As a young impressionable teenager, it was first hearing Mingus’ tribute to Thelonious Monk – Jump Monk – that first turned me on to jazz. I’d been exposed to odds and sods during secondary school but this was a milestone in terms of me becoming obsessed with the sound.
A breakthrough for me as a musician, and particularly as a composer, was when I stopped imagining harmony in rigid frameworks. The first instrument I excelled at to some degree was the guitar (being a fairly average pianist), and that had a great impact on the way I thought about chords.
One of the eureka moments I had studying music was when I began to understand the harmonic series and how in turn this relates to pitch, intervals, harmony, tuning, waveforms, frequency and latterly timbre.
When I was younger and first getting into learning about harmony I was always fascinated in particular by certain jazz pianists and their ability to string long complex chord sequences together, drifting in and out of original key with ease.
New York in the 1940s saw an explosion of musical creativity: small ensembles playing heavily reharmonized tunes, often at a flurried pace, and relying very heavily on improvisation – this is the music we know now to be bebop.
Quartal harmony is a system of building chord structures on perfect fourths. It’s been used by classical composers such as Stravinsky, Debussy and Bartók and innumerable jazz musicians like McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans and Chick Corea to name but a few.
Who Is Jill Scott? (Words and Sounds Vol. 1) is the platinum album from Neo Soul singer, songwriter, poet, model and actress, Jill Scott, released on Hidden Beach Recordings in 2000.
How to write convincing progressions is a question that often comes up with my students. With a basic grasp of music composition it’s possible to string together coherent chords that sit nicely within a key and support the main melody or motifs.
I want to quickly have a look at this chord I stumbled across in Charles Mingus’s 1955 piece, Jump Monk, which can be found on the album, Mingus at the Bohemia.
I want to look at two songs. One is the 1959 ballad Naima taken from John Coltrane’s game changer Giant Steps, and the other is Erykah Badu’s Other Side of the Game, produced by Richard Nichols and The Roots, taken from her 1997 album, Baduizm.