Steve Swallow interview

A friend sent me a link to this video - Steve Swallow and John Scofield, interviewed by Dr. David Schroeder. It's over an hour, but well worth the time. Topics include "ear" playing versus reading skills; the origin of the Real Book; Steve's experiences working with Gary Burton, Stan Getz, Carla Bley and others; and Steve's transition from double bass to electric bass. Some great stories here!

I'd long wondered why the old Real Book had changes to "Here's that Rainy Day" that seemed so wrong - according to Steve, they were Jim Hall's reharmonization. Steve also mentions that the Real Book changes to "My Romance" are the "Bill Evans changes." That made me wonder what the original chords to the song actually were, since pretty much all modern fake books show something close to the changes in the old RB. The original harmonization was quite a bit different; I'll get to that in a future post. Here's the interview:

Combo project - "Horace Silver Complete" fakebooks

Over the last several years, my Saturday adult combo class has taken on some ambitious projects. The first was playing repeatedly through a list of 100 jazz standards, trying to play by ear and from memory, rather than reading (we are not done with this project). Next was playing through all the tunes in the Thelonious Monk Fake Book, one or two tunes every Saturday for more than a year. After that was the Just Gershwin Real Book, then Charles Mingus - More Than a Fake Book. Following that was an effort to go through all the Tadd Dameron tunes that we could find charts for.

Our newest project is to play through the two volumes of the "Horace Silver Complete" fakebooks - Horace Silver Complete Vol. 1: The 50s (58 tunes), and Horace Silver Complete Vol. 2: The 60s (49 tunes).

We had hoped at first to check out at least one or two tunes each session, but it hasn't worked out that way. One reason is that many of these tunes involve arrangements that are more detailed than the usual head/solos/head format of a run-of-the-mill combo rendition. Another reason we've been working more slowly is that Horace's compositions are enjoyable and challenging, and some need several weeks, just to come anywhere close to getting it right.

We felt the same way about the Monk and Mingus repertoire, though we got through the list of Dameron tunes somewhat faster. As for the Gershwin fakebook, I think we all agreed that George and Ira in fact wrote a large number of pretty unmemorable tunes, along with the wonderful ones that made it into the jazz standards canon.

Jay Glacy, the editor of the two Silver books, has made a fine contribution to jazz education. I do have to say, after going through the first dozen tunes with the class, that some charts could have benefited from one more round of proofreading. It has been helpful for the class to listen to Horace's original recordings, both to check for typos and to understand the intended form of the tunes. Of course, checking the recordings is something that we should do anyway, since a lot of musical elements can't really be put into lead sheet form. The charts do include many shout choruses, bass lines, and harmony parts.

I'm hoping the editor will eventually publish one or two more volumes in this series. Horace recorded through the 1990s. He was with Blue Note records from 1952 to 1979 (27 albums). According to Wikipedia,

His final Blue Note album was Silver 'n Strings, recorded in 1978 and 1979. His stay was the longest in the label's history. By Silver's account, he left Blue Note after its parent company was sold and the new owners were not interested in promoting jazz. In 1980, he formed the record label Silveto, "dedicated to the spiritual, holistic, self-help elements in music"...Silver also formed Emerald at the same time, a label for straight-ahead jazz, but it was short-lived. 

From 1993 to 1999, Horace recorded five more albums for Columbia, Impulse, and Verve.

Here is Horace's Wikipedia bio, and here is his discography. 

Here are the Amazon links for the two volumes:

Horace Silver Complete Vol. 1: The 50s 
Horace Silver Complete Vol. 2: The 60s 

The books, as well as pdf versions, are also available from reallygoodmusic.com.

Michel Legrand and Saint-Saëns

Here are a couple of terrific performances: Michel Legrand playing his song "I Will Wait for You," and Itzhak Perlman playing Camille Saint-Saëns' "Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso."

Both are great listening, but I'm posting these because I had a tune-detective moment with the rondo theme that occurs at 1:40, 3:08, and 5:27 in the Saint-Säens video. Maybe it's a stretch?

Patterns books, Part 2: Yusef Lateef's "Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns"

Dr. Yusef Lateef was a deep musical thinker as well as a prolific recording artist, composer, and author. He left us a lot of wisdom and beauty. A look at his website, yuseflateef.com, will give you some idea of the breadth of his interests.

Yusef's Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns (1981) is, as the title indicates, a sort of jazz equivalent of Nicholas Slonimsky's "Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns" (1947). Where Slonimsky's book is a systematic "Thesaurus," organizing and presenting scales and patterns in a series of permutations, Lateef's work is a "Repository," an eclectic collection of scales and patterns derived from the music of many cultures, as well as from contemporary classical music, that he found interesting and/or useful, as an improviser and composer. Or, as Yusef himself describes the book in his introduction,

[This book] is a capacious pallette of materials...that refuse to be indentured by a severe conventional plan...this Thesaurus [Yusef's word here] is a collection of deep reflective explorations in thought, sound, and feeling pursued in many directions with the objective of symbolizing movements of beauty through sound.

First of all, let me say that I highly recommend this book to all creative musicians.

In a previous post, Pattern books, Part 1, I suggested that patterns books attempt to serve three purposes, in varying degrees:

1) Improving finger dexterity
2) Working towards the goal of fluency in all keys, both mentally and physically
3) Providing sources for musical ideas, to be explored in improvisation or composition

The "Repository" is primarily intended to serve as a source of ideas and inspiration. It can certainly also be used for 1), finger dexterity. The book does not much emphasize 2), 12-key exercises. I suppose that is assumed, but that's not really the focus of the book.

I probably won't be putting many of these patterns into 12 keys, although I did play through the entire book. Even with this limited level of engagement, this book opened my ears to some interesting aspects of music that were new to me. Playing through the book was also a great sight-reading project and fingering workout.

Patterns are presented almost entirely within the normal range of the saxophone, and are playable on other instruments as well. A few piano pieces are included. A bass clef version of the book is available.

To give you some idea of how diverse the ideas are in this book, here are just a few of the types of patterns Lateef includes:

• Triads around the circle of fourths and in other cycles, organized and inverted in creative sequences
• Similar patterns and exercises for other chord types
• "Synthetic Formations" given by Eric Dolphy to Yusef, with creative variations composed by Yusef 
• Fourths patterns
• "Triple diminished" patterns 
• Pentatonic patterns
• Archaic Chinese and Greek scales with etudes and derived patterns composed by Yusef
• 12-tone patterns
• Japanese, Indian, and Pygmy scales, and derived patterns

That's just a sampling from the first half of the 270-page book. 

Generally, Yusef not only presents the scales and patterns, but also includes composed exercises and etudes that draw on the patterns. I'm sure that he meant this to show the way forward, an illustration of how to apply the patterns creatively, for musicians who might be exploring the "Repository."

Yusef sometimes uses some rather opaque jargon: "improvisational spirals," "morphic patterns," "mutated hexadic scales of the supra-diatonic scale." These can often (though not always) be figured out with the aid of the "Explanation of Terms" at the front of the book.

Yusef's recorded performances seem to me to be very much rooted in the jazz and blues tradition, augmented by multi-cultural materials acquired in his research and exploration. His output as performer/composer/author was extensive, and in a number of different genres. You can check Yusef's list of compositions on his website. The website also lists his recordings on his own label, YAL Records, but he also recorded on commercial labels including Impulse, Atlantic, and CTI. Here's Wikipedia's discography.

Here's Yusef's Wikipedia entry, with a biography.

Yusef did not care for the term "jazz," preferring "autophysiopsychic music."

Yusef's music explains what he was about far better than I could. Here is a documentary, "Brother Yusef," filmed in 2005, when he was 85. It is absolutely worth 51 minutes of your time:

Coltrane, Morton Gould, Francis Poulenc, and Harold Shapero

A friend (thanks, Carlos) just pointed me at a great "Deep Dive With Lewis Porter" article on the inspirations behind John Coltrane's composition "Impressions." Briefly put, Porter demonstrates that the melody of "Impressions" is a paraphrase of a section of Morton Gould's "Pavanne" (1938). The chord structure, of course, is borrowed from Miles Davis' "So What." For more detail on this, check out the Porter article. It's a great read, with plenty of sound clips. I'd heard about Coltrane's use of "Pavanne" before, but the following was news to me:

In a follow-up article, Porter cites the source of the melody to Coltrane's "Big Nick": Francis Poulenc's "Impromptu #3." See Porter's article for recorded examples.

In a comment below the second article, a reader points out that the source of the melody to the first half of "Giant Steps" was pretty definitely Harold Shapero's String Quartet (1941). Check the recording below! Shapero moves his theme through quite a few transpositions, including some chromatic third relations, though he doesn't follow "Coltrane changes."


 

The second half of "Giant Steps,” both chords and melody, is definitely borrowed from Nicholas Slonimsky. This is widely known (see this previous post for an image).  It was a monumental achievement for Coltrane to combine the Shapero melody, Coltrane changes, and the Slonimsky example into a cohesive whole, not to mention working up the technique and applying the improvisational creativity necessary to perform it.

While checking other sources for this post, I ran across an assertion that the intro to "So What," written by Gil Evans, is borrowed from Debussy's "Voiles." I hear Debussy, but I don't particularly hear that piece in the "So What" intro. I also read in several places that "So What" derives in some way from Ahmad Jamal's recording of Gould's "Pavanne" - I'd have to be convinced. However, it's a fact that the horn riff in James Brown's "Cold Sweat" was derived from "So What" - as stated by Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis, who wrote the horn parts.

Update 3/28/21 - Regarding "So What," see the comments below. It seems pretty clear that Miles used the template of Ahmad Jamal's "New Rhumba" (not the Jamal "Pavanne" recording cited in Wikipedia), distilling it into the modal, ultra-cool piece that had so much to do with setting the mood of Miles' "Kind of Blue" album. 

"La Fiesta," "Someday My Prince Will Come," and "Olé"

A couple of days ago I was driving home from teaching, and turned on KCSM, our Bay Area jazz station. Miles' recording of "Someday My Prince Will Come" was playing, and I tuned in just in time for John Coltrane's solo. The first notes in the solo are pretty much exactly the beginning of the second theme in Chick Corea's "La Fiesta." I had never noticed that before.

Here's the Miles recording on Youtube. Coltrane's solo starts at about 5:50.

Here's a transcription of the solo, scrolling while the music plays. (Sorry I can't just post these videos here - apparently Sony has blocked any access except viewing them directly on Youtube.)

Here's Chick Corea's tune. The second theme (the part in question) starts at 1:45:

Both tunes are in 3/4 time, and the chord progressions are the same for four measures. The Miles recording was done in 1961; "La Fiesta" was recorded in 1972. It seems pretty clear that Corea got some initial inspiration from the Miles/Coltrane recording. 

As you might expect, I was not the first person to notice this. Here's a discussion from 2003; check out the first comment from Mike Fitzgerald (fourth comment from the top), with some very good information on this question. The comments also point out the similarity of the first theme of La Fiesta to the Coltrane tune "Olé" (recorded in 1961 also). Coltrane's "Olé" definitely uses the same chord progression as the first theme in "La Fiesta," but as Fitzgerald points out (quoting Lewis Porter's Coltrane bio), the progression was not original with Coltrane. 

The song "El Vito" is a likely source, both for "Olé" and for the first theme of "La Fiesta":