazz world. This is a surprise, given that “Work Song” is such a standard. In this post, I’ll talk through a couple of possible interpretations, before giving my preferred explanation (spoiler: it’s in blues tonality.)

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An intro to remixes

One of the most significant developments in the past fifty years of popular music is the idea of using existing recordings as raw material for new musical expression. The remix began as a way to make dance versions of pop songs, but it has evolved into an entire new art medium unto itself.

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Clair de Lune

I struggle with the rhythms of rubato-heavy classical pieces, and no one loves rubato more than the Impressionists. When I started listening in earnest to recordings of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” I couldn’t even guess the time signature, much less place notes in the bar. This piece is therefore an excellent use case for aural learning through remixing. First I tried putting the MIDI in Ableton over some beats. Then I thought it would sound better to use human performances and cooler beats.

This was my toughest remix challenge yet. Adapting breakbeats to triple meter is one thing; adapting them to 9/8 time is another. I did finally discover that “The Crunge” by Led Zeppelin is also in 9/8, and after some minor editing, the opening drum break fit in just fine. I also used jazz drumming sampled from McCoy Tyner and Adam Makowicz. I used aggressive low-pass filtering to keep the beats from overwhelming the delicate piano, and I beefed up the piano part via compression as well.

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Dear Prudence

John Lennon supposedly thought that “Dear Prudence” was his best song. I agree. I have spent more time playing and remixing it than anything else in the Beatles catalog, and I continue to find new layers.

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Rhythmic ambiguity in the Bach E major partita prelude

I have been creating a series of beat-driven remixes of canonical classical works. I have mostly done this for my own enjoyment, because I like hearing the pieces with some groove to them. But I also sense that there might be pedagogical applications for this method as well. I finally found a good example: the rhythm in the bariolage passage from measures 17-28 of the prelude to Bach’s violin partita in E major. Listen to it at 0:24 in Viktoria Mullova’s recording, it’s the purple part:

Something strange happens whenever I listen to this passage: after the second measure, I start hearing the rhythm wrong. I bet you do too!

The passage is made of four-note groups. The lowest note in each group jumps out at you as being the most prominent one. They are in a different register from the others, and they define the harmony. You start hearing these standout notes as being accented, even if the performer isn’t accenting them. The convention in classical music is to put accented notes on strong beats. So you probably start hearing the lowest notes in each group as “downbeats,” and your sense of the meter reorients accordingly. But this is wrong! Each low note falls on the last sixteenth note of each grouping, not the first. You aren’t expecting such hip syncopation in 18th century music, so when the passage ends you get all confused about where the beat is.

Here’s the score, with the “accented” notes in red. If you are anything like me, you will quickly fall into a groove of hearing the red notes as downbeats beats, so the last note will feel strangely misplaced.

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Hip-hop glossary

This is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to hip-hop slang and vocabulary. Such a thing would be impossible, especially because the culture is constantly producing new terms. This list will necessarily be out of date by the time you read it. My purpose is to introduce the most important musical terms, along with some more general slang for context.

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Perpetual motion in Bach’s E major Violin Partita Prelude

In this crazy time, learning and analyzing Bach is an obsessive-compulsive activity that feels like an anchor of mental stability. In that spirit, I’m finding it therapeutic to dig into the famous prelude from the E major violin partita. It’s an example of “perpetual motion,” uniform note values played without interruption. Aside from measures 1, 2, 134 and 135, Bach’s prelude is an unbroken string of sixteenth notes. This kind of composition became a genre unto itself for 19th century composers. However, when Paganini does it, I mostly just find it exhausting. Bach uses unpredictable phrasing and emphasis, so even when his note values are all uniform, his rhythms still feel syncopated and fresh.

My favorite recording of the prelude is by Viktoria Mullova. Her straightforward exactness suits this music better than the sloppy exuberance of more famous virtuosos like Itzhak Perlman.

I hear Bach’s complex rhythmic phrasing better when the tempo is steady and there are some beats underneath, so I made this remix.

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Is it okay to post tracks with unlicensed samples?

I am not a lawyer, just a guy who studies hip-hop academically. But I’m married to a lawyer, and have spoken to various music industry people and done a lot of reading on this. My advice is to go ahead and post tracks with uncleared samples, even though doing so is technically illegal.

Flute in Simpler

Understand that you are not allowed to use samples without permission, even if you are giving away the track for free, and even if you give credit and say you aren’t intending to infringe anyone’s copyrights. But posting tracks with uncleared samples is “illegal” the way jaywalking is illegal. It is very unlikely that doing it will get you into any trouble. Entertainment lawyers cost money, and the copyright holders have better things to do than go after indie artists who aren’t profiting off their samples. The chief copyright attorney for a major publisher told me that they don’t go after random people on the internet, because there’s no upside, and it attracts negative publicity.

If your track does blow up, and you want to release it on a major label, or license it for a TV show or movie, or otherwise make real money from it, then the situation changes. At that point, you will absolutely have to negotiate a sample clearance, both with the songwriter(s) and the owner(s) of the master recording (usually not the same people). You or your label can use a sample clearance service, or hire an entertainment lawyer. I do not recommend trying to do this on your own. The clearance might take the form of a one-time fee, a percentage of royalties/publishing, or both. Depending on who you sampled and how well-resourced they are, this might be a big up-front payment or a major percentage of your publishing. So you or your label might decide that it doesn’t make sense to go through with the clearance. At that point, you will have to replace the sample or withdraw the track from circulation.

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Key centers in the Grateful Dead’s China>Rider

My emotions about the Grateful Dead have gone from intense obsession as a teenager, to embarrassment about my former intense obsession in my 20s, to nostalgic re-embracing of my fandom in my 30s. In my 40s, I’ve come to feel about the Dead the way I feel about my extended family: we’ve had our ups and downs, but they’ve always been there, they’ll always be there, we’re inseparably entangled.

Now that I’m teaching music theory, I’m finding a new angle for Dead appreciation: as a source of pedagogical examples. Here’s a pair of Dead tunes, an original called “China Cat Sunflower” and an arrangement of a folk song, “I Know You Rider.” The Dead performed them together, seamlessly joined by a modal jam, so they’re known as a single unit, “China>Rider.”  Here’s my favorite version.

I was listening to this recording recently, and I noticed that during the transitional jam, there’s a peculiar moment at about 3:34 where I sense the key center changing, even though there’s no change in chord or mode. The band is playing a drawn-out groove on D7. At first, it feels like the V7 chord in G major, but after a certain span of time, I start hearing it as the I chord in D Mixolydian instead. It’s like a musical Necker cube.

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Brian Eno and the role of the producer

The meaning of the word “producer” has changed significantly over the history of recorded music. Before the 1960s, most record producers were businesspeople, responsible for signing checks and making sure the musicians and engineers did their jobs. Some producers took a creative role in choosing repertoire, arrangements and takes, but others were hands-off. As recording technologies and processes became more complex and further removed from documenting real-time performances, producers started to take on more creative importance. Consider George Martin’s role with the Beatles. For the first few albums, he simply supervised the recording process, but as time went on, he began to write and conduct orchestral arrangements, play instruments, and carry out technical experiments with the band and engineers.

In the 1970s, more artists started to think of the recording studio itself as an instrument, assembling tracks into collages that sometimes bore little resemblance to the original live performances. An album like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was as much a creation of the producers and engineers as the songwriters and musicians. As they started “playing the studio,” album producers became less like film producers and more like film directors. (Meanwhile, recorded music became less like filmed stage plays and more like Pixar or Star Wars movies.)

Brian Eno is a crucial figure in this evolution. It’s significant that his background is in visual art, not music. (Many British rock and pop musicians got started in art school.) Eno has described himself as a “non-musician.” He initially thought of himself as a conceptual artist more than anything. As a student, he experimented with electronic music under the influence of John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but he approached these projects as sound art, not as “music” necessarily.

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