Everything is terrible, but at least we have the blues to help us through it. Blues melody week is my favorite week of pop aural skills class. Last session, after one of my sections worked through some Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker, we listened to a couple of jazz tunes, including “Functional” by Thelonious …
Tag Archives: swing
Bring It On Down To My House
I came to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys through my dad. He had the first volume of The Tiffany Transcriptions on CD, a series of live recordings that the Texas Playboys made for radio syndication. My dad was an impeccably highbrow opera fan, and aside from the Elvis Christmas Album, Bob Wills was the …
Ray Charles sings “You Are My Sunshine”
I am mildly obsessed with this recording, both as a work of art and as a music teaching resource. While I have mentioned this track several times on here, I haven’t really dug into the details. So it’s time to change that. There’s a lot to talk about: the genre, the chords, the melody, the …
Polymeter vs polyrhythm
As I continue to build groove pedagogy resources, I want to clear up some persistent confusion about polymeter and polyrhythm. If you don’t feel like reading the whole post, it can be summed up in this image: Here’s the most concise way I can put this into words: In polymeter, the grid lines are aligned, …
Lil’ Darlin’
I finally got around to watching Tár. Early in the movie, Lydia helps her wife Sharon through a panic attack by dancing with her to one of my favorite jazz recordings, Neal Hefti’s tune”Lil’ Darlin’” as recorded by Count Basie. Lydia says, “Let’s bring this down to sixty beats per minute.” Sharon corrects her: “Sixty-four.” …
I made a new track for teaching swing
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 …
There Was A Time (I Got To Move)
Being a fan of James Brown can be a challenge, because his classic songs have all been recorded multiple times in different versions with different names on different labels. “I Got To Move” is a case in point. It was first released on In The Jungle Groove in 1986, but was recorded back in 1970. …
Althea
Here’s a Grateful Dead song that I loved as a teenager. As with many things I loved as a teenager, I did not know why this spoke to me. Now I do, so I get to share that knowledge with you.
What’s Going On
For a discussion of musical form in Contemporary Music Theories, we talked about Marvin Gaye’s classic “What’s Going On.” The multitrack stems are in circulation, and they are quite a revelation. Here’s a nice walkthrough with Questlove and Motown executive Harry Weinger.
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 …