Jazz Standards Research Articles

An HMM-Based Approach for Cross-Harmonization of Jazz Standards

This paper presents a methodology for generating cross-harmonizations of jazz standards, i.e., for harmonizing the melody of a jazz standard (Song A) with the harmonic context of another (Song B). Specifically, the melody of Song A, along with the chords that start and end its sections (chord constraints), are used as a basis for generating new harmonizations with chords and chord transitions taken from Song B. This task involves potential incompatibilities between the components drawn from the two songs that take part in the cross-harmonization. In order to tackle such incompatibilities, two methods are introduced that are integrated in the Hidden Markov Model and the Viterbi algorithm. First, a rudimentary approach to chord grouping is presented that allows interchangeable utilization of chords belonging to the same group, depending on melody compatibility. Then, a “supporting” harmonic space of chords and probabilities is employed, which is learned from the entire dataset of the available jazz standards; this space provides local solutions when there are insurmountable conflicts between the melody and constraints of Song A and the harmonic context of Song B. Statistical and expert evaluation allow an analysis of the methodology, providing valuable insight about future steps.

Features of the Functionality of the Harmonic Progression II–V as a Main Element of the Musical Jazz Vocabulary

The purpose of the article is identifying the harmonic and functional characteristics of the main elements of jazz harmony, namely the harmonic progression II–V. To achieve the goal of the article, the following research methods were used: comparative (for a comparative analysis of the harmonious functionality of academic and jazz music); method of musicological analysis (for musicological analysis of jazz standards); method of stylistic analysis (to identify the stylistic characteristics of certain styles of jazz music); method of generalization (to summarize the study). Scientific novelty. In the presented scientific work, for the first time in Ukrainian musicology, an attempt was made to theoretically comprehend the functional connections within the framework of the harmony of jazz music. Conclusions. Harmonic formula II–V is the single functional link of jazz harmony, the main characteristic of which is the dominant functionality. Since the phenomenon of dominance is the main impetus for the implementation of musical development, the harmonic progression II–V is not only the main harmonic formula, but also a leading element of the harmonious development of jazz music. This statement is an impulse to rethink harmonious functionality in the context of jazz music and, in particular, to understand the function of harmonic progression II–V, which will lead to a fuller and deeper understanding of jazz music by its performers and, consequently, listeners. Key words: jazz music, harmony, functionality, harmonic progression II–V

Transformations of Musical Form «12-Bar Blues» in Jazz Music

The purpose of the article is to investigate the characteristics of the 12-bar blues within the jazz music. The research methodology is based on the use of methods of analysis (for musicological analysis of jazz standards), comparison (for comparative analysis of the characteristics of blues formation and features of jazz music formation) and generalisation (to formulate research conclusions). The scientific novelty of the study is in highlighting the problem of the relationship between the formative principles of blues and jazz music. Conclusions. The musical form «12-bar blues in jazz music», is an unprecedented quintessence of the form-forming features of blues and jazz music. However, despite all the changes that the standard form “12-bar blues” has undergone in jazz music, in all its forms and with the introduction of any elements, it remains a phenomenon of blues formation in jazz music and requires the use of separate terminology for its definition. Thus, we are faced with the full depth of the above musical form, which has the potential for an infinite number of transformations and the introduction of innovative features, the infinite potential of which, in turn, is inherent in jazz music.
 Key words:jazz music, blues, musical form, 12-bar blues, jazz standard, 12-bar blues in jazz music, 12-bar minor blues, modern 12-bar blues.

Jazz Standard as Archive

The jazz standard remains an enduring part of the tradition of jazz performance and pedagogy. Contemporary jazz scholarship has tended to focus on improvisation as a practice and jazz-as-lived-experience and, while the jazz standard repertoire has occasionally been the subject of study the relationship between the standard repertoire and the ‘language’ or style of jazz has not been theorised. In this article I argue that the distinctive style of jazz improvisation is at least in part, determined by the characteristics of its shared repertoire and the statements that have accrued around that repertoire. I borrow Foucault’s conception of the archive to propose a reexamination of the historical progression of ideas that troubles the narrative of the individual creative genius and of jazz as the normative condition of improvisation. In this genealogical context, the jazz standard is positioned as an archive of a particular body of thought, a way of organizing and understanding the transmission, evolution and connection of ideas over time. The intended effect is to provide an alternative perspective on creativity in jazz, and a theorisation of an idea that is already implicit in jazz pedagogy and practice.

Teaching Jazz Standard Writing at College-Level Songwriting Class Setting

Songwriting has become an essential skill for future musicians. It is inevitable for musicians to write a wide variety of songs according to the ongoing changes of market trends and various commercial purposes. Since there is an increasing need for songwriting classes in academia, it would be beneficial for future college educators to create teaching methods when preparing for the courses. This article provides step-by-step methods for instructors to guide students to write jazz standards. The methods include designing harmonic progressions, composing melodies, organizing the formal structure, and writing lyrics. In the future, I hope to help foster younger generations of jazz classics.

The New Old-School American Revolution

The New Old-School American Revolution Francis Russo (bio) Woody Holton, Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021. 800 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $37.50. When it came to self-immolations, Richard Wagner could stomach exactly one: the heroine Brünnhilde, who rides her loyal horse to flames in the fifteenth and final hour of Wagner's epic opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, Historian John Murrin, by contrast, identified three in the saga of American Revolution historiography. Independence origin stories by schools Imperial, Progressive, and Whig had each, "in a pattern of self-immolation," swelled over time into tangled morasses of "accumulated inconsistencies."1 The tale goes that since the late nineteenth century, professional historical writing on the American Revolution had been dominated by roughly three major interpretive schools, each associated with contrasting approaches to the past. These were not just academic arguments but implicit convictions about how history and contemporary politics conjoined. Whigs looked to ideology and stressed consensus among elite actors, Progressives looked to social history and economics and stressed a polity riven by class conflict, and Imperial historians looked to institutions and stressed that the entire British Empire had to substitute a parochial view of the thirteen colonies if the Revolution's causes were to be understood. In 2007, Murrin—a famed fixture at Princeton for three decades and a dean essayist of early American history—had traced the history of these schools and argued that whatever insights they had originally claimed, they had grown so capacious and complex that their interpretive luster had faded. Murrin supposed these immolations unique to historical writing on the American Revolution. In fact, he put his finger on a repetitive historiographical asymmetry: empirical proliferation, explanatory contraction.2 Yet by the time Murrin's essay reappeared in an edited collection in 2018, his perspective was eclipsed by a new way of viewing early American history that placed a premium on expanding the field's boundaries rather than continuing to play within the confines of antique schools. Mark Peterson recently predicted "imaginative failure" if historians obsessed over fitting together Murrin's a priori schools rather than approaching archives with "questions [End Page 264] generated by our current predicament," like climate change, information technology, or global authoritarianism.3 Meanwhile the Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution (2012) had declared the end of school-based Revolution history altogether. Editors Jane Kamensky and Edward Gray lamented a previous generation's alienating battles between intellectual (neo-Whig) and social (neo-Progressive) historians whose "irreconcilable interpretations" amounted to "ever more Manichean and absolute postures."4 The Handbook set out instead to capture what many historians now refer to as "vast early America": plural views west (from London and Bengal), north (from the West Indies), east (from Indian country), and inward (from port cities of thirteen rebel colonies), all in longue durée perspective and with bricolage interpretation "methodologically pluralist, even promiscuous."5 The sun never set on the new bounds of the American Revolution, except on its old historiographical schools. Here was a summa that recalled not the immolation flames of Wagner's last Ring opera, but its more portentous title: Götterdämmerung—"Twilight of the Gods"—a complete washing away of the old wars in favor of a fresh start. But were Murrin's hoary gods really gone? David Waldstreicher rejected the Handbook's "declaration of historiographical independence" and claimed that deep continuities with the traditional schools persisted in the new.6 Despite real losses for the Whig camp, Waldstreicher argued, the Handbook displayed a "neo-Imperial" stance (billed "Atlantic"), which paired well with a Progressive inclination for social conflict. The best essays were those whose authors acknowledged their lineage without becoming shills for calcified camps. Waldstreicher likened an old school to a jazz standard that could "get you out on the dance floor if it's played a bit differently and doesn't nod too sagely to your grandparents."7 And the "trophies," Waldstreicher suggested, "will go to those who know the old steps as well as the new ones."8 Woody Holton knows both the old and the new steps and...

Archival Silence in the Collections of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn

Archival Silence in the Collections of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn

The Year of Jazz

The Year of Jazz Gloria Blizzard (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution gloria blizzard and jazz, lake ontario, canada | photo by heidi seirekidis [End Page 26] This essay takes the form of a jazz standard. Nestled within the intro and outro are alternating A and B sections. I am sustained by John Coltrane's music and the company of a dog named Jazz, as I liken the experience of lockdown to that of a bizarrely acquired concussion. Intro The alpha puppy, I learn later, is untrainable. Determined. Feisty. Smart. Bossy. Mischievous. An improviser. Will not fetch. The dog trainer gave her back after a week of residential training. He never cashed my check. My daughter and I named her Jazz. Life is complex. The child says, Jazz, short for Jasmine. I say, the puppy's name was Coltrane's fault as she was to become one of My Favorite Things. His version of the eternal tune. Precious and unfathomable. A When the tent pole first went up my nose, it shook up my brain and me so much that it took a bit of a break and went off to Bermuda or was it Brazil. I had not traveled to Brazil yet at that time, so it must have been Bermuda. A place that I've never been drawn to and never wished to go. I pulled the tent pole from my left nostril. Blood gushed out onto the sands of Sunnyside Beach. I turned quickly away from my daughter and the other children, so that they would not see. My friend, Jacqueline, gathered them and pulled them far away. I moved northish. A stranger sat me down on a bench. She called an ambulance. The attendants asked a few questions. They smothered laughs. A tent pole up the nose? An ambulance for a nosebleed? It was a two-minute drive to St. Joseph's Hospital. An emergency room doctor said, "Take a couple of days off of work" and wrote a note to that effect. On day 2 at home however, the world seemed too bright, the sidewalk would not stay still. No one else was squinting at the too bright sun. No one else swayed. Their sidewalks appeared to be stable. Perhaps it was me. I went back inside for my shades and made my way gingerly to a walk-in medical clinic. I removed my shades, the doctor looked briefly into my eyes. "Go back to the hospital immediately. This is for an emergency CAT scan," he said, handing me a slip of paper. An hour or three later, the procedure was completed and a white man in hospital scrubs raced into the examining room waving a gray scan, "Nothing obvious," he told me, "but stay at home for two weeks and follow up with your general practitioner." I returned home, the sidewalk tipping generously from left to right. The sun was a piercing, bright light. I called my brothers, they laughed. I laughed. It sounded ridiculous. Tent pole up my nose. A Date of Injury (DOI): March 19, say the medical records. "Post-concussional type syndrome resulting from a very focal injury" wrote Scott McCullagh, MD, neuropsychiatrist. Brain Injury Clinic at Sunnybrook Hospital. He'd never seen such an injury. A blow to the inside of the head. "It is called 'mild,'" he said apologetically, knowing full well the catastrophic impact it was having on my life. I was suddenly disabled and could not work. I slept a lot. I went for short walks. I made simple meals for my daughter and me. I swept the floor. I went to appointments. Eventually the thought arose, perhaps from my gut, that this might be an appropriate time to get a puppy. My daughter had been asking for one for a year or was it two. I was now available for the care of a baby dog. It would sleep a lot. It would need very short walks. Just like me. I would be home when it needed to pee hourly. My daughter, now eleven, was also old enough to participate in dog care. Two months after the DOI, on May 9, I brought Jazz home...

Jazz improvisation as a phenomenon of music art

This article examines a series of theoretical issues of jazz improvisation. The author analyzes various definitions and emphasizes the main features of jazz improvisation, reveals a number of ways of processing jazz standards. A special aspect represents the character of dialogue proper to this type of musical creation, the typology of improvisation and the relationship between improvisation and composition.

The missing fundamentals of harmonic theory: Chord roots and their ambiguity in arrangements of jazz standards

Since Lippius and Rameau, chords have roots that are often voiced in the bass, doubled, and used as labels. Psychological experiments and analyses of databases of Western classical music have not produced clear evidence for the psychological reality of chord roots. We analyzed a symbolic database of 100 arrangements of jazz standards (musical instrument digital interface [MIDI] files from midkar.com and thejazzpage.de ). Selection criteria were representativeness and quality.The original songs had been composed in the 1930s and 1950s, and each file had a beat track. Files were converted to chord progressions by identifying tone onsets near beat locations (±10% of beat duration). Chords were classified as triads (major, minor, diminished, suspended) or seventh chords (major–minor, minor, major, half-diminished, diminished, and suspended) plus extra tones. Roots that were theoretically less ambiguous were more often in the bass or (to a lesser extent) doubled. The root of the minor triad was ambiguous, as predicted (conventional root or third). Of the sevenths, the major–minor had the clearest root. The diminished triad was often part of a major–minor seventh chord; the half-diminished seventh, of a dominant ninth. Added notes (“tensions”) tended to minimize dissonance (roughness or inharmonicity). In arrangements of songs from the 1950s, diminished triads and sevenths were less common, and suspended triads more common, relative to the 1930s. Results confirm the psychological reality of chord roots and their specific ambiguities. Results are consistent with Terhardt’s virtual pitch theory and the idea that musical chords emerge gradually from cultural and historic processes. The approach can enrich music theory (including pitch-class set analysis) and jazz pedagogy.

Uncovering the Origin Story of Juan Tizol’s Caravan: A Predecessor

ABSTRACT Caravan is a popular jazz standard that is recorded frequently. The first recording of Caravan by Barney Bigard and his Jazzopators from December 19, 1936, credits Juan Tizol as the sole composer. However later recordings give credit to both Duke Ellington and Tizol as the composers and his manager, Irving Mills, as the lyricist. Because Ellington and Mills commonly used the band members’ ideas and compositions, it is perhaps easy to assume that the conception of Caravan follows a similar narrative. Despite Tizol’s insistence on compositional independence, trumpeter Rex Stewart contends that Caravan’s melody “evolved from another tune, Alabamy Home,” which is credited to Ellington. And indeed Alabamy Home and Caravan are quite similar in melody, harmony, and exotic affect. Inconsistent information in Stewart’s account and the fact that the first recording of Caravan was made three months before the Gotham Stompers had recorded Alabamy Home initially complicate Stewart’s assertion. However, a trombone part from the Ellington archive at the Smithsonian Institution for Alabamy Home, dated between 1926 and 1928, indicates that Alabamy Home was written first. I suggest that Tizol refined the exoticism of Alabamy Home, originally devised for the Cotton Club, to create Caravan, the most famous of his self-proclaimed “Spanish melodies.” I trace the back-and-forth musical exchange between Caravan and Alabamy Home through four manuscripts and five recordings dated between 1926 and 1937. By doing so, I explore the irregular case of these two pieces connected by their shared melody, harmony, and affect, but with differing levels of success in the Duke Ellington songbook.

All the Things Tunes Are: Avant-Textes and Referents in Jazz Improvisation

ABSTRACT Jerome Kern's “All the Things You Are” has enjoyed a lengthy and varied history as a jazz standard. Like many other standards, hundreds of recordings of the tune exist, each rendition different from the last. This radically pluralistic identity makes it difficult to pin down what exactly “All the Things You Are” is. In this article, I argue that the notion of an avant-texte may be used to engage with the pluralistic identity of the jazz tune. Originally developed by literary scholars dealing with authors’ sketches, the term avant-texte describes a network of documents that can be traced in order to determine how the identity of a text is constituted and changes over time. I argue that improvisers construct such networks based on the versions of a tune with which they become familiar, eventually forming a referent for improvisation. By analyzing some of the manifold relations between various recordings of Kern's composition across history, I demonstrate how particular creative choices proliferate throughout the network and gradually alter not only the tune's current identity as a referent but also the future paths the tune's identity might take.

On the Adaptability of Recurrent Neural Networks for Real-Time Jazz Improvisation Accompaniment.

Jazz improvisation on a given lead sheet with chords is an interesting scenario for studying the behaviour of artificial agents when they collaborate with humans. Specifically in jazz improvisation, the role of the accompanist is crucial for reflecting the harmonic and metric characteristics of a jazz standard, while identifying in real-time the intentions of the soloist and adapt the accompanying performance parameters accordingly. This paper presents a study on a basic implementation of an artificial jazz accompanist, which provides accompanying chord voicings to a human soloist that is conditioned by the soloing input and the harmonic and metric information provided in a lead sheet chart. The model of the artificial agent includes a separate model for predicting the intentions of the human soloist, towards providing proper accompaniment to the human performer in real-time. Simple implementations of Recurrent Neural Networks are employed both for modeling the predictions of the artificial agent and for modeling the expectations of human intention. A publicly available dataset is modified with a probabilistic refinement process for including all the necessary information for the task at hand and test-case compositions on two jazz standards show the ability of the system to comply with the harmonic constraints within the chart. Furthermore, the system is indicated to be able to provide varying output with different soloing conditions, while there is no significant sacrifice of “musicality” in generated music, as shown in subjective evaluations. Some important limitations that need to be addressed for obtaining more informative results on the potential of the examined approach are also discussed.

The Public Domain Song Anthology

Reviewed by: The Public Domain Song Anthology ed. by David Berger, Chuck Israels Mikkel Vad The Public Domain Song Anthology: With Modern and Traditional Harmonization. Edited by David Berger and Chuck Israels. Charlotteville, VA: Aperio Press, 2020. [Forewords in English. Available as an online resource and in print (paperback). ISBN 978173354301. $0 (electronic), print version available via donation beginning at $150.] This collection contains songs from before 1924, which are all in the public domain. In other words, these songs are not anthologized according to a genre, style, or tradition, as is common from most other songbooks, but rather according to the political economy of copyright law and its slightly arbitrary historical marker of 1924. Building on this the editors add a US national framework to the collection, as well as—perhaps most significantly and uniquely—an extra set of "modern harmonizations" in addition to the "traditional" chord changes. I shall begin by commenting on the scope and structure of the book, plus the selection of songs, before reviewing the actual songs and harmonizations which, of course, constitute the main part of the book. The motivation for the book is, admirably, to create a resource for students, teachers, and musicians who want to perform songs without risking having to pay the extra royalties that comes with playing material that is still under copyright. This will no doubt be useful for musicians wanting to play a gig of only public domain music, or for music teachers who want to organize concerts at the lowest possible cost. This is backed up by the fact that The Public Domain Song Anthology is free and easy to download as an open access, open educational resource in PDF, XML, and Sibelius file formats in addition to the physical book. These issues of copyright, public domain, and open access are the main topic of the short forewords by Robert Schwartz and Peter Jaszi, who are both lawyers. The battle of copyright and the fight for open access educational resources should be of growing concern to every musician, so it is nice to see this issue being raised here. The main editors of the volume are David Berger and Chuck Israels. Berger is a prolific composer, jazz arranger, and conductor, including as the former leader of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, the most famous jazz repertory band in the United States. Israels is a bassist, who has played with everybody from Billie Holiday to Herbie Hancock and is best known for his work with the pianist Bill Evans and as the former director of the National Jazz Ensemble, another pioneering jazz repertory band. With the choice of big jazz names like Berger and Israels as editors and authors of the reharmonizations, the book also contributes to the well-known centering of jazz as the quintessential national music of the United States. The book is clearly meant to work, by all appearances, as a fakebook from which jazz musicians can play and jam, and the addition of the modern [End Page 635] jazz harmonizations suggests that the editors think that these songs could be added to the jazz repertoire. This makes sense, given the centrality of the Great American Songbook in the jazz world. Indeed, several of the songs in the anthology are already jazz standards (such as, After You've Gone and Who's Sorry Now), while there are others that I, frankly, would be surprised to see suddenly pop up on jazz recordings in the coming years despite a good, new harmonization and otherwise classic status (for instance, Yankee Doodle and Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!). This variety is in many ways as much a strength as it is a weakness, and I certainly had fun playing some songs that I do not come across when leafing through my other fakebooks. As is clear from their forewords, Berger and Israels have been more concerned with national heritage than with copyright when putting together the anthology. David Berger begins his forward: "Living memory is not sufficient to preserve our musical heritage. Popular songs that are in the public domain (free of U.S. copyright obligation) needed to be collected and made freely available." There are...

Content of Teaching a Future Artist/Vocalist Jazz Improvisation

Teaching vocalists jazz improvisation contributes, on one hand, to developing general skills (sociability, memory, attentiveness, coordination of movements), and on the other, to developing musical and creative abilities, as well as it helps to shape the worldview and aesthetic taste that a student acquires when studying at higher artistic education establishments and provides an opportunity to develop one’s abilities further in other areas. Special attention in the content of teaching vocalists jazz improvisation is paid to further development of individual improvisational and interpretive abilities of students, complete mastering of improvisational techniques and principles of their organization, formation of quality professional improvisational and performing levels of instrumentalists in the course of learning, an individual creative method in the art of improvisation and interpretation of jazz standards, study of signature methods and concepts of outstanding improvisers of jazz, rock, pop music and mixed improvisational and folklore directions in the historical and temporal aspect for the purpose of their creative rendering and use in one’s work. A goal, objectives, content and methods are all necessary elements of teaching vocalists jazz improvisation. The study of these issues is of great importance for determining its direction and nature, since a misunderstanding of the teaching goal and objectives often leads to negative results in the development of methods for training an artist/vocalist. Objectives and specifics of the content of teaching vocalists jazz improvisation in higher educational establishments are defined in three main areas: “why teach” (teaching goal), “teach what” (teaching content), “how to teach” (teaching forms and methods).

Practicing Integrated Care Pathways in Norwegian Hospitals: Coordination through Industrialized Standardization, Value Chains, and Quality Management or an Organizational Equivalent to Improvised Jazz Standards.

The goal of coordinating pathways for cancer patients through their diagnostic and treatment journey is often approached by borrowing strategies from traditional industries, including standardization, process redesign, and variation reduction. However, the usefulness of these strategies is sometimes limited in the face of the complexity and uncertainty that characterize these processes over time and the situation at both patient and institutional levels. We found this to be the case when we did an in-depth qualitative study of coordination processes in patient pathways for three diagnoses in four Norwegian hospitals. What allows these hospitals to accomplish coordination is supplementing standardization with improvisation. This improvisation is embedded in four types of emerging semi-formal structures: collegial communities, networks, boundary spanners, and physical proximity. The hierarchical higher administrative levels appear to have a limited ability to manage and support coordination of these emerging structures when needed. We claim that this can be explained by viewing line management as representative of an economic–administrative institutional logic while these emerging structures represent a medical–professional logic that privileges proximity to the variation and complexity in the situations. The challenge is then to find a way for emergent and formal structures to coexist.

UTILIZING PRAGMATISM PRINCIPLES IN LEARNING JAZZ GUITAR REHARMONIZATION TECHNIQUE USING MALAY ASLI SONG

This article proposes a pragmatism approach useful in explaining the logic of learning jazz guitar reharmonization techniques. Music and practices are both unseparated and unified in the field of music education. This poses challenges for traditional and western music consolidation because reharmonization technique is only known in western music repertoires while traditional music normally utilizes old-style repertoires. Some practitioners rooted in dogmatic thinking still maintain authenticity and traditions. In this study, our data is gathered using qualitative content analysis. We then identified similarity of pragmatism principles along with the interpretation of jazz reharmonization techniques. We suggest that pragmatism approach is a useful pathway for music educators to reconceptualize teaching and learning of traditional music using jazz reharmonization technique and then, recreate and innovate a new sound and context of learning jazz harmony rather than using jazz standards repertoires.

Utilizing Pragmatism Approach in Learning Jazz Guitar Reharmonization Technique using Malay Asli Song

Details of developing jazz guitar reharmonization learning book using Malay Asli song will not discuss here, however, this article divulges pragmatism approach that can be transcending in explaining logic between learning jazz guitar reharmonization techniques using Malay Asli Song. Although music is a universal language, traditional music and western music educators do not come to an agreement diffusing learning western music elements such in traditional music or vice versa. As a result, reharmonization technique only become known on western music repertoires. While traditional music practitioners presenting the same old repertoires, with deep-rooted dogmatic excuses to maintain what they called traditional authentic values. To conduct this study, relevant data on pragmatism was done through document analysis. The result show pragmatism approach can help music educators to reconceptualize teaching and learning traditional music using jazz reharmonization technique to recreate and innovate a new sound and contextual of learning jazz harmony, not just using on jazz standards repertoires, in making music theory beneficial to both traditional and modern music educators and students.

The Syntax of Jazz Harmony: Diatonic Tonality, Phrase Structure, and Form

The regularities underlying the structure building of chord sequences, harmonic phrases, and combinations of phrases constitute a central research problem in music theory. This article proposes a formalization of Jazz harmony with a generative framework based on formal grammars, in which syntactic structure tightly corresponds with the functional interpretation of the sequence. It assumes that chords establish nested hierarchical dependencies that are characterized by two core types: preparation and prolongation. The approach expresses diatonic harmony, embedded modulation, borrowing, and substitution within a single grammatical framework. It is argued in the second part that the proposed framework models not only core phrase structure, but also relations between phrases and the syntactic structures underlying the main forms of Jazz standards. As a special case, the Blues form relies heavily on the plagal derivation from the tonic and is analyzed in comparison with other analytical approaches to the Blues. The proposed theory is specified to a sufficient level of detail that it lends itself to computational implementation and empirical exploration, and this way it makes a step towards music theory building that embraces the close links between formal, mathematical, and computational methods.

That Old Song: Ehud Asherie and his Friends

That Old Song:Ehud Asherie and his Friends Molly McQuade (bio) When she sings jazz standards, Hilary Gardner sounds to me just like a musical instrument. When any other singers sing, they sound to me like themselves, singing. If you are a singer struggling to be heard, then sounding like yourself could bring a kind of comfort: you are who you are, you know it, and maybe someone will notice. On the other hand, sounding like yourself might also narrow your musical prospects, for it might narrow the scope and identity of your music. When I realize that Hilary Gardner sounds to me just like a musical instrument, that insight, like her music, abruptly raises a curtain on what singing can mean or be. Although I have learned since then how to recognize her voice, that's because to me it isn't just a voice. To put it another way: when we hear a flute, do we say, "Thanks, flute!"? Not me. Instead, at best, I heed exclusively the sounds coming from it. Those sounds are explicit, and they are iconic. Those are what I want to hear and keep, analyze and venerate. Gardner when singing almost disavows being only human, possibly because the music sings her. Why doesn't she need to be herself? Unlike other emphatic individualists, she offers no resistance to music's greater power. Her voice evokes cello, oboe, clarinet, and then some: open vowels, tonal depths, vibrato, swing, and yet no true debts. In her recent jazz CD, The Late Set, Gardner also shows a willingness to hand the lead over to the piano. But then, she deftly takes it back. While his piano sings with her, Ehud Asherie never comes across as mainly or merely an accompanist. As with Gardner, the music of Asherie plays him. [End Page 362] ________ For some years, he's been hosting an understated little keyboard hootenanny every month or so with his friends at the Fat Cat on Christopher Street. For New York it is unusual: no hoopla, and not all-star, but faithful, old-fashioned good stuff. Now and then, Hilary Gardner attends, whether to listen or to sing. Though he is esteemed by the high-minded of jazz know-it-alls, Asherie's own tendency is democratic-autocratic. When I sidle in from the afternoon glare of a Sunday, what I find hunkered down in darkness among the Fat Cat's ping-pong tables, caterwauls, bobbing ponytails, and beer glasses is unranked motleymotley-motley. And I like that. Amid the startling musical miscellany is Matthew, so raptly selfcritical that if he begins to play and doesn't love it right away, he may bolt from the piano bench, never to return—never, that is, until next month. I sometimes imagine that he must be playing one-handed; his music is meticulously united. Then there's Terry Waldo, Eubie Blake's upstanding protégé, who can translate Mozart into ragtime without a blink. Waldo's pinched, sad face atop a lanky slouch reminds me of a fatalistic El Greco. At times, his high-stakes skitter intensifies; leggy, maned women entreat him together, in the shadows. And there is a young man, Sam, encouraged by his father, who plays stride with his very own sense of rhythm. I can't quite describe it, but I always listen to Sam attentively. This fellow's feeling for time as it passes does not answer to anyone, not even really to time. I feel like the guy is inventing time before time can. His technique is far from flawless. But the trickling sidelong tempo is his alone. Uncommon things happen on Stride Sundays, if you stick around. In late March of 2019, someone named Jean-Baptiste Franc appeared at the piano, tearing it up, saying nothing, tearing it up again. During a session one April, a man wearing a bright white head scarf walked in and hurried to Asherie's elbow. He held a swaddled baby, slung tightly to his chest, directly above Asherie's keyboard, as if there were no way [End Page 363] to get the sentient infant near enough to manna. Asherie broke into a grin, solar...