Friday was a sad day as we found out about the death of trumpeter Rich Turner, a friend to lots of us on the London jazz scene and the main force behind the gigs at Con Cellar Bar. It was at the beginning of our first big band meetup that we heard, sitting with lots of his friends as we were waiting for Rich to come and play. Rich would make things happen totally selflessly and with a great sense of ambition - the work he put into the Con Cellar really showed, with some major international musicians coming to play there alongside lots of the country's top young bands. Round Trip, his long-standing quartet, were one of the bands I've enjoyed hearing most in London over the last few years. He'll be missed.

There have been a couple of interesting takes on my post of a few weeks here from over the pond (then up a bit) - from Peter Hum at the Ottowa Citizen and John Wertheim of A Devout Musician . Both good reads, check them out.

I was playing for some auditions a couple of days ago that were being held in the Music department of UEA in Norwich. The jazz co-ordinator there, Vic Hobson, has a fantastic collection of old jazz magazines going back to the post-war period; we had to be reluctantly dragged off to do some work! There were quite a few duplicates that he was planning on getting rid of, so he invited us to take a few if there was anything that took our fancy. I walked off with a couple of editions of 'Jazz Monthly', from 1959 and 60.
They're quite a fascinating read. I thought I'd just post a little excerpt from the August 1960 edition, just to give you a flavour:



A common theme throughout is the willingness of reviewers to make what we would nowadays call 'value judgements' - there's no tip-toeing around personal opinions, and to someone used to flicking through a copy of Jazzwise , it's quite startling to read. It does put me in mind of one particular critic who is to be found writing about jazz in London today (anybody remember a particularly striking review of Brad Mehldau at the Barbican a few years back?), but, for the most part, writing on jazz today is a lot less about 'what I think as a critic' and a lot more 'what might be useful to my readers, without prejudicing them one way or another'.
Perhaps it's also fair to say that everyone today knows, if not everyone, someone that knows everyone, or at least follows them on twitter or facebook. Musicians/writers/bloggers/PR/agents/labels are all highly visibly connected through social media, and opinions spread, fast. Does this mean that opinions are therefore less individual/more accommodating?
I'm not saying that I would appreciate a return to the kind of thing you find in Jazz Monthly August 1960. I like the fact that most publications and blogs are very positive, pro-musician, and lack the self-importance of old. People still hold strong opinions, and they occasionally get vented (look at this comment stream on the popular LondonJazz blog). There tends (rightly, in my opinion) to be a collective frown, however, if things get close to the kind of review seen above.
I don't have a personal view on the whole issue. Is there an argument for greater critical distance in the media when it comes to jazz? Or is it better just to pass by things that you don't like, rather than going out there to tell everyone why you didn't like it? Tricky business, and I'd be wrong to thing this is an argument that hasn't gone around the houses a few times before. Feel free to comment, although, to learn a lesson from LondonJazz, no anonymous comments please...

The previous post was about a piece from John Taylor's Phases called Summer, and two posts before that I wrote about another piece of his, Ritual. This one, possibly the last in my little John Taylor run, is about what I've got from looking at these small transcriptions, in the form of some compositional ideas that I've tried to use myself. Here's what I wanted to do:

- to use some of the concepts behind the chords in Ritual, namely building quite bitonal-sounding chords from a recognised scale area (I picked the harmonic major)
- developing a kind of system and order for these chords, but interspersing them with some freely-chosen ones for shape and colour (again, see Ritual)
- breaking that system with more tonal passages , and trying to imitate some of the melodic strength of Summer
- thinking about a couple of short extra sections that can be used to build or release tension so the piece can move as a whole.


It's a sketch at the moment - click here to see the file (scan of a handwritten page I'm afraid).
And click here to have a listen....(just recorded on my upright with my little olympus recorder)

Like in Ritual, I tried having a sequence of chord types - so at the beginning, you have a chord from the harmonic major, an inverted major 9th, a major #11, and then another harmonic major. That pattern of chord types repeats across in the phrase (it's also in the 'coda', though some of the voicings are different. Not sure how the coda quite works yet...it might have to come later, not straight after the 2nd time bar bit). The descending chords at the end of the 2nd and 3rd lines are also from the harmonic major - I had quite a lot of fun trying to voice out the scale in some different ways. Not sure exactly how it's going to work out right now, but I'll keep fiddling...it might just make it out into the big wide world at some point!
Maybe the homage is a bit obvious. I'm not sure, I can't tell any more....anyhow, it's been a really good little exercise, and blogging about it has certainly helped keeping my thoughts in order, if nothing else! A good enough reason to keep doing it. Now I need to go and get the new Meadow recording - do you think it's possible to get too much of a good thing?

A couple of posts ago I wrote about a piece of John Taylor's called Ritual . This time I'm writing about another piece from Phases called Summer, and in the next post I'll be writing about bit of composition I tried myself after looking at this piece.

What do you want to know?
In transcribing an original composition, as opposed to an improvised solo, I think there's something else we tend to be looking for. All the elements of musical language that we think about during improvisation are certainly still there, but there's also something more abstract and intellectual. A thought process, a sense of logic, a method - all things that our brains enjoy having the luxury of time to think about and refine. As eager students, it's something we can absorb and apply through whatever kind of musical language we pick - the more abstract the better!

The transcription - CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD PDF
With that in mind, the transcription is my effort to get close to a 'lead sheet' of what I think the composition involves at a basic level. In other words, if John Taylor was to take it to a rehearsal, what would he give the other musicians? I've mixed and matched a few different repetitions of the main melody in order to form what I think might be a fair 'average' - it never actually happens quite like this. The voicings are exact, however - in the 'C' section, I've just provided the voicings, as the way they are played rhythmically changes too much to write one 'definitive' version.


The Piece
The 'A' section is really a kind of introduction/interlude - its harmonic stability throws all the other parts, with their rich harmonic language, into sharp relief. The time signature does give it a restlessness that does create some tension, although it's quite placid. The B section is the 'core' of the piece to my ears - one voicing is taken through a series of transpositions (with the melody very much arising naturally from the shapes of those particular voicings), before a beautiful shift sideways to some kind of resolution :

The whole thing then sets off again a semitone lower (bar 10) before resolving more fully onto B minor. There's a tremendous sense of shape in this section, as the very last chord is the only time you get a stable, rooted chord. As for that recurring voicing, it's hard to know how to categorise it - the harmony certainly comes from the melodic minor scale. You can see this quite clearly in bar 9 when the notes are padded out a little more. What to call it in traditional jazz notation is another question, and one that I'm not sure really matters....
The C section takes the pedal idea from the A section and winds it down through 4 keys - with the 4/4 time signature here and the sense of repetition, it really it like a big exhalation, regular and quite stabilising. You end the C section on this beautifully poised diminished voicing, ready to go through the intensity of the B section again. Everything is balanced, and everything has a purpose.

The Method?
I would take a guess that the B section was written first. It's a stunning example of managing tension and release - the harmonic shifts in bars 7-8 and 14-15 really get me. These are the bars that break away from the 'system' of transposed voicings in bars 3-6 and 10-13 to resolve (the first time only partially). There's no doubt that the sound created by these tense shifting minor chords is quite haunting and rather beautiful, but the strength of its logic is revealed even more by breaking away from them. That's the kernel of the composition for me - taking something that has its own kind of almost mathematical beauty, and turning it into something alive and human.
Now it may be total speculation, but I could make an educated guess at how the piece was written. It really is no more than a guess, but even if it's wrong, it could be useful. Here we go:

1. Find a voicing (here just an interesting way with a fairly basic scale)
2. See how it moves/transposes, put it through a sequence
3. As tension builds, break the system and make it musical and melodic
4. Find yourself with a whole section, judge its effect, see if you need contrasting sections
5. Write some contrasting sections, more simply if necessary, each with a certain purpose

I had a go - up next, the results!

Just a quick thought I've had this week about playing tunes in 12 keys. There are lots of different opinions on whether you need to do it - essentially the argument against doing it is that people never actually play Donna Lee in E (for example). So you'd be better off, if you're practicing Donna Lee, to spend your time getting phenomenally good at playing it in Ab than spending the same amount of time getting moderately good at playing it in 12 keys.

However, I always had the niggling doubt that it was just an excuse for being a bit lazy - various teachers, like Martin Speake, had always recommended learning tunes in lots of different keys, even if you don't end up actually playing in them. If there's somebody whose word you want to take when it comes to playing changes, it's probably Martin! Nevertheless, I never really applied myself to it that well. However, I found myself just playing the other day and realised that I really wasn't getting around the A section of a rhythm changes in Db particularly well. Not surprising really - know many rhythm changes in Db? It's not a really odd key - you certainly find yourself in it quite frequently during the course of a tune, even if it's not the overarching key (more frequently than keys like B, E and A anyhow, particularly in a 'bop' context). So I've started to make my warmup start with taking a couple of Parker heads round the keys, two handed, quite slowly.

What I soon realised is that perhaps the greatest advantage of learning a tune in twelve keys is that it makes you much better at playing the tune in the original key. You start thinking about intervals, the degrees of scales and chords that the melody takes. You really have to engage your inner voice - for somebody who is not a great natural singer, accurately trying to sing 'Crazeology', for example, in A major, without any bassline, is pretty tricky (perhaps more difficult if, like me, you have perfect pitch...?An interesting side-thought...). Once you put together the impulse of your singing voice with your learning of the tune in the 'abstract' (by degrees of scale, chord movement and interval) you have a much deeper musical connection with it that feeds back to your relationship with it in the original key. It may sound obvious - after all, taking transcribed solos/licks etc through keys is something we all do. However, in my mind that was always designed to improve your playing in that particular key. What I understand more now is the general usefulness of transposition. I'm enjoying it, and I'm going to keep doing it.

(transcription at the bottom of the post)

I first heard this at about 1am on the N26 bus, (after a Tuesday night at Charlie Wrights...) I remember being on the top deck, peering out at a sleepy Mare Street, and then being knocked over by these chords....fantastically sonorous, and with that Messiaen-like way of being able to hint in all sorts of harmonic directions without ever feeling obliged to pick just one. I had to know what was going on...so here's a bit about my quest to find out.

Using 'Transcribe!'
I'd never used this piece of software before, but I knew that I had no hope without it on this one! With all the extremely complicated overtones that this kind of harmony is designed to create, and an extremely well-recorded piano, it was a big challenge even with the help of the software. After doing a few bars, however, I came up with a method that worked quite well. Here are a few things I had to watch out for:

a) The Pedal - pedal changes (or lack thereof) can make it quite deceptive when you're trying to transcribe a chord - you have to find the 'cleanest' bit you can, and even then you have to go back to the previous chord and see if anything has 'leaked' over!
b) Harmonic resonance - it's amazing how much octaves resonate - the software is often sure that an octave is being played, but I found it to be sympathetic resonance 90% of the time
c)Using the frequency graphs - you can see if a note appears to grow or shrink at a certain place by inching along the graph. This really helps in seeing if something is a new note, or just something leaking from earlier on.
d)Trusting your ears - our brains learn to interpret sonic information very well. There was one place where I really heard a high G as a main note in the right hand, though the software said it was barely there.
e)Seeing patterns - once I'd done about 6 or 7 bars, I could see the patterns in the chord shapes, so that even if the software was telling me there were 12 notes down, I could make a 95% guess at what was really going on.


How the piece works (I think...)

The melody consists of the 12 tone row D, Bb, F#, G#, A, C#, G, D#, B, F, E, C, harmonised by a series of chords which are arranged as 'polychords' (two blocks of notes, each consonant within itself, each implying different harmonic areas yet still resonating strongly together). The sequence of 12 chords is repeated 6 times, with transposition by octave to vary the contour, and a couple of different chords added only in the 4th and 5th cycles. The cycle of 12 chords is played in a rhythmic cycle that is only 11 chords long, so that the rhythmic and harmonic cycles go out of phase. The rhythmic cycle is consistent, apart from a small variation the first time (I've put one cycle per line on the transcription).
The chords themselves are of two types - firstly there are chords that are never transposed (apart from by octave), and only repeated at the same stage in each cycle. These (referring to the key at the end of the transcription) are chords A, B, C, E, F, G and H. Chord D is the most common sort of chord in the piece - its intervallic pattern is found 6 times in different transpositions during the cycle, as the 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th chords:



They are all third inversion minor 7 chords on the bottom, with the major triad of the note a tone above the 'root' on top (for example E major triad over third inversion D minor. The notes spell out the harmonic minor scale - for instance, the first chord spells out A harmonic minor.
It's hard to know exactly how these chords (and the others, which all bear quite close resemblance) were conceived in terms of a compositional process. As soon as sounds that invoke modern classical music start to appear, the natural reaction is to look for a rigorous methodology - the first place I went to try and work out what was going on (without any luck) was to Messiaen's modes of limited transposition. Then I thought that maybe they were all certain scales, arranged polychordally - this turned out to be true, with the exception of a couple of chords, like chord 'C' in the transcription, that just didn't quite fit the same system.
I realised a bit later that, particularly with an improvising musician like John Taylor, it's more likely that a composition will use a mixture of methodology and pure musical intuition. If you have a look at some other compositions of his, such as Ambleside Days, you find quite a systematic idea that is clear enough to give the piece a definite character, but is applied with enough artistic license to allow a natural sense of melody and shape to unfold. Whilst the 'process' is a bit more involved here, using out-of phase cycles of rhythm and harmony, 12 tone rows, polychordal voicings etc, I think that compositional instinct has the final say. Just look at the chords that change unexpectedly the fourth and fifth times, the way the rhythmic cycle is different the first time around, the use of octave transposition to shape the passage, the fact that chords A and C are built very differently to the others....I think that you can hear some of this natural, improvisatory approach in the music, and that this is just as much a source of its beauty as the brilliance of the processes within.

Click here to download the transcription

NB. I may be totally wrong of course - if anybody out there spots anything else going on, I'd love to hear it!