PRACTICE PORTAL

What is it about women that inspire men to write such incredible music? never mind… i’ve been listening to “Kathelin Gray” by Ornette Coleman over and over again. what a beautiful melody. what i enjoy so much about Coleman’s music is its conversational quality. his phrases expand and contract- they breath as Coleman breathes. he’s accompanied here by Pat Metheny on guitar, Charlie Haden on bass and Denardo Coleman playing drums. I wrote a sketch below. the biggest difficulty in transcribing it is notating it rhythmically. i thought about not including a time signature at all- i’ve seen this song written out in 3/4. since the whole band plays freely (Metheny dovetails the melody, Denardo Coleman lends splashes of sound mostly as color and texture, but also to provide a little propulsion, and Haden outlines the harmonic underpinnings to Coleman’s line) a transcription could turn out many different ways rhythmically, but i think the most important aspect to highlight is how the phrases fit together. this to me is the element that makes playing Ornette Coleman’s music so appealing. there’s such a beautiful logic in how each phrase blurs into the next in quirky and subtle ways. this song in particular invites a performer to inject his own personality into it, to breathe life into it… the effect of this way is playing is to make the song sound as if it’s being composed on the fly. there’s obviously a lot of preparation involved but there’s still wide latitude in the direction the lead, and consequently the rest of the group, can take…

I heard Charles Lloyd play “Hommage” in Los Angeles with Cedar Walton, David Williams and the one and only Billy Higgins many, many years ago. Aside from being one of most stylish cats i’ve seen on a bandstand, Lloyd blew some fifteen or twenty inspired choruses over this tune. “Hommage” has a blues quality to it, somewhat along the lines of “Mr. PC”. toward the end of the head the rhythm section plays and ostinato figure, emphasizing beats two and four while the lead riffs over it. it serves as a reservoir to build energy for push into the next section. the ostinato is on the five chord, but instead of going back to the one, it moves to the two chord, which cranks up the energy another notch. Lloyd was incredible but the catalyst was Higgins, who found unique, funky ways set up successive choruses. he rarely did it with volume, the most obvious way. rather he used subtlety, understatement and an incredible psychic energy that could be felt throughout the club to push the proceedings to ever higher levels… he possesed the same quality that i felt with Sonny Rollins when i heard him here in Tokyo a few years back. he’d lost a lot of the power in his sound but the bigness of his aura and the power of his beat, even in the huge concert hall where he performed, was reeeeeediculous…

ORNETTE COLEMAN- KATHELIN GRAY (mp3)

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CHARLES LLOYD- HOMMAGE (mp3)

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Every jazz musician has a favorite Horace Silver song. for some, it’s a bop head like “No Smoking”, “Room 608″ or “Nutville”. others like his more overtly Caribbean flavored songs like “Que Pasa”, “Cape Verdean Blues” and “Nica’s Dream”. then you have the mid tempo foot tappers like “Strollin’” and “Sister Sadie”. i, for one, have always dug his ballads. “Peace” is a favorite of mine. there’s also “Shirl”, a ballad he featured on Six Pieces Of Silver. Silver is great at conjuring a mood- so much of his music is programmatic. and i’ve always been a sucker for songs dedicated to women. this song evokes an image but a very elusive one. the music has an ambiguous and unfinished quality about it. i’m only guessing, but “Shirl” must have been a very complicated and intriguing woman. the first four measures sound like the opening strains of some forgotten impressionist era piano prelude. the first two 13b9 chords ring out and are then answered by two more of the same transposed up a fourth. following that is a group of 7#9 chords that starts on F and moves down to E, Db, Bb and A before resolving to Ab Maj and then on to a D7#9 chord. a brief progression follows that sounds almost cadential in nature but before a listener has a chance to get to too settled, the progression again gathers a head of tension by utilizing a ii-V progression from G min, moving upward by fourths, to F min with an Ab in the melody, which creates a tension that wants to (eventually) resolve to a G (in an Eb Maj chord) but instead, by way of an Eb7#9 chord, the melody moves to an F#, triggering a progression similar in nature to the previous sequence of 7#9 chords (F, Eb, Bb, A). it feels as if the listener is being sucked into a pit of quicksand. there are shifts in the time signature and pulse that evoke a mood of hesitancy- “slow your roll. don’t say too much, you might get yourself in trouble!” the bridge moves smoothly into a cycle of ii-Vs descending chromatically. finally, there’s a short suspended chord with a moving line in the bass voice, then a restating of the original melody. Horace Silver’s piano solo is buoyant and energetic. juxtaposed against the dark, brooding progression he sounds as if he’s trying to keep the faith, to stay optimistic during a troubled time. like he’s tryng to draw something else out of the progression, throw light on the progression from a different angle. but then the improvisation abruptly moves back to the melody, almost stumbling over itself. trying to read into an artist’s intentions is not something i want to do too much of on this blog, but it’s an amusing way to take up a little space… let’s just say this, it’s a really great piece of music that i can listen to many times over. i’ll call what i did below a “sketch” because i wasn’t able to pick out all the notes in the harmonies that Silver plays. but i did write out the shell of the piece and filled in chord tones as i could hear them. the way i wrote the tune formally- where i put the time signature change- is my best guess at what “Shirl” might look like on paper. oh yeah- when you get a chance, check out Horace Silver’s autobiography, Let’s Get To The Nitty Gritty. a friend of mine lent me the book a while back. it’s a quick read with some nice stories about Silver and the musicians that surrounded him…

HORACE SILVER- “SHIRL” (mp3)

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