Coltrane and the "Delta" Symbol for Major Seven Chords, part 1

A friend sent me a copy of Yusef Lateef's Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns a few months ago (thanks, Bill!). I've been having some fun with it, playing through some cool patterns, just splashing around on the surface of this obviously very deep book. I'll get around to reviewing it at some point (it's been around since 1981, but it's new to me). But this post takes off from just one brief sentence in the book:

"DELTA (△) SYMBOL. Introduced into music notation to symbolize a major seventh chord by the late John Coltrane."

Really? John Coltrane invented the delta symbol for major seven chords? Well, Yusef was as fallible as any of us, but then again, he was a friend of Coltrane's. Yusef was one of the greats, and had been around jazz for a long time (b. 1920), so maybe he knew what he was talking about.

Then I remembered that I had a copy of the catalog for the 2005 Guernsey's Jazz Auction, with thumbnails of a number of Coltrane manuscripts that were up for bidding. Below is a chart for "Lady Bird," possibly in Coltrane's hand, showing the delta symbol (I commented on this chart in a previous post, in connection with the turnaround). This chart was not advertised as being in Coltrane's hand, and was grouped in the catalog with some Tadd Dameron charts that had been owned by Coltrane. However, the manuscript style looks similar to other charts that are definitely in Coltrane's hand (see below), and looks not at all like the other Dameron charts. Click to enlarge.

This chart for "Naima," also from the auction catalog, is definitely Coltrane's. The catalog leads us to believe it is in his hand, and it came to the auction from the family of Juanita Coltrane (John's first wife; Naima was her middle name). Coltrane recorded "Naima" in May 1959. If you have ever wondered about the correct changes to this song, this chart should help.

But then, this chart for "I'm a Dreamer! Aren't We All?" uses "maj 7" rather than the delta symbol. Coltrane recorded "I'm a Dreamer" in 1958. The coda to "Dreamer" seems to be an arranged addition, and matches the end of Coltrane's 1958 recording. (Interestingly, the melody in the "Dreamer" chart is transposed to tenor key, while the changes appear in concert pitch. Why?)

Some observations about these charts:

1) The treble clefs in "Naima" and "Dreamer" are the same. "Lady Bird" clefs are a little different. See my "Lady Bird" post.
2) In "Naima" and "Dreamer," Coltrane mostly doesn't bother with bar lines at the left- and right-hand sides of the page. In "Lady Bird," bar lines appear at the beginning and end of each line.
3) Coltrane recorded "Half Nelson" (changes based on "Lady Bird") in 1956, "Dreamer" in 1958, "Naima" in 1959.

I thought for a moment that the chronology of the charts might help us figure out when Coltrane started using the delta symbol (1959?), but it's not that easy.

1) The "Dreamer" chart seems to be from around 1958, judging from the coda "arrangement" and the date of the recording, but might be earlier.
2) The "Naima" chart might date from 1959, the date of the recording, but could be earlier. Coltrane and Juanita were married in 1955.
3) The "Lady Bird" chart could be from any time at all. I'd assume that Coltrane knew the tune well enough to not need a chart. "Lady Bird" goes back to at least 1947.

The discrepancies in the treble clefs, bar lines, and in "△" vs. "maj7" can be explained by plain old personal inconsistency. Speaking for myself, I'm sometimes inconsistent when handwriting chord symbols - for example, m7 vs.  -7, m7b5 vs. ø, and △ or △7 vs. maj7.

So while it's an interesting exercise to try to figure out when Coltrane started using the "delta" symbol, I don't think these charts really give us an answer, except to say that he was using it in 1959 for sure, and maybe earlier.

If any readers know of any pre-1958 examples of the use of the delta symbol, by Coltrane or anyone else, please send in a comment!

For your listening pleasure, here is the Coltrane recording of "I'm a Dreamer! Aren't We All?" using the ending from the chart above. Coltrane just burns.

And here's "I'm a Dreamer" in its original setting:

Update 10/8/15 - I looked at some more charts in the auction catalog - Click here for Part 2 of this post.

Jobim's "Estrada do sol" and Copland's "Laurie's Song"

"Estrada do sol" is a beautiful Jobim tune, written in 1958. It's been recorded by a long list of artists; here's a nice, definitive solo piano version from Jobim's album "Terra Brasilis" (1980).

The other night, picking up after dinner, we had "Classic Arts Showcase" playing on the TV, and a video came up with Aaron Copland's "Laurie's Song," from his opera The Tender Land (premiered 1954). There's a phrase with a similarity to "Estrada do sol" that's hard to miss, right at the beginning, in the instrumental introduction.

I think it's quite possible that Jobim consciously borrowed that melodic phrase from Copland; there are a number other instances of his borrowing musical ideas (from both classical and American popular sources) and using them in his own way.

Besides the melodic phrase, the pieces have a bit of harmonic similarity. In "Laurie's Song," the harmony seems (to me) to start with repeated Bm to C chords, creating a temporary B phrygian feel, eventually resolving to G major. "Estrada do sol" begins with a Dm7 G7 vamp, giving a temporary D dorian feel, resolving after 8 bars to C major.

This device - beginning in minor (in "Estrada do sol," D dorian), dwelling on it long enough to establish the minor key as tonic, then resolving it to the "relative major" (here, C) - shows up in some well-known tunes that predate both the Jobim and the Copland. Bronislaw Kaper's "Invitation" (1950) does this, as does Ary Barroso's "Na baixa do sapateiro" (1938).

Here's a Toquinho version of "Na baixa" that starts with the vamp in question:

You can find the music to "Estrada do sol" on jobim.org (click here), along with a wealth of other Jobim resources.

The Flat Five As a Blue Note

It seems pretty clear that in early blues (say, pre-1920), musicians did not much employ the b5 as a blue note. By the mid-1920s, we have recordings with b5 licks used as part of the blues/jazz vocabulary. At some later point, the concept of a "blues scale" was conceived. I've been trying to get some historical perspective on all this (see my previous post, Early Blues, Blue Notes, and Blues Scales).

In his autobiography, referring to pre-1914 Southern folk music, W. C. Handy wrote:

[Black Southern folk musicians were] sure to bear down on the third and seventh tones of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton fields of the Delta or on the levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same...

Handy speaks of the flat third and seventh, but does not mention the flat fifth.

Looking at the earliest blues (by Handy and others) that appeared as sheet music pre-1915, I don't see any "blue note" use of the b5 (see the books on early published blues by Peter Muir and Vic Hobson, reviewed here earlier).

Listening to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1924), I don't hear any blues use of the b5. Gershwin was not a blues musician, but as a bright young music industry insider, he would have been quite aware of blues usage in his time, at least the commercial and big-city type (Gershwin was born in 1898; the "blues craze" in popular music began c.1914). If the b5 had been part of what constituted "blues" for him in 1924, he surely would have exploited it in "Rhapsody in Blue."

To me, "blue note" usage of the flat five consists of either scooping the note in the same way and to the same extent that the third was traditionally scooped and bent, or incorporating the b5 into this sort of lick. This is from the opening of the melody in Tadd Dameron's The Squirrel (1947):

This kind of usage doesn't seem to have been there, in the earliest days of blues.

So when did musicians begin to use the b5 as a blue note? The earliest recorded example I could find was this 1925 Bessie Smith recording of "St. Louis Blues," featuring Louis Armstrong:

In the minor-key section, Bessie bends the fifth, and also embellishes the melody with a lick that's very close to the b5 4 b3 1 shape shown above. (Incidentally, check Louis in the second 12-bar strain of the tune, suggesting a IVm chord in bar 6 - pretty harmonically aware for 1925!)

There are a quite a few similar b5 licks in Louis' 1928 recording of "St. James Infirmary":

The b5 licks here are used liberally - in Louis' vocals and cornet solo, and in the clarinet and piano parts as well (Earl Hines was the pianist). The trombone contributes a b5-5 scoop.

You can hear similar b5 licks in later jazz standards like Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing" (1931) and "In a Sentimental Mood" (1935), and in Matt Dennis' "Angel Eyes" (1946).

Interestingly, the b5 licks in these Bessie Smith, Armstrong, Ellington, and Matt Dennis examples all occur in a minor-key context. This might seem to suggest that b5 blues usage started in the mid-1920s, in minor-key tunes.

On the other hand, the mid-20s time frame only reflects minor-key examples that I could find recordings for. "St. James Infirmary," for example, is a very old tune (see this Wikipedia entry). Perhaps Louis was just playing it the way New Orleans players had played it decades earlier, before recordings.

By the 1940s, b5 licks were commonplace in major-key blues as well. (Note: blues usage of the b5 by the bebop players was a different phenomenon than their use of the b5 for harmonic color.)

Some years ago, I researched blues scales for a college course. Surveying books and articles, I found no less than ten different "blues scales." The earliest proposal of a "blues scale" that I could find was by Winthrop Sargeant, in his 1938 book "Jazz - Hot and Hybrid." Here's Sargeant's diagram, as reproduced in Gunther Schuller's "Early Jazz":

The arrows indicate prevalent melodic motion. Sargeant stated that this diagram related more to early or traditional blues (from a 1938 perspective).

If this scale is based on C as tonic, it is our present-day "major blues scale" with an added b7, and does not include the b5.

I'm not sure when our present-day "minor blues scale" (1 b3 4 b5 5 b7 1) came into the picture. If a blues scale involving the b5 had become commonly known by the 1940s, could it have influenced b5 usage? It's an interesting thought, but I have a feeling that it didn't happen that way.

I emailed this question to a few jazz musicians who who had learned their stuff in the late 1930s or early 1940s: When you were learning to play, were you aware of any concept of a "blues scale?" I heard back from two of them. One well-known NY pianist had this to say:

When I was learning to play, in the 30's and 40's, there was no "jazz education" to formalize matters, but there were soloists such as Lionel Hampton, Pete Brown, Lester Young,  Harry Edison, Buck Clayton, Charlie Christian, and the boogie-woogie pianists (Ammons, Lewis, James P. Johnson) who employed the blues scale in their solos and their pieces, and we followed what they did without labeling it systematically as "the blues scale."

Maurice "Dr. Bugs" Bower's answer was, "Never heard of it."

"Bewitched," "Este seu olhar," and "So em teus bracos"

"Este seu olhar" is our latest addition to the list of classic Jobim tunes that use a harmonic template similar to an American "golden age" standard - in this case, Rodgers and Hart's "Bewitched."

A recent recording by Carlos Lyra, Roberto Menescal, Marcus Valle, and Joao Donato runs these tunes simultaneously, along with "So em teus bracos," another Jobim tune with similar changes (but not quite as exact a match). No one has posted this track or this album on Youtube yet, but here's a link to the album on iTunes; play the short sample of "Bewitched" and you'll get the idea.

Thanks to Carlos Ribas for the tip!

Teaching Music in Silicon Valley, a Saga

My music teaching business, Hope Street Music Studios, will be moving to a new location in Mountain View, in the next couple of weeks. Here’s a brief history of our studio, with some perspective on what it takes to be a self-employed music teacher in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Ten years ago, in 2005, I was teaching in the back of a music store in downtown Mountain View. The store, Mountain View Music Center, had been around for many decades. The store’s founder was an old friend; I used to buy reeds from him when I was a kid. But the store had changed hands - Tony had sold the store to his son, and a few years later, Tony’s son sold it to an ex-tech guy who had made some money on Netscape, and had always wanted to run a music store. 

Unfortunately, this was a period of shakeout in the music store business. Customers were using the store to try out instruments, but then making their purchases on the internet. It began to look as though the store might not survive this shakeout. I had been talking with one of my fellow teachers about finding a place to rent, so that we could be in control of our own venue, and in 2005, Frank Conrad and I leased a 1200-square-foot space in downtown Mountain View, about a block from the store. It had 6 small offices (it was former medical space), a luxurious teaching situation compared to the tiny, stuffy teaching rooms we had at the store. (A year and a half later, the store did in fact close.)

A couple of teachers at the store came with us, and over time we signed up other teachers, who sublease space from us on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis. We now have 17 teachers at Hope Street, covering most instruments (piano, guitar, bass, drums, voice, sax, clarinet, flute, violin, viola, cello, french horn, trombone, and trumpet). As a business, the studio partnership is break-even. Frank and I make little or no profit on the studio (we make our living on our teaching), but our business plan has worked out well - we are surrounded by fine teachers, and we have a pleasant place to work that is under our own control.

In 2005, we were still in a bit of a tech recession. Commercial vacancy rates were around 20% in Mountain View. The space we leased had been vacant for over a year, and as result we had been able to obtain a 5-year lease with a 5-year option to renew, at a very reasonable rate.

As we came to the end of our 10-year lease, we began to worry. Mountain View has changed radically. Tech businesses and their employees are putting huge pressure on the real estate market, both commercial and residential. Where commercial vacancy rates were 20% in 2005, it’s more like 2.5% now.

To say that this area is in an economic “boom” does not begin to describe it. Google is the business that dominates the city, with tens of thousands of employees and thousands more coming, but Intuit, LinkedIn, Symantec and many others are also located here. Apple is building a new HQ a few miles away, in Cupertino. New-construction 1-BR apartments are renting for up to $4,000/month; downtown office space rents for $4-$5/sf/month. It’s crazy. We were offered a new lease at our present location, but the rent would have more than doubled.

So about a year and a half ago, we started a search for a new location. We checked commercial real estate listings nearly every day. There wasn’t much available, and it seemed that every time we found a possibility, there was a problem with zoning, parking, affordability, location, or lack of a long-term lease. Then about a year ago, on a day when I was feeling too burned out to check, my wife saw a new listing. It seemed like it might work: zoning OK (but we would have to apply to the City for a Conditional Use Permit), parking OK, affordability OK, location good, and a 5-year lease with 5-year option to renew. The only drawback was that it was basically warehouse space, and would require an expensive buildout to be used as teaching studios.

We started paying rent on the space last October, while we worked on the Conditional Use Permit, then the architect’s plans for the remodel, then the building permit. There were expenses and hangups every step of the way. Only two parts of the process went smoothly: Our acoustical adviser (Malcolm Clark) has been terrific, and once we had the building permit, our contractor (Dan Riley) got the job done in record time, and kept our expenses from getting any more ridiculous than they already were.

I’m omitting a lot of details here. It’s been a long, involved process. But after all the hassle, I’m pretty sure that we didn’t have a choice, if we want to keep working as independent music teachers in Silicon Valley. The alternatives would have been: 1) start driving to students’ houses to teach, 2) teach in my living room, 3) become an employee of one of the for-profit or non-profit music teaching organizations in Mountain View, where management takes a cut of 50% or more of earnings or 4) try to find space in the back of a music store (not many stores are left, and their space is completely booked). These were not attractive options. In addition, Frank and I considered the other 15 teachers, and the fix some would be in if we closed the studio.

At the moment, we are feeling pretty good about it. If all goes well, we will be open for business at the new location in a couple of weeks. We won't be on Hope Street any more, but we're keeping the name, for the time being.

Tchaikovsky, Bing, and the Checkers

I guess inspiration can strike in unlikely ways. Here's Odette's Solo from "Swan Lake"(1876)...

And here's Bing (1943)...

As a side note, the composer of "I'll Be Home For Christmas," Walter Kent, is also remembered for "There'll Be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover" (1941), another wartime song of hope and home. Here's a cool version by The Checkers (1953). Stick around for the sax solo by Red Prysock...