Friday, May 30, 2014

Key Transformation and Motive Relation in "First Meditations" and "Sun Ship"

First in an article and later in his book, Lewis Porter shows how the four movements of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme suite are integrated, specifically through the application of set class (025) to both thematic motives as well as key transpositions between movements. Porter writes: "During his final period, 1965--67, Coltrane succeeded in eliminating the feeling of sectionality altogether, so that one experiences each late work as an indivisible whole..."

A Love Supreme was recorded in December 1964. Do Coltrane's studio albums recorded later in 1965, like Sun Ship and First Meditations, exhibit similar integration through motive and key relations despite not explicitly being "suites"? 


The key areas of the fives pieces released together as First Meditations are transformationally related and can be mapped as a transformational network. I find Kopp's system of chromatic mediant transformation most useful to illustrate the triad transformations in Coltrane's music. In Kopp, R/r represent diatonic mediant relationships (two common tones), and M/m represent chromatic mediant relationships (one common tone), with major and minor third between chord roots, respectively; D/F represent the relationships between triads with a fifth between chord roots (one common tone), of the same mode and changing modes, respectively. 


The relationships between the five key areas of First Meditations (Ab-flat major, F minor, B-flat major, D minor, and F-sharp minor) can be mapped accordingly. 





(The graph illustrates a relationship in which the triads representing the different keys heard in First Meditations are transformed into one another by shifting just one or two voices by step around one or two stationary common tones.) 

The five pieces and six separate keys that make up Sun Ship (B-flat minor, F-sharp minor, C minor, A minor, E minor, and G-sharp minor) are also transformationally related. 






First Meditations shows a degree of motivic integration as well. For instance, the themes to both "Compassion" and "Consequences" are based on little more than the whole-step dyad of scale steps 7 and 1, and the ultimately scalar theme to "Love" is generated from transpositions of a whole-step dyad. 


The listener notices furthermore that the scales on which the themes of First Meditations are based are related by common tones, inclusion, and efficient voice-leading. Below are the scale collections at the foundation of "Love," "Compassion," "Joy," and "Consequences."



[Eb F G Ab Bb C Db]-->[Eb F G Ab Bb C]-->[D F G Bb C]-->[D F G A C]

There are similar common-tone and semitone voice-leading scale relations in Sun Ship, for example between the two hexatonic collections comprising "Attaining" and the diatonic collection of "Dearly Beloved."

[G Ab Bb C D Eb]-->[G A B C D E]-->[G# A B C# D E F#]

Note that the common tones between the first two collections are (G C D), set class (027), and the common tones between the second two collections are (A B D E), or set class (0257). Set class (027) also provides the three-note theme to "Amen," [B E F#], to which [A] is eventually added, making set class (0257). "Attaining" also contains melodic statements of (027) and (0257): 




"Dearly Beloved" too contains a very prominent melodic statement of fourths, which stands in relief to its otherwise completely stepwise theme: 




That melodically salient tritone connects "Dearly Beloved" to "Sun Ship," whose three-note theme [C# D# A] contains nothing more than a tritone and a whole step, the interval content of set class (026). Inverting [D#] about [C#] results in [C# B A], the three-note motive that begins "Dearly Beloved" and germinates into its full, diatonic theme. Alternately, inverting [A] about the axis D-G# (the melodic tritone from "Dearly Beloved," as it happens) results in [C# D# G], the pitches which structurally outline the theme to "Ascent." Its major third interval is filled in with rising semitones referenced in the title of the piece.  

The compositional integration of "First Meditations" and "Sun Ship" through key and motive relationships lends support to Porter's suggestion that Coltrane's late period albums can indeed be heard as an "indivisible whole."


Saturday, May 24, 2014

Steve Coleman and Dominant/Half-Diminished Seventh Symmetry

Steve Coleman shares an example of the first sixteen bars on a "Rhythm Changes."





Notice the prevalence of half-diminished seventh chords in melodic outline. In his discussion of Charlie Parker's solo on the bridge out of "Celebrity," Coleman points to the use of such tetrachords (he shares the beboppers's preference for calling them "minor chords with added sixth") as upper extensions on an underlying dominant seventh chord. For instance, when Bird outlines C half-diminished seventh (E-flat minor--added 6th), he is arpeggiating the upper chord tones (3-5-7-9) of A-flat dominant seventh, which itself is the tritone substitution for D dominant seventh, the first chord of the bridge of "Rhythm Changes." From a voice-leading perspective, B-flat and E-flat represent chromatic appoggiature to the chord tones A and D which arrive in the following bar. 

Coleman is also aware of course that the dominant seventh and half-diminished seventh tetrachords have the same interval content---both belong to set-class (0258). Dominant seventh and half-diminshed seventh chords can therefore be related by inversion; e.g., D dominant seventh and the C half-diminished seventh that Bird superimposes on it are symmetrical. If we imagine the twelve chromatic pitch-classes as lying on a clock-face, then inverting (geometrically "reflecting") D and A (2 9) over the tritone axis of C--F-sharp (0 6) yields B-flat and E-flat (t 3), respectively. In other words, D dominant seventh and C half-diminished seventh are inversionally symmetrical about their shared tritone axis, C--F-sharp/G-flat: 



                                                                                           



Sunday, May 18, 2014

Lena Bloch, "Feathery"

The so-called Tristano School has been getting some press in the last few years, and the influence of a few of its members can even be heard from time to time.

The musical aesthetic of Tristano, Marsh, Konitz, et al. is multifarious. It is characterized in part by an introspection and a commitment to maximum spontaneity and ego-less improvisation that---despite the hype---remains quite uncommon in jazz. 

In her own fearless dedication to these ideals saxophonist Lena Bloch is therefore a rare player. The music on her new album, Feathery, bears a strong affinity to the most ineffable and unpredictable qualities in the music of Warne Marsh, Sal Mosca, Ted Brown, and her friend and mentor, Lee Konitz. But Feathery sounds like none of them, quite appropriately: it sounds unmistakably like Bloch, Cameron Brown, Dave Miller, and Billy Mintz. It's original and beautiful. Buy it.


Ray Mac's Sax Goes to 11

Tenor saxophonist Ray McMorrin summons the earth-shaking, gospel-permeated intensity of Gilmore, late Coltrane, Shepp, and Sanders while remaining firmly within the jazz folkloric tradition of swinging, melodic language. In this he is a rarity, a true original.




Wednesday, May 14, 2014

On Bechet's Birthday

"Bechet. The greatest of all originators, Bechet, the symbol of jazz… I consider Bechet the foundation. His things were all soul, all from the inside. It was very, very difficult to find anyone who could really keep up with him. He’d get something organized in his mind while someone else was playing and then he’d play one or two choruses---or more---that would be just too much.”
Duke Ellington, reflecting on hearing Bechet for the first time after his return to the United States in 1922 (quoted by Collier). 

...

Today is the 117th anniversary of the birth of Sydney Bechet. In an essay entitled "The Rise of Individualism and the Jazz Solo" from his book Jazz: The American Theme Song, the sometimes dubious James Lincoln Collier argues that Bechet was the initial impetus---albeit not ultimately the strongest and most widely acknowledged one---for jazz becoming a soloist's music by the end of the 1920s. Collier: 

“…why is he not today recognized as the first true jazz soloist? The answer is quite simple: from 1919 to 1922, when jazz was washing out of the honky-tonks and vice districts into the mainstream, and drawing to it thousands of aspiring musicians looking for models to emulate, Bechet was in Europe. Interest in jazz there at the time was virtually nonexistent… Had Bechet been in the United States in those years…he would have become the central figure in jazz, the position Louis Armstrong would hold by the end of the 1920s.” 

An older post on Bechet, Coltrane, and opera is here



Sunday, May 11, 2014

Lennie Tristano, "There Will Always Be You"

Along with that of John Coltrane, Lennie Tristano's playing represents the very height of improvised chromaticism, not to mention quarter-note based rhythmic complexity. Below is my transcription (right hand only) of his solo on "There Will Always Be You," released on the album Note to Note

My transcription of Tristano on the tune "Note to Note" from the same album can be found here.

Caveat auditor.


Friday, May 9, 2014

"A Space Which Cannot Be Owned"

"It's a great tragedy for painting that paintings can be owned. Composers and novelists and poets don't have this problem. Nobody can walk out of the symphony hall with the symphony in his pocket, even if he pays $500 million for it, because the symphony exists in another space---a space which cannot be owned."
Roger Scruton, The Representational Art Conference 2014 Keynote Speech





Who is a Jazz Musician?

"…a person is a jazz musician if accepted by other jazz musicians. Admittedly, this is fundamentally circular but does embody something of great importance: namely, that one of the characteristics of jazz has been that it is under the control of those who play it more than it is of agents, record companies, club owners, audiences. My guess---I underline 'guess'---is that this has been true since the ‘teens at least, perhaps even before. This may mean, by the way, that jazz is such a small segment of the market for music that it can be ignored as a major source of income by the music business.”



"From a genealogical standpoint, it becomes very clear to a knowledgable [sic] listener whose music has been informed by the Black tradition and whose hasn’t ... It’s very clear who is a master drummer in the tribe and who is not."

Improvisation Is...

"Improvisation is not an introspective art, nor is it a vague one. It is designed for an audience, and its starting-point is that audience’s expectations, which include the current conventions of musical form.”

 Nicholas Temperley on Chopin

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Jackie McLean In the Big Room

“…consider abstraction as the urge to disregard the features that lie on the surface of things, in hopes of finding the kernel within that does not change and is therefore felt to be the reality.” 

Although he criticizes it as a misnomer when it comes to art and prefers its use to describe the method of science, abstraction as Barzun defines it above is perhaps the best way to think of what Jackie McLean does so masterfully to the blues in this recording, from McLean's "saxophone class" at the Hartt School in 2001: 





My transcription is below. In it I have merely indicated pitches; precise rhythm (Jackie is playing freely and without synchronizing to the pulse of the bass and drums), phrasing, and timbre---the most ephemeral but most significant elements in improvised music---are not included. As always in the case of transcription, Caveat auditor