When I teach swing, I like to play examples of the same piece of music with and without swing for ease of comparison. My favorite comparison is between “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” from the Nutcracker Suite and “Sugar Rum Cherry” by Duke Ellington. This isn’t an exact comparison, though, because Ellington does more …
Tag Archives: John Coltrane
Playing “Giant Steps” as an instrument
Last weekend I went to a hip-hop jam session. There was a drummer, bassist, guitarist, pianist, and a couple of emcees, and I played samples from my laptop via Ableton. I was going through my jazz folder, dropping different things into Simplers and Drum Racks, and at one point I tried using the first few …
Where do jazz standards come from?
My Song Factory class is coming up on the Standards and Showtunes unit, covering the Great American Songbook. I mainly relate to these tunes via jazz. In this post, I collect standards of the ones that appear in movie musicals, and I pair each one with a well-known jazz interpretation. (Note that most of these …
Dorian mode
Dorian mode is such a cool scale. It evokes medieval chant and the blues. Its characteristic minor sixth chord is almost a diminished chord. And it’s unique among the diatonic modes for being symmetrical, meaning that it uses the same sequence of intervals going up and down. When you write Dorian on the chromatic circle, …
Mixolydian mode
If you flatten the seventh note of the major scale, you get Mixolydian mode. It’s like a bluesier version of major. Mixolydian is a medieval mode that fell out of favor with “art” music composers during the Baroque era. However, it stayed alive and well in various European folk traditions before having an explosion in …
The first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School
Here are the tracks we listened to on the first day of Contemporary Music Theories at the New School. The class is a requirement for music majors, and as its name suggests, it is intended to give a broad-based understanding of music theory, not just Western tonal theory. We started things off with excerpts of …
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Erroll Garner meets the Carpenters
When I teach remixes in music tech class, I like to make the analogy to radical jazz arrangements of standards. Technically, John Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things” is not a remix of the version from The Sound of Music, but it occupies the same cultural role as a remix. (In fact, I just accidentally …
The diminished scale
When I want my music to sound mysterious, the diminished scale is a reliable tool in the harmonic toolkit. It worked for John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and it can work for you!
Nature Boy
There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy. His name was eden ahbez, he was a hippie decades before that was a common thing to be, and he wrote “Nature Boy“, which Nat King Cole turned into a major hit. The tune has become a jazz and pop standard, and has been recorded uncountably …
My Favorite Things
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 …