Listening 13- Over the Rainbow/ Art Tatum

As a Kansas boy, born and raised, I hold this song close to my heart.  And only because some movie told me to...funny ain't it.  Word on the street is they gave this to Art with minimal prep time to jazz it up, so this is pretty raw Tatum.  Let's listen...

This is Art Tatum recorded in 1939.  We'll analyze this one.  It starts out with some reflective ding dongs.  Then it goes into the song we know and love with Art's flair and runs riddled throughout the piece.  The piece doesn't have too discernible of a meter.  He speeds up here, slows down there.  Really what ever he's feeling. Its 16 bar blues. The format is AABA then he solos. His solos are like his playing of the AABA, going slow then fast. Its hard to tell what is his solo and what is the next AABA because he alludes to the piece in his solo and he solos throughout the AABA.  Then he ends it with AABA but on the last A, he races through it and finishes it real fast.  Like he was on a time limit and he was running long or something.  Like I said this is an early version. If you want to hear a later version from the 50s, watch the one below.

This believe it or not, is even more all over the place.  If you hadn't told me this was over the rainbow, I would not have guess it.  But that's jazz for you.  This has been Dan, and I am outta here....

Auto-tune Till We Die

Now for the thing sweeping the nation.  It started decades ago, on very small scale things, like one note being out of tune.  Now it is in every song produced and some songs solely rely on it as their musical talent.  We've gone from singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong to robots.  It can be quite that culture shock, I'm sure anyone from the 30's would be appalled at what we listen to but that's just a personal opinion.  But nonetheless, it is pervasive and it is sound altering, so lets look into it.

Auto-tune is a computer program that can alter the pitch of the vocal or instrumental electrical recording.  It will take what ever note it is given and take it to the nearest true semi-tone.  For experience listeners, you can hear that an auto-tuned song  sounds as if the singer or instrument is jumping from note to note rather than transitioning as is natural.  This technology was originally meant to help with drilling for oil, but was discovered to have different abilities than just that.  The first major commercial use of it was in Cher's Believe.  Where she sounds cyberspacy. T-Pain is probably most famous for his use of Auto-Tune as that is all he does.  I don't think I have heard an un-Auto-tuned song by him for half a decade.  The song on the right is called Best Love Song and it is T-Pain featuring Chris Brown.  I picked this because Chris Brown doesn't use (or only slightly uses) auto-tune where as T-Pain's voice is always auto-tuned.  Listen to the runs that they do with their voices.  You can tell T-Pain because his voice jumps from note to note with no continuity.  It is just another example of musicians doing what it takes to stay ahead of the game, I guess.

Listening 12- Walkin and Swingin /Andy Kirk & His Twelve Clouds Of Joy

I have always loved swing music, so this song title caught my eye.  Walkin and Swinging by Andy Kirk.

The song is written by Mary Lou Williams, an accomplished female jazz pianist.  She has written and arranged for a lot of great band leaders.  She wrote this for Andy Kirk while she played piano.

Its in 16 bar blues. The format is AABA.  Then it goes to a trumpet and saxophone who are in perfect sync, so good it sounds like a new instrument, a trumpophone.  Then it goes into Mary Lou's solo.  Then it  is the sax's turn to solo. Mary Lou then goes into a short bit and then does a call/echo with the rest of the band.  Then it goes back into the AABA with some more flair on the top of it.  Overall, it is AABATsPSPAABA.  Its got the 16 bar blues as book ends with some fun stuff in between.  A girl walked by my room and said this music made her wanna swing dance.  Is that just pure coincidence that the song is called walkin and swingin and that is what she did?  The world may never know.

Dub Step Wobble

I decided to do my last two sound alterations on more modern alterations.  Even if a trumpet plays purely into a microphone, the microphone is connected to a sound board and that sound board can mess around with the sound before sending it through to the speakers.  We'll be looking at some things sound boards can do to your sounds.

If you have ever seen a music recording studio, whether in real life or on tv, you'll have seen something that looks like the picture to the right.  This is a sound board.  As you can see, it has a bunch of different buttons and switches and sliders that are used to take multiple inputs (like different mics for different instruments) and make it into one wave, one sound.  So not only does it combine the waves together, but you can also alter each wave individually or as a unit.  You can put a filter on it so only higher frequencies pass through, or only lower frequencies.  It can pick an choose certain notes to add or take away.  It can amplify one quiet harmon muted trumpet while scaling down the loud proud trombonist.  Some say this kind of power takes away from the musicians.  It should be up to the musicians on how loud they play and what they want to do with the notes.  I'm sure if this kind of tech was around during Monk's time, they would have filtered out those dissonant notes thinking they were mistakes.  This leads to the question, can jazz persist if soundboards take over?  Will jazz once again transform into something new, utilizing the sound board and it's capabilities?  I have faith in the pervasive jazz musicians out there.  Jazz is as american as bald eagles, and I'd be crazy to think that new technology would ever stop jazz.

A newer type of alteration is called Wobble.  It is a low frequency oscillator, so it takes bass notes and makes them loud then soft then loud then soft, over and over, pretty quickly.  Considering notes are just oscillating waves them selves, the idea is to oscillate an oscillating waveform.  What you end up with is known as wobble.  At 1: 50 on the following clip is a good example of what a wobbled note is.

Oh Sweet Harmon-y / Listening 11- All Blues by Miles Davis

My best friend plays trumpet.  When we were in Jazz Band together in High School, I loved playing my cup mute, as I have said, but his pride and joy was his Harmon Mute.  The Harmon mute, unlike straight or cup mutes, has a circular cork around the stem.  When the stem is inserted into the bell, it completely cuts of air flow so air can only go through the mute.  It resembles a kind of bucket mute.  The sound comes out the fat end.  There is a cup on a tube, that circular thing in the fat part, that can pull out letting more air flow, or you can take it out completely.  Harmon mutes effect is best described as a high pitched buzz.  I've only seen them for trumpets, but apparently trombones and most other brass instruments can use them too.

Harmon mutes kill a lot of the sound though.  Because it restricts air flow so much and doesn't allow air outside of it, the harmon mute can dampen the softest of sounds by 8dB and can bring down the loudest (fff at 30dB) down 21dB to 9dB.   Thats a loss of 2/3rds of the sound.  So playing as loud as possible with a harmon mute is like play piano or metso piano without a mute.  This is why harmon muted players, like Miles Davis, play into microphones, because otherwise, a crowded room wouldn't be able to hear him.  One of Miles Davis' better known pieces, All Blues, has him playing with a harmon mute.  Lets watch.

As you can see, Miles liked to play a harmon without the cup-tube on it at all.  This would get him the loudest sound.  It starts out with just the bass, drums, and piano playing.  Miles comes in with the harmon mute on and immediately starts playing the blues.  Its quiet though. If you look at his cheeks, you can tell he is pushing as much air as possible through the horn, yet it pales in comparison to an un-muted trumpets normal playing.  After the first part, he takes off the mute and lets it fly.  The back bass is fairly simple up and down, the drums is doing what I used to call "shooting the breeze".  Meaning he had his standard snare, high hat, and bass drum hits that he would do, but he would add flair here and there if he thought it sounded good. The piano is keeping the blues chords for Miles to play off of.  After Miles is done, it is the tenor's turn to tear it up with a solo.  Then after his solo is Herbie Hancock's turn.  He wails on ivory keys, playing a very melodic jam.  at around the 6:30 marker, he starts in on a lick that I think someone later took and put into a Sonic the Hedgehog game as the background. Then Miles comes back in with the Harmon and plays the first part again.  They end on a fermata and fade out.  The overall format is IntorAABSSSAAOutro.

I couldn't tell how many bar blues it was (maybe it was a combination of All Blues), because Miles never seemed to come in on down beats.  But I could tell it was in 3/4 time.  At first I thought that miles on the harmon and the first part without the harmon were unscripted cause they sounded so genuine and soulful, but then he played it again after Herbie's solo, and it blew me away.  Not only did his solo have feeling, but he gave the whole song his soul.  That's special.

Listening 10 - Linus and Lucy / Vince Guaraldi Trio

If you've been around longer than a decade, you know about Charlie Brown.  A classic comic strip started up in the 50s that ran until 2000.  It got made into many TV specials, like A Charlie Brown Christmas.  In A Charlie Brown Christmas, they are putting on a play.  While they are rehearsing for this play, the kids dance to a song.  This song is called Linus and Lucy by Vince Guaraldi.

I grew up watching this movie, and my dad had bought the sheet music for piano for the movie.  Problem is, he couldn't read music.  But he'd try his best and play this song by ear.  He was very good.  Once I was older and I knew both bass and treble clefts, I helped him get the rest of the songs down so now he can play the whole show.  Suffice to say, sitting at the piano watching my dad feel what note was right was a neat experience for me.

This song starts out with a piano's left hand playing the base chords for the song for the intro for 4 bars.  The drummer in the back is hitting ever other beat while using a cabassa shaker. There is then 2 repeated 10 bar phrases and then the shaker cuts out and and the piano does the iconic Charlie Brown hit chords for 6 bars. The first 20 bars are repeated.  Then there is a scripted piano solo.  Then back into the first 20 bars again.  Then an unscripted piano solo.Then the first 20 bars again.  From there it is kinda just a repeat of the intro 4 bars with some piano comping.  The overall format is IAACAASAAUAAIII.  It is a lot of AAs with other things in between.  Just like in the show, this is the kind of song one could dance to, nothing too fancy, just something you could jazz out by yourself to.

I like this song a lot, I hope you do too.

Bottle of Crown and a Bag to Boot

Recently, I went to a Jazz concert in the K-State Union.  One of the groups had a trumpeter.  This trumpeter used a mute I had only heard of but never seen myself.  It was the bag that Crown Royal comes in.  He had placed it over his bell kinda like a bucket mute.  Problem is, the bucket mute is a rigid space that sound can reverberate in.  This Crown Bag was essentially just draped over the bell.  I wondered why did he do that, and why a Crown Royal bag?

Turns out it is called a Velvet Mute.  That makes sense because the Crown Royal bags are velvety. Velvet mutes decrease the sound by about 13 dB, but also give it the darker tone.  The soft velvet material absorbs a lot of the energy in the sound, and also attenuating some higher frequencies, kind of of like sound proof walls.  I found a really cool PDF that compares all the different kinds of mutes I've covered so far.  http://iwk.mdw.ac.at/Forschung/pdf_dateien/1995e-MB-CAC-mutes.pdf

Its very comparative between different types of mutes.  Disclaimer: it is in English but some of the graphs are in German.  Things to note: ohne in German means without, so no mute.  ppp represents the softest you can play, and fff represents the loudest you can play.  

This brings me to my last question, why the Crown bag?  Why not another velvety fabric.  I asked a trumpet buddy of mine who had one why he went with the Crown bag.  His answer? " It looks classy and it looks like I have just enjoyed a bottle."  Good enough for me