Last week was fun - beautiful autumnal weather, some good gigs....also, pianist John Turville and I had a little two-piano play, and John brought along a chart he'd done for 'Ice 9', a John Taylor piece from 'Requiem for a Dreamer'. I really like this tune, as it has some real 'JT' hallmarks - notably symmetrical harmonic patterns and a strong intervallic theme. There's definitely a 'quintal' (fifths) theme going on here - this sound is the basis for much of the tune:


It has a lovely open character, but with a little grit in the middle thanks to the semitone in-between the hands. You don't get the semitone when it's over a major chord though:

For the 'sus' chords in the sequence I've taken the quintal voicing from their minor counterparts and then changed the root:

There would be other ways of doing it, but I think this way preserves a consistent sonic character.

What I wanted to do is to try and convert these rooted/two-handed voicings into rootless left-hand voicings that kept some of the 'quintal' character of the sound of the originals. When a tune has such a specific sound voicing-wise, it seems like a good idea to develop that further into the improvisational language used, rather than just take a more general approach.
So, first of all, here is a chorus of the solo section, voiced out in full quintal harmony for two hands:


And here's how I've tried to compress the sound. To my ears, keeping the 9th and the 3rd next to each other is important, as is having the 11th in the voicing and keeping an interval of a fifth in there somewhere. You can do this by leaving the root and 5th off the bottom and rearranging the notes starting with the 9th on the bottom: (on Em11 here)


It's useful to have another 'position' to play in so that you can voice in a consistent range. Here I've rearranged it slightly so that it's based on the 7th:


That gives you two positions to voice in. I've used this method for the major chords too.

By compressing the sus chords into rootless voicings you get identical shapes as before, just based on the 4th or 6th of the chord:


So, here's what a whole chorus could look like (there would be other 'routes')


What to do with it now? Well I'm going to really try and get them under my fingers in 12 keys and see if they start popping up anywhere else...I like their sound as they keep some of the cool, quite detached sound of the full voicings but you have some fingers left to do other things with!

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!

(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!

Seems like a natural progression to me. 'Home', Goldberg's latest CD (feat. Reuben Rogers and Eric Harland, as well as Mark Turner on a few tracks) is one of my favourite purchases this year. It prompted me to go back and pick up Goldberg's earlier CD with the same trio 'Worlds', which I'm now enjoying a lot too. They're quite similar records in some ways, with simple but beautifully constructed melodic tracks interspersed with some mad hat arrangements and rhythmic pyrotechnics. It's the delivery of clear rhythmic ideas that has led me over the past few months to delve deeper into tracks like 'Shed' and the arrangement of Stevie Wonder's 'Isn't She Lovely' (both on Home).
Holding down left hand grooves whilst having total freedom of improvisation in the right hand is one of the most difficult skills to get to grips with at the piano - real 'pat your head and rub your tummy' stuff. 'Shed' has a great example of this. Here's the L.H. groove:




Looping this, it's a pretty standard 5/4 feel (dotted minim + minim), but with the quaver C at the beginning making the resolution sound like it is on the 1 'and'. Good groove to play with - not too complex, but with a little quirk that gives you something to work with. I'm not putting a whole transcription up, but if you listen to it you'll hear the right hand layering some really interesting groupings on top. He starts with groups of three quavers (a dotted crotchet pulse if you like) over the top, which creates a pretty 'hip' (couldn't think of a better word!) pattern of rhythmic tensions and resolutions with the left hand. And then there are triplets, what sound like septuplets, all sorts of things I haven't quite got my head around yet...
Anyway, the point of all this is that I've been trying to forge a closer, more intimate relationship with my left hand. You see, on the piano our melodic creation comes out through the right hand most of the time - that inner singing voice that drives improvisation is wired in so strongly to the right hand that, in a lot of jazz situations, the left hand is really just supporting. That's fine most of the time, and I'm not a great fan of pianists whipping out loads of flashy 'hand independence' stuff in a group setting just because they can. But being able to hold down a groove in the left hand in a solo passage is a fantastic thing to pull off and requires the left hand to 'be the boss' for once - it's the bedrock of time and harmonic rhythm that your right hand plays on, and in order to keep it solid it has to be more than muscle memory. It has to be in the same creative, melodic place as the right hand.
So here's what I've been doing - if you fancy some punishment, give it a go! Learn the left hand groove. Sing it. Then....keep singing it whilst you play with your right hand. Simple things - just scales in crotchets or quavers, triadic patterns. Sounds easy? If my experience is anything to go by, it is a world of unimaginable pain. After 5 minutes you look up from the keys, your brain wondering why you've been trying to rewire it and your eyes barely able to focus. But it feels good.......

I've been working on this on and off for the last 3 months, trying, just as with the previous transcription, to learn everything purely by ear and through my limited vocal abilities before notating it. I have to say I took on a pretty big plateful with this one - Tristano's incredible Line Up, an improvisation over the chord sequence from All of Me from the record Lennie Tristano (Atlantic). This is a notorious recording. It seems that Tristano took Peter Ind and Jeff Morton's parts, slowed them down, recorded his part and then sped the whole thing up again, hence making it appear that he could deliver this monument of linear invention off the cuff and at breakneck speed.
Some people dismiss this, therefore, as not 'real' jazz. I'm not sure it matters a great deal - the end-product is astonishing. The strength of his articulation, especially whilst trying to make us doubt we can actually count a 4/4 time signature, combines with a clarity of phrasing and control of harmonic colours to mesmerising effect. Here's the transcription; I need to leave it a while before I go and do any real analysis or my head may explode. When I do I'll put it up. There is a copy in bass clef and one in treble (the range of the solo is very low - I've written it in treble clef as it's more generally useful, but the real pitch is 8vb). Once again, I've added only particularly important and unusual articulations to clarify the trickiest bits in terms of groupings. The recording is the place to start for the rest of it...


Download Line Up in treble clef

I recently picked up the Cannonball Adderly record 'Live at the Lighthouse', featuring Sam Jones, Louis Hayes, Victor Feldman, and his brother Nat. A lot of people don't really 'rate' Cannonball. Poppy, too accessible, too many licks and clichés, etc...maybe all valid points. The guy was an entertainer - he loved audiences, loved to crack a joke and dish out some suave patter. But the reason we love him is because of his feel. His swing is so deep that all those all-too-familiar licks sound musical and expressive, rather than just filler.
I decided to transcribe his solo on 'Big P' (a minor blues) following some of Dave Liebman's advice, first learning to sing the whole solo and then working it out on the piano aurally. In fact I've done the whole thing, including transposing into 4 different keys, without writing anything down, only producing the written pages below this morning as the end of the end of the process rather than the beginning. This is a new thing for me, and I have to say it is a revelation-- any kind of melodic transcription I do in the future I will do this way. It makes things like transposition a thousand times easier to have every note available on-demand from your own voice, and seems to be a much better way of capturing some of the 'feel'. So here is the transcription; there is no articulation or phrasing marked (or chord symbols - just a minor blues), as I see it really as just a reference point for anything notes-wise that is tricky to get off the record. Still I hope it's useful....


Download the solo in C
Download the solo in Eb

Normally, I go through a patch of maybe a week or two with an album I really like; just a quick look at my iTunes stats tells me that this is actually my most played album, and for the last 2 or 3 months I would say I’ve listened to at least 2 or 3 tracks from it pretty much every day. And now I find myself trying to get a handle on Bill’s beautiful solos; they’re short, usually based around the tune, but with the clarity of the recording they’re really little gems for any pianist who, like me, just wants to take them down, learn them and work out why they sound so astonishingly good. There’s no simple way of putting it; the way I often think about Bill’s playing is something like this - “I’m pretty sure I know what he’s doing there, but why does it sound so much better when he does it?”. It’s all in the detail....
Nowadays we’re all taught a lot of the things that Bill brought to the piano - crystal clear, rich voicings, completely fluent in all keys and available in all shapes, colours and inversions you care to think of. There isn’t a note in anything I’ve transcribed of his that I’ve thought ‘what on earth is that?’. What it is is just an utter, peerless mastery and encyclopedic knowledge of what has become a fairly universal harmonic language, meaning that every note in every chord is entirely intended, understood, and has a specific role to play. No superfluous filling out of voicings just because the fingers are there; I’m astonished at just how much richness and colour he gets out of so few notes in a voicing sometimes. It sounds great because he really knows the colour of each voicing, and exactly when to use it to shape a melody or comp Tony. There are a lot of us out there who’ve studied harmonic language that owes a great deal to Bill, and there’s a tendency to think ‘bah, it’s only a minor 6 upper structure, the simplest thing in the world...(sorry non-pianists!)’. But that voicing, at the right place and the right time, can be something pretty special. I think there’s something to be said for going back to what you know, and knowing it better - transcriptions to follow....

It looks as though I’m going to have to get permission from Warner Music to sell the Mehldau transcription, assuming that I can’t find a publisher for it. So watch this space...

I have quite a few transcriptions now, which I’m looking to put up on the site. They include Brad Mehldau, Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner and even some non-pianists....I’m just waiting for some more information on copyright before I go ahead, particularly for a couple of the larger ones which I’m looking to sell. It appears it is a thorny problem in terms of intellectual property; here are some of the issues:
I have, as you will see below, a very large transcription of the Mehldau trio playing the standard tune All The Things You Are. My transcription doesn’t include the actual melody, although the chord symbols are present. Does the abstract chord sequence constitute part of the song, even without the melody (and not even voiced in a specific way?). There is a great case involving Steely Dan and Keith Jarrett which illustrates this problem - listen to Jarrett’s Long as You Know You’re Living Yours from the album Belonging and then listen to Steely Dan’s Gaucho from the album of the same name. Guess which came first, and guess who got uptight about it...
The Dan got done on this one; the chord sequence in that particular voicing, at that tempo, in that key was seen as being identifiable as specific to the Jarrett track. However, when it is simply the harmonic structure behind an improvised performance, is it still protected by copyright? And even if it is, if the physical chord symbols were taken out of the published material, would the sequence still really be there? Of course I’m dealing with publishers, not record companies here (Mehldau cannot copyright his improvisation on someone else’s composition), but I suspect this is going to be the problem I come across. We shall see....

My grand project - a transcription of the Brad Mehldau Trio playing ‘All The Things You Are’ on Art of the Trio vol. 4’ is pretty much done. Here is a little taster - this part can be found during the third chorus, starting from 6’20’’. I’ve had plenty of encouragement to get this published so keep on the look out! Get in touch if you have any questions.
On a more general note, the project, which is forming part of my Masters at Trinity College of Music, is looking at rhythmic aspects of this recording, and has thrown up a lot of interesting things; claves, groupings, swinging in 7/4, ‘layers’ of time going on...if you want to learn to really play like one of the guys in the trio the transcription is really just a guide map. Ears are much more informative. There’s just no way to represent the more intangible side of what three improvising musicians can do on paper.
However you can just about get the nuts and bolts down, and try to work out what on earth is going on, which, in this case, is more than enough to be getting on with...
(clicking on the files takes you to a page where you can download them, along with a complete Keith Jarrett transcription of ‘Prism’ from Personal Mountains)