Radiohead falls into the category of music I should know, but know little about. My wife has several of their charts on her iPod, but whenever I'm driving the car and her iPod is on, I tend to skip past them. Often for "Weird Al." And occasionally Billy Joel.
Bodysnatchers is much more "traditional" in terms of pop and rock'n'roll, only that what's happening in it is much more similar to the entire period than a specific sub-genre. There's electronic music happening within, but there's a solid punch to the ride to highlight the time. The lyrics are hard to understand to my pep band damaged hearing, but there's a good melodic guitar riff, even if overdriven from time to time. The synths get some solo lines.
Overall, this chart is a rather boring way to close out our listening because there's nothing really new happening. Yet, maybe this is a good way to end, because a lot of what's happening is a synthesis of what we've learned. There's the roots in jazz, the development into rock, and the late 20th century pop too. It might be a bit boring, but it's also rather comprehensive.
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Module 7
By this point in American popular music, we've come a great distance from where we started with the folk songs of late 19th century and the early jazz of the 20th. While everything that now exists owes its genesis to that which has come before, it's hard to continue to hear that genesis in the music making of the 1980s.
I've never liked Prince or his music. I honestly thought it ran the risk of ruining Tim Burton's 1989 take on Batman, yet I acknowledge a brilliance to what he does. I don't like electronic pop, nor do I like his take on it, but there is a musical and theoretical genius to how he creates. Our choir director is a local "pro" rocker, and he opened our variety show last year with his choir covering a Prince chart. He confided in me that when Prince first came on the scene, he hated his music, but like I did, he come to respect the brilliance of it. His kids wanted to sing 1999, and he took them up on their request. And in doing so, we all came to grow in our musicial understanding.
We’ve shifted in this module from the style-line of jazz-big band+blues-rock to something more unique and less grounded in the above line. Prince embodies 80s and 90s pop rock with a techno-flavor. Dubstep, Europop, Techno are all more rooted in the styles of When Doves Cry than When Doves Cry is in what has come before. Electronic instruments and synthesizers are used for more music making than ever before and in more unique ways than ever before too, and proto-synths are being used here. The shift to the focus being on the performer rather than on the chart or the listeners being active participants in the dance is in full shift. Soon, Whitney Houston will solidify this with her rendition of the National Anthem, something that will mark the fullness of The Time of ME! and will continue right through Renee Fleming’s rendition this past Super Bowl. When Doves Cry is boring. The bass line, a driving force of rhythmic cohesion in other styles is bland and has little influence. The drum set, rather than the bass (electric or acoustic) has taken the bass part’s role in time keeping and cohesion with boring, simple patterns and limited fills. To me, Prince isn’t innovative, he’s simplistic. Not my style.
I've never liked Prince or his music. I honestly thought it ran the risk of ruining Tim Burton's 1989 take on Batman, yet I acknowledge a brilliance to what he does. I don't like electronic pop, nor do I like his take on it, but there is a musical and theoretical genius to how he creates. Our choir director is a local "pro" rocker, and he opened our variety show last year with his choir covering a Prince chart. He confided in me that when Prince first came on the scene, he hated his music, but like I did, he come to respect the brilliance of it. His kids wanted to sing 1999, and he took them up on their request. And in doing so, we all came to grow in our musicial understanding.
We’ve shifted in this module from the style-line of jazz-big band+blues-rock to something more unique and less grounded in the above line. Prince embodies 80s and 90s pop rock with a techno-flavor. Dubstep, Europop, Techno are all more rooted in the styles of When Doves Cry than When Doves Cry is in what has come before. Electronic instruments and synthesizers are used for more music making than ever before and in more unique ways than ever before too, and proto-synths are being used here. The shift to the focus being on the performer rather than on the chart or the listeners being active participants in the dance is in full shift. Soon, Whitney Houston will solidify this with her rendition of the National Anthem, something that will mark the fullness of The Time of ME! and will continue right through Renee Fleming’s rendition this past Super Bowl. When Doves Cry is boring. The bass line, a driving force of rhythmic cohesion in other styles is bland and has little influence. The drum set, rather than the bass (electric or acoustic) has taken the bass part’s role in time keeping and cohesion with boring, simple patterns and limited fills. To me, Prince isn’t innovative, he’s simplistic. Not my style.
Nirvana and Smells Like Teen Spirit… I rather prefer the Weird Al satire myself, but this came first. It is so different from Prince, and as different from Prince is as Prince is from what has come before. Our two required listening examples this week are so diametrically opposed from one another. This is still Rock, with a pulsing bass line, and my observations about Prince are completely the opposite here, as the bass line is handled by the electric bass. There are extended guitar solos, and we’re back to the music being about the music. At least until they smash their guitars in some live performance of the chart. Pity that Nirvana wasn’t able to stay on the scene for too long.
Prince stands out in this week’s listening as one of the major pivot points in popular music history. Much of the remainder of the listening, including Aerosmith, Van Halen, and the like, are all similar to Nirvana than they are to Prince. The bass grooves, the set is interesting, and the groups are about the music. It might have a nice beat that you can thrash to, but the music is about the music.
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Module 6
In the initial run of his course, I spoke about it being a shame that I wasn't more of a Carlos Santana fan and that I didn't own any of his albums. I regret that I've not corrected that issue in the past six months. Perhaps iTunes and I need to have a little talk with my credit card this weekend. It's true that the music I'm familiar with, Oye Como Va especially, are tunes I really like. I know from college pep band that it's a great tune, and it was always one of my favs when we played it at Wisconsin, and certainly when I’m flipping through the vast array of options on my XM Radio while driving, a Santana chart all but guarantees that I’ll stop on that station and listen.
Santana's Wikipedia article credits him with fusing Rock and Latin American rhythms and using blues lines in his guitar playing. While Wikipedia is, perhaps, not the most academic resource, this statement about his music certainly shows in Oye Como Va. I can hear grooves and lines that have their basis in the blues, he has extended guitar solos that are very evocative of blues charts we listened to back in Module 4. I can hear the connections to big band (and jazz itself harkens back to African grooves) within the Afro-Latino styles, and the added Latin percussion completes the flavor. Having just completed World Musics at UF, it's easy to hear these additions and respect the authenticity of the charts. It’s also not surprising to me that versions of Oye Como Va appear in the books of many public school jazz bands, and it's probably time that I made sure we had it in our books with the East Tophatters too.
Santana's Wikipedia article credits him with fusing Rock and Latin American rhythms and using blues lines in his guitar playing. While Wikipedia is, perhaps, not the most academic resource, this statement about his music certainly shows in Oye Como Va. I can hear grooves and lines that have their basis in the blues, he has extended guitar solos that are very evocative of blues charts we listened to back in Module 4. I can hear the connections to big band (and jazz itself harkens back to African grooves) within the Afro-Latino styles, and the added Latin percussion completes the flavor. Having just completed World Musics at UF, it's easy to hear these additions and respect the authenticity of the charts. It’s also not surprising to me that versions of Oye Como Va appear in the books of many public school jazz bands, and it's probably time that I made sure we had it in our books with the East Tophatters too.
Wayne's World was easily one of my favorite Saturday Night Live sketches back when I was in junior high and high school, but it made it's leap to the big screen when I was a freshman. At the time, my knowledge of hip rock'n'roll was quite limited. I wasn’t one of the “cool kids," and all my folks listened to, which I've discussed at length in both runnings of this class, was their own vernacular music. This movie was my introduction a Queen other than just the annoyingly ubiquitous sports anthem We Will Rock You, as well as the music of Led Zeppelin. I loved the scene in the music store with the “No Stairway to Heaven” signs in the store as Wayne takes the Fender Stratocaster, “No Stairway. Denied.” Between Wayne’s World and the No Quarter collaboration, I really came to like a lot of Zeppelin’s charts, but I never saw the appeal of Stairway. I suspect it’s because I’m not a guitar player, so that “famous riff” at the start never resonates with me in a personal way. Listening to this chart now, with much more mature ears, the tune is brilliant. A chorale at the beginning? Then a prolonged rock section? As a concert band guy, this blows me away. It’s not the rhapsodic hodge-podge that is Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, it’s a Bach Little Prelude and Fugue, a Clifton Williams piece (Dedicatory Overture comes to mind), Carter’s Overture for Winds, McBeth’s Chant and Jubilo. It follows format that really works for me with the maturity I now possess in my musicianship.
Are Talking Heads the “gateway drug” to George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic or is it the other way around? I only know Talking Heads for Burning Down the House, which was influenced by Clinton and his group, and they date back to doo-wop. The question makes sense in terms of this listening, despite our Talking Heads chart for the week being prior to Burning Down the House, as Talking Heads claim to have gotten the idea from a Parliament-Funkadelic show. I think I need to familiarize myself with that group too. With the advancement in electronic technology, our Talking Heads chart has an early 80’s sound to it, despite its 1977 premiere, yet the structure is very much rock with roots all the way back to the blues.
The bulk of the remainder of this week’s listening are charts that I’m familiar with from either the Saturday night “Super Gold” that I've referred to many times or pep band tunes.
Sunday, November 2, 2014
Module 5
The listening for this module consists of Motown, the British Invasion, and what we've come to know collectively as "rock'n'roll." It's a module full of the original "boy bands" - the Beatles and the Beach Boys - as well as a host of other soloists and groups that give us the true switch over from the jazz idiom to what we now know as rock music.
Of our listening this week, I maintain that the Beatles are the most harmonically interesting. The charts on this week's listening are quite diverse, and not just within the idiom, but for the group too. Although their core sound is easily recognizable, the Beatles strive for a great deal of interesting musical ideas and styles. Of all the pop music from this period on, they are probably one of the more diverse artists, with the exception of Billy Joel. Like Billy Joel (Good Night My Angel), the Beatles utilize a great deal of classical harmonic structures, with suspensions and double suspensions throughout this week's listening. There is also a lot of joking about how modern popular music requires a great many collaborators to write, and yet music of this era is much more complex yet was written by fewer people. Certainly the poetry of the Beatles' lyrics is extremely interesting. I enjoyed reading about the story of Hey Jude coming to be earlier this fall as my band prepared for its fieldshow. Paul McCartney originally wrote it for Jules Lennon in the wake of the Lennon's divorce, and he wrote it during his drive to Cynthia Lennon's home.
Yesterday also has an interesting story behind it as it wasn't originally written and performed by the Beatles. Even though it appeared on a Beatles album, Yesterday was written and first performed by Paul McCartney. It was only after it became a hit that the Beatles made it part of the full group's book.
The Beach Boys and I go back to my youth as my parents were huge fans. Surprisingly, Good Vibrations has a much more “modern” sound than the bulk of the listening we have. The electric guitar parts use sounds that are unique for their time. Most electric guitar lines of the time sound just like basic rock guitars, where Good Vibrations utilizes something akin to distortion pedals. I am not conversant in guitar lingo beyond this, so I’m not quite able to articulate what I hear, but I’ve always thought that this chart was more of a late 1970s tune than the mid-60s. Perhaps it was my own exposure to the chart on the Saturday night “Super Gold” oldies program on the local radio station that my parents listened to (I’ve referenced this in my discussion posts), so I heard it out of context, but it always struck me as later than it actually was.
Of our listening this week, I maintain that the Beatles are the most harmonically interesting. The charts on this week's listening are quite diverse, and not just within the idiom, but for the group too. Although their core sound is easily recognizable, the Beatles strive for a great deal of interesting musical ideas and styles. Of all the pop music from this period on, they are probably one of the more diverse artists, with the exception of Billy Joel. Like Billy Joel (Good Night My Angel), the Beatles utilize a great deal of classical harmonic structures, with suspensions and double suspensions throughout this week's listening. There is also a lot of joking about how modern popular music requires a great many collaborators to write, and yet music of this era is much more complex yet was written by fewer people. Certainly the poetry of the Beatles' lyrics is extremely interesting. I enjoyed reading about the story of Hey Jude coming to be earlier this fall as my band prepared for its fieldshow. Paul McCartney originally wrote it for Jules Lennon in the wake of the Lennon's divorce, and he wrote it during his drive to Cynthia Lennon's home.
Yesterday also has an interesting story behind it as it wasn't originally written and performed by the Beatles. Even though it appeared on a Beatles album, Yesterday was written and first performed by Paul McCartney. It was only after it became a hit that the Beatles made it part of the full group's book.
The Beach Boys and I go back to my youth as my parents were huge fans. Surprisingly, Good Vibrations has a much more “modern” sound than the bulk of the listening we have. The electric guitar parts use sounds that are unique for their time. Most electric guitar lines of the time sound just like basic rock guitars, where Good Vibrations utilizes something akin to distortion pedals. I am not conversant in guitar lingo beyond this, so I’m not quite able to articulate what I hear, but I’ve always thought that this chart was more of a late 1970s tune than the mid-60s. Perhaps it was my own exposure to the chart on the Saturday night “Super Gold” oldies program on the local radio station that my parents listened to (I’ve referenced this in my discussion posts), so I heard it out of context, but it always struck me as later than it actually was.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Module 4
As I listen to the transitions of vernacular music from the 19th Century to the 21st, I am fascinated by how elements slip away, how they return, and how they can be restructured. Prior to Sinatra, we had the standard dance bands that had some strings and had no strings, some even not having any including a bass player. Yet when we listen to the Sinatra listening for this week, Ol' Blues not only incorporate the strings, he pulls a full compliment of them together, almost in the manner of a symphony orchestra. The incorporation of strings in jazz and popular music has always been a very fluid thing, mirroring very much the transitions of vernacular music over the past century. Legendary trumpet Maynard Ferguson was lauded for staying true to the roots of jazz but remaining progressive enough to stay relevant with the vernacular styles of the times. His years with Stan Kenton, which were contemporaneous with the Sinatra ballad from this week, were straight dance band years. Yet, one of his final albums, Storm, sounds very much like late 1980s rock 'n' roll. The listening for this week contains prime examples of this flux and incorporation of what came before...
Frank Sinatra’s ballad of Nancy is so different than the ballads we listened to in the last module. Sinatra’s voice and phrasing are so unique to him and a style of his own. The band backing him up isn’t a 40s dance band, as with Sinatra, there is a full compliment of strings that are big, warm, and part of the overall tonal weight. Sinatra weaves around with very little popular form to this ballad. The only hook is “Nancy with the laughing face,” and that occurs sparingly. There is not really a chorus section, the verses move from one to another.
Frank Sinatra’s ballad of Nancy is so different than the ballads we listened to in the last module. Sinatra’s voice and phrasing are so unique to him and a style of his own. The band backing him up isn’t a 40s dance band, as with Sinatra, there is a full compliment of strings that are big, warm, and part of the overall tonal weight. Sinatra weaves around with very little popular form to this ballad. The only hook is “Nancy with the laughing face,” and that occurs sparingly. There is not really a chorus section, the verses move from one to another.
In listening to Louis Jordan’s Choo-Choo Boogie right after, the contrast from the two charts is so stark. The style of Jordan’s chart is really a bridge between big bands (with large elements) and 50s rock’n’roll. There are big brass and sax hits, instrumental solos, and no big strings. I’d argue that this has much more in common with In the Mood than Nancy does, yet Nancy is jazz, and the Choo-Choo Boogie really borders on proto-Elvis rock’n’roll. I head more in common with this and Crazy Little Thing Called Love from my Song Share than I do with the Sinatra chart. Jordan’s chart is very structured and formal, with verses and chorus predictably interwoven.
As much as my parents loved Chuck Berry, I’m pretty sure that Maybelline uses the rhythmic underpinning of a quick-step march with rock’n’roll imposed on the top. This chart is just as different as the previous ones this week. When you throw some swing on the ride to help the “boom chucks” on the set, Charlie Brown is quite similar, with the other exception being the brief pauses for the “why is everyone always pickin’ on me?” hooks and the slight tempo changes in the verses. The chorus cooks along with a nice “boom chuck” pattern, similar to the Chuck Berry chart. A third chart this week, Long Tall Sally is quite similar to these charts in form and structure, although Little Richard does much more with harmonies in the piano. I am of the mind that his hook is “ooooo-oooo-uuuuh!” Although I am of the mind that it’s his personal hook, rather than just one for the song.
Elvis gives us something completely different, yet totally rooted in everything we’ve listened to this week. Gone is the big brass from Choo-Choo Boogie. The big, big strings from Sinatra are gone too. Elvis strips the big band sounds and the Sinatra additions down to an electric bass, a piano doubling the bass more than anything, yet with deemphasized comping, and then all the brass hits that we’re used to hearing in big band charts of similar structure covered by voices on bops, oos, and ahs. A mediocre arranger could take Don’t Be Cruel and arrange it out for full big band (such as Miller or Basie) or even Sinatra orchestra and have a very viable chart in those styles. Elvis uses a guitar as well, but mainly it stays out of the harmonic picture and just reinforces the rhythms. Drum set is largely out of the way with a simple swing pattern on, I believe, the hi-hat, rather than the ride cymbal, which, although it’s still a swing pattern, is a rock-style departure from the driving ride of jazz. There are other Elvis charts on the optional listening list for this week, and they all use this same minimalism of the big band instrumentation.
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Module 3
Of any styles of American Vernacular Music, the "Swing Era" has an almost pragmatic quality to it. It has stood the test of the time because of the quality of its music. Our school jazz bands are still playing Swing Era charts, and in competitive jazz festivals, Swing is a requirement. The Wisconsin School Music Association has changed its jazz band Solo and Ensemble requirements over the years, but a SWING CHART has always been required. The underlined required in-text analysis tunes for this week are frequently found on the WSMA jazz band list, with different arrangements in found in different difficulty classes, and they're there because these charts are such important pieces of Americana and are still alive today as ever.
Hal Leonard has published a basic jazz chart book with tunes like Ja-Da, Blue Skies, American Patrol, It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got That Swing), and In the Mood. Many of these charts have been published separately, and this particular version of It Don't Mean a Thing used to be on the WSMA Class B list in its separate publication. These are great opportunities for us to expose jazz bands at any level to these Swing Era gems.
One of the things that may have contributed to the longevity of Swing Era in the US is Johnny Carson's reign on The Tonight Show. As recently as 1992, people could tune in five nights a week and hear the Doc Severinsen-led swing band on television. Carson's Tonight Show Band was playing their versions of these charts for thirty years, and are still touring together playing their versions of these charts. I owned all three of the old Tonight Show Band albums on cassette and I recently purchased digital copies from iTunes so I could keep listening to them, as well as share the music with my daughter and with my students. The Tonight Show Band's tempos aren't always the same as the original recordings, and especially Doc Severinsen’s version of In the Mood, which is significantly faster than Miller’s. Sometimes the order of the phrases or complexity of the charts don't always match either, but Doc maintains the styles, as even in In the Mood, the stompy push on each beat (this is known to me as part of the dance band style). I am not seeing a recording of One O’Clock Jump with our text, but YouTube recordings abound. Doc’s version, which is full of just wild, showy playing, and dating to the mid-1980s, is still as authentic as everything we've been listening to this week.
The version of In the Mood on this week's listening is the Glen Miller original, and it's certainly a swing chart that remains on that needs to be in every stage band’s books, whether it's a complex version of it, an majorly uptempo and harmonically more modern version like the Doc Severinsen version I spoke of above, or the more simple one readily accessible in the Hal Leonard swing book.
The Glen Miller In the Mood gives us further development of the dance style from what we heard in this week's listening of The St. Louis Blues. In the version of St. Louis Blues for this week, we hear the great Bessie Smith singing the melody with Louie Armstrong on his cornet playing a counter-melody. W.C. Handy’s composition dates to 1914 with the recording in our listening dating to 1925. It's not an uptempo version that we've grown accustomed to hearing, but rather more of a ballad than the up-tempo foxtrots and quick dances of the time. This particular YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmFUXYaZIMk purports to be a recording of Handy playing his chart on piano with period jazz orchestra, and I easily hear the foxtrot style with touches of ragtime infused.
With Miller's In the Mood, gone is the one-step, but a foxtrot dance might work. In these swing charts, as I alluded to above, the power of the beat is a focus because these are dance charts. It's really important for people to have a clear understanding of where the beat sits so that, as social dancers, you know how and where to move. In the Swing Era, a further development of the cymbal swinging eighth-notes comes in to being, and you can hear it clearly on each of the recordings for this week.
With Smith and Armstrong we have a demonstration of an early ballad in the blues style, when we get to the Benny Goodman chart, we get a swing ballad that is something of a meld of the original Handy, the Henderson chart’s style and backgrounds, and the Smith and Armstrong recording. I hear a progression in style of the ballad as we move from the blues to swing, and it becomes clear to my ears that all three charts are intricately related. By the time that Paper Doll comes in during World War II, we’ve had almost twenty years of development from Smith and Armstrong’s balladification of The St. Louis Blues, and you can hear some very different harmonic and rhythmic lines in that development. You can hear this continued development in In the Mood and you can also hear it in the representative Severinsen recordings too. Lastly, even Paper Doll appears in the Hal Leonard book, making it accessible to today's young jazz students.
Hal Leonard has published a basic jazz chart book with tunes like Ja-Da, Blue Skies, American Patrol, It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got That Swing), and In the Mood. Many of these charts have been published separately, and this particular version of It Don't Mean a Thing used to be on the WSMA Class B list in its separate publication. These are great opportunities for us to expose jazz bands at any level to these Swing Era gems.
One of the things that may have contributed to the longevity of Swing Era in the US is Johnny Carson's reign on The Tonight Show. As recently as 1992, people could tune in five nights a week and hear the Doc Severinsen-led swing band on television. Carson's Tonight Show Band was playing their versions of these charts for thirty years, and are still touring together playing their versions of these charts. I owned all three of the old Tonight Show Band albums on cassette and I recently purchased digital copies from iTunes so I could keep listening to them, as well as share the music with my daughter and with my students. The Tonight Show Band's tempos aren't always the same as the original recordings, and especially Doc Severinsen’s version of In the Mood, which is significantly faster than Miller’s. Sometimes the order of the phrases or complexity of the charts don't always match either, but Doc maintains the styles, as even in In the Mood, the stompy push on each beat (this is known to me as part of the dance band style). I am not seeing a recording of One O’Clock Jump with our text, but YouTube recordings abound. Doc’s version, which is full of just wild, showy playing, and dating to the mid-1980s, is still as authentic as everything we've been listening to this week.
The version of In the Mood on this week's listening is the Glen Miller original, and it's certainly a swing chart that remains on that needs to be in every stage band’s books, whether it's a complex version of it, an majorly uptempo and harmonically more modern version like the Doc Severinsen version I spoke of above, or the more simple one readily accessible in the Hal Leonard swing book.
The Glen Miller In the Mood gives us further development of the dance style from what we heard in this week's listening of The St. Louis Blues. In the version of St. Louis Blues for this week, we hear the great Bessie Smith singing the melody with Louie Armstrong on his cornet playing a counter-melody. W.C. Handy’s composition dates to 1914 with the recording in our listening dating to 1925. It's not an uptempo version that we've grown accustomed to hearing, but rather more of a ballad than the up-tempo foxtrots and quick dances of the time. This particular YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmFUXYaZIMk purports to be a recording of Handy playing his chart on piano with period jazz orchestra, and I easily hear the foxtrot style with touches of ragtime infused.
With Miller's In the Mood, gone is the one-step, but a foxtrot dance might work. In these swing charts, as I alluded to above, the power of the beat is a focus because these are dance charts. It's really important for people to have a clear understanding of where the beat sits so that, as social dancers, you know how and where to move. In the Swing Era, a further development of the cymbal swinging eighth-notes comes in to being, and you can hear it clearly on each of the recordings for this week.
With Smith and Armstrong we have a demonstration of an early ballad in the blues style, when we get to the Benny Goodman chart, we get a swing ballad that is something of a meld of the original Handy, the Henderson chart’s style and backgrounds, and the Smith and Armstrong recording. I hear a progression in style of the ballad as we move from the blues to swing, and it becomes clear to my ears that all three charts are intricately related. By the time that Paper Doll comes in during World War II, we’ve had almost twenty years of development from Smith and Armstrong’s balladification of The St. Louis Blues, and you can hear some very different harmonic and rhythmic lines in that development. You can hear this continued development in In the Mood and you can also hear it in the representative Severinsen recordings too. Lastly, even Paper Doll appears in the Hal Leonard book, making it accessible to today's young jazz students.
Sunday, September 21, 2014
Module 2
In this module, we begin moving from folk songs and the work songs of slavery being the musical voice of the people to the start of America's first native musical art form, jazz.
I was reminded last night about the strong role that folk songs have always played in our vernacular musical culture, however. There is a group of young rock stars (wannabes), made up of students from the school I teach at. They had a "bar gig" last night at a local bowling alley. As three of the five members are currently students of mine (and a fourth is now an alum), at their invitation I came out to listen. Sitting at the bar with the drummer's dad (my booster club president), the drummer's mom (my colorguard instructor), whilst the barmaid (the bass player's girlfriend's mom) served our tasty beverages, I was enjoying their music making, er, rock'n'rolling. At one point, I leaned over to my booster president and shouted, "ARE THEY REALLY SINGING 'LOCH LOMOND?'" He smiled and shouted back, "YES!" and the barmaid smiled too and shouted, "KIND OF A DROPKICK MURPHY'S VIBE, HUNH?" Right isles, wrong island, but close enough. Yet the point is this, folk music has always been a part of our popular musical culture, and ancient folk songs still are even now in the 21st Century. The boys of Barely Civil showed me that last night.
And it was this initial fusion of folk music and work songs that melded into the jazz art form that would later give rise to rock'n'roll. The boys last night opened with a cover of a Beatles tune. In the time period of this week's module, the rhythm section is primarily only the piano and drums. Strings, and especially the upright bass, are still the property of classical music and the orchestra world, but it won't be much longer and the primary rhythmic force of the rhythm section will be appropriated. In fact, as this module wears into the next module, that transformation of the addition of the upright bass is already happening. The saxophone is not yet on the scene either. About the same time as this module, military bands like the ones Holst was writing for are using the "outdoor" clarinet more as a reinforcement of the alto lines in the music that what vernacular and big band composers would use it for. This, it is the clarinet and trumpet that we hear doing the counter melodies and solos in I Got Music. Grainger loved the Sax for what he considered its tuning capabilities and used it in his contemporaneous music almost to death, and in popular music today it is often relegated to be of a more schmaltzy “love” nature (as well as an even more erotic nature), but it would be the big bands that followed Gershwin that would use it to its best ability.
Going back to the lack of bass, I can hear this clearly in My Blue Heaven. It’s a jazz ballad (indeed readily available from stock arrangers for all level of public school big band), but the piano is the main accompaniment with little or no percussion or other rhythm section. When we get to the 30s and we have this instrument fully integrated, my ears become much happier.
The Tiger Rag is a chart that has been around in many incarnations, much like Barbara Allen from last week’s listening. I played the “Tuba” Tiger Rag version at University of Wisconsin. It’s a jazzy, proto-big band rag with everything we’d expect from music of this time, while the more modern arrangements almost seem to amplify the bass-line as if to make up for the lack of it during its original existence.
I was reminded last night about the strong role that folk songs have always played in our vernacular musical culture, however. There is a group of young rock stars (wannabes), made up of students from the school I teach at. They had a "bar gig" last night at a local bowling alley. As three of the five members are currently students of mine (and a fourth is now an alum), at their invitation I came out to listen. Sitting at the bar with the drummer's dad (my booster club president), the drummer's mom (my colorguard instructor), whilst the barmaid (the bass player's girlfriend's mom) served our tasty beverages, I was enjoying their music making, er, rock'n'rolling. At one point, I leaned over to my booster president and shouted, "ARE THEY REALLY SINGING 'LOCH LOMOND?'" He smiled and shouted back, "YES!" and the barmaid smiled too and shouted, "KIND OF A DROPKICK MURPHY'S VIBE, HUNH?" Right isles, wrong island, but close enough. Yet the point is this, folk music has always been a part of our popular musical culture, and ancient folk songs still are even now in the 21st Century. The boys of Barely Civil showed me that last night.
And it was this initial fusion of folk music and work songs that melded into the jazz art form that would later give rise to rock'n'roll. The boys last night opened with a cover of a Beatles tune. In the time period of this week's module, the rhythm section is primarily only the piano and drums. Strings, and especially the upright bass, are still the property of classical music and the orchestra world, but it won't be much longer and the primary rhythmic force of the rhythm section will be appropriated. In fact, as this module wears into the next module, that transformation of the addition of the upright bass is already happening. The saxophone is not yet on the scene either. About the same time as this module, military bands like the ones Holst was writing for are using the "outdoor" clarinet more as a reinforcement of the alto lines in the music that what vernacular and big band composers would use it for. This, it is the clarinet and trumpet that we hear doing the counter melodies and solos in I Got Music. Grainger loved the Sax for what he considered its tuning capabilities and used it in his contemporaneous music almost to death, and in popular music today it is often relegated to be of a more schmaltzy “love” nature (as well as an even more erotic nature), but it would be the big bands that followed Gershwin that would use it to its best ability.
Going back to the lack of bass, I can hear this clearly in My Blue Heaven. It’s a jazz ballad (indeed readily available from stock arrangers for all level of public school big band), but the piano is the main accompaniment with little or no percussion or other rhythm section. When we get to the 30s and we have this instrument fully integrated, my ears become much happier.
The Tiger Rag is a chart that has been around in many incarnations, much like Barbara Allen from last week’s listening. I played the “Tuba” Tiger Rag version at University of Wisconsin. It’s a jazzy, proto-big band rag with everything we’d expect from music of this time, while the more modern arrangements almost seem to amplify the bass-line as if to make up for the lack of it during its original existence.
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