That Jazz - Monkey Max Music and File Download

18
Part I: All That Jazz: A Tour of the Basics
Now, expand the song on your own. Make up a couple more verses and invent
your own words, melody, and accents.
Congratulations! You’ve now completed a basic seminar in improvisation.
And while 12-bar blues is just one simple structure used in jazz, you’re starting
to get a feel for how jazz players invent music within a framework.
Bent notes and innovative modes
Jazz players often use note combinations that can’t be produced on a piano.
They bend a note (by bending a string on guitar or sliding between notes on a
saxophone) to alter its pitch and make a sound that doesn’t exist in the western
chromatic scale (start at middle C on a piano, and move up key by key to
B, just before the next C. Those 12 tones constitute the western chromatic
scale). Bent notes help give jazz its mystery, tension, and energy.
Another unusual jazz technique is the use of modes. Modes are various scales
or groups of notes. The term modal jazz refers to a new approach pioneered
by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and others in the late ’50s and early ’60s (see
Chapters 7 and 8 for more about these periods in jazz). Instead of using rapid
chord changes that required a soloist to employ many different scales, modal
jazz songs (and improvisations) build around one or two scales — either chromatic
scales or scales from Indian, African, Arabic, and other world music.
Many nonwestern scales subdivide an octave into smaller increments, or
microtones. Arabic scales, for instance, have 17, 19, or 24 notes; an Indian
scale has 22.
Coltrane and Davis were early explorers of modal jazz, along with some of
their peers. Tunes such as Davis’ “So What” and Coltrane’s famous version of
Richard Rodgers’ “My Favorite Things” exemplify the dark, meditative, mysterious
vibe of modal jazz. Here are a few more great modal jazz recordings:
� Coltrane’s “Impressions”
� Davis’s “Flamenco Sketches” and “Milestones”
� Pianist Bill Evans’ “Peace Piece”
� Saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints”
Other American music, including Broadway show tunes and modern classical
compositions, uses many more different chords and scales instead of modal
jazz’s minimalist approach. These types of music possess their own assets,
including surprising melodies and intricate harmonies, but they don’t give
the same freedom to a soloist that modern jazz does.