In this post I’m going to discuss some types of cadences and turnarounds. Cadences are a topic that comes up for my first year foundation Understanding Music Theory students (as well as for many others), and this will acts as a resource to demonstrate the four types of cadence they need to know.
This article was originally published in 2014 and has been updated for 2022.
This is a brief guide to the altered scale – how you can figure it out and some basic harmonies derived from it.
An incredible track from Erykah’s 1997 Baduizm album. Otherside of the Game was written by Badu, Questlove, James Poyser and Richard Nichols. Wikipedia describes it as “effectively showcases Badu’s debt to jazz as well as soul”, which I can’t disagree with.
Ondine is the first movement from Ravel’s fabled 1908 composition Gaspard de la nuit. The piece is regarded by many as one of the most demanding piano works.
Taken from their 1974 Light of Worlds album, Summer Madness is perhaps one of Kool and the Gang’s coolest tracks in a slew of well known dancefloor fillers.
I love the blog 20 Jazz Funk Greats, and during 2016 they posted a series of short articles titled Dancing music in the C20, expertly detailing the lineage of dance music during the 20th Century through some of the more and less obvious music genres.
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.
The Jan Hammer Group’s track Don’t You Know is a groovy synth-jazz funk number taken from their 1977 album Melodies. It has seeped into the collective conscious through Erol Alkan’s inclusion of it on Another Bugged Out Mix and through being sampled numerous times.
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.
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.