Adam Neely video on rap covers

I have been enjoying Adam Neely’s videos for a few years, so it was pretty exciting when he asked me to help out with his recent examination of white supremacy and music theory. It was even more exciting when he invited me to do an interview on the problem of the white rap cover. See …

Martin Urbach interview remix – What is hip-hop education?

For my dissertation on hip-hop educators, I’m creating a mixtape of remixed interviews with my research participants. In this post, I talk through the process of remixing an interview with Martin Urbach that I conducted on July 30, 2020 in Prospect Park. The remix includes the highlights of about two hours of recorded audio. Dissertation …

Remixing a solo saxophone recording by Catherine Sikora

Many years ago, I played some jazz with Catherine Sikora. She was a fierce and excellent saxophonist then, and her playing has only grown in the time since. In the past few years, Catherine has been releasing a series of albums of solo and duo improvisation. That takes a lot of confidence! Her lines are …

“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 …

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

In these troubled times, we could all use some uplift. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” is one of the most uplifting tunes I know.

Make your chord progressions less boring using secondary dominants

Diatonic harmony is boring. Random dissonance is boring too. How do you make your music less predictable, but in a logical-sounding way? Especially if you want your harmony to sound “jazzy”? One reliable technique is to use secondary dominants. The idea is to treat each chord in a key as the temporary center of its …

An intro to counterpoint

Counterpoint is a musical technique that combines two or more independent melody lines. It’s one of the characteristic sounds of Western classical music. Bach wrote a ton of it. But counterpoint isn’t always so complicated. Any song that has a vocal melody with a bassline underneath is an example of counterpoint. If you have ever …

RIP McCoy Tyner

One of my favorite ever jazz musicians, and favorite ever musicians period. His playing with John Coltrane is obviously mind-boggling, but even if he and Coltrane had never met he would still have been a giant. My favorite McCoy moment is a four-bar phrase from the middle of his long solo on Coltrane’s “Lonnie’s Lament.” …

How do key signatures work?

Most of my students struggle with key signatures. This is understandable! Like the rest of the Western notation system, key signatures are based on a big assumption: that all of the notes will be within one of the twelve major keys, or within some scale that can be derived from a major scale (most often, …

Donna Lee

Here’s a Charlie Parker recording that’s not widely known outside of jazz, but is absolutely foundational inside it: This recording features a very young Miles Davis on trumpet. Miles later said that he wrote the tune, and that its copyright attribution to Charlie Parker was a record label error. I believe him. It sounds more …