by David Schiff
Halfway through my first year I decided to switch to the study of music, even though the department was far more traditional than the one at Columbia. The Cambridge music curriculum was amorphous by American standards. There were no required courses or activities, no classes in musicianship or solfège. You were expected to spend the year preparing, with the help of a faculty supervisor, for six three-hour exams, called the Tripos. In music these exams consisted entirely of a single kind of exercise. They gave you the beginnings of pieces ranging from the fourteenth century (Machaut) to the twentieth (Poulenc), and you were asked to complete them—at your examination desk. (The composer Nicolas Flagello later told me that when students at the more humane setting of Rome's Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia took a similar examination they would be locked in a studio with a piano and provided with as much spaghetti as needed to get through.) Previous exams were made available so I knew what to expect, but no one could explain how I might prepare myself for this daunting task. As good English empiricists the music dons at Cambridge viewed music theory as a suspiciously Germanic form of speculation. They seemed to believe that you could pass the exam on the basis of listening and intuition alone.
Before I could get too panicky, though, fate intervened in the form of the Vietnam War. In the spring of 1968 the draft laws changed; graduate study no longer deferred me from service. I soon learned, though, that New York City was setting up a crash program to train teachers, who were still qualified for deferral. I sailed home to learn, in eight weeks, how to teach at a junior high school.
My year at J.H.S. 118 in the south Bronx, which was also the year of a protracted New York teachers' strike, Woodstock, and the moon landing, was, needless to say, interesting, but once I drew a high number in the draft lottery my thoughts anxiously returned to the Tripos. My brother Andy recommended that I call his jazz piano teacher, Irwin Stahl, for advice. I brought Irwin a copy of an old exam. He asked if anyone at Cambridge had taught a way of analyzing the music in order to complete the incipits —but, of course, they had not. In that case Irwin suggested that I study harmony and counterpoint with him. In just a few months he taught me everything I have ever needed to know about both subjects. His understanding of harmony was stunningly lucid. “There are just three chords,” he told me. “Everything else is a just a substitution.” Irwin, who wrote the liner notes for the great Art Tatum Solo Masterpieces collection, showed me how to think about harmony from a jazz perspective, even though we were not studying jazz.
I later learned that his approach to harmony was nearly identical to that of Schoenberg's textbooks. Irwin had me compose progressions, not pastiche imitations of Bach chorales or Mozart minuets, just different combinations of those three chords: the subdominant, the dominant, and the tonic, or, in jazz terms, ii, V, and I. Once I understood the relationship between these chords I could expand their potential. Changing the note in the bass by “inverting” a chord allowed the music to flow more smoothly. Replacing a chord with its relative minor or major made the harmony sound richer. Preceding any chord with its dominant increased the sense of urgency. Adding a fourth pitch to triads, making them into seventh chords, turned a Bach-like progression into jazz. Preceding the dominant with the subdominant (ii) made any chord progression sound like bebop. Using only four-pitch chords that did not contain the fifth turned cocktail piano into Bill Evans. The only problem with harmony, I discovered, was the way it was usually taught. But what could I do with this knowledge other than hope that it would get me through the Tripos? Though I never pictured myself as a real jazz pianist I got a fake book. I learned to play “Satin Doll” in different jazz styles, at different tempos, and with different voicings. Schoenberg once said that there was still a lot of music to be written in C major. I used to think that was a joke but now I took it as prophecy.
“SATIN DOLL” OR JAZZ PIANO 101
[Parental warning: from here on things get a little technical.]
Jazz harmony is largely the domain of pianists, and its concepts today still derive from the 1930s keyboard styles of Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum. Viewed broadly, it differs from classical tonality only in requiring that all chords contain at least four different pitches. In other words, it is based on seventh chords rather than triads. Like classical harmony, jazz harmony recognizes three different chord functions: tonic, dominant, and subdominant. In classical theory these would all be the major triads (in a major key) I, V, and IV, or, in the key of C, C major, G major, and F major. The dominant creates harmonic tension that needs to be resolved by the tonic. It is therefore usually played as a four-pitch dominant seventh chord, or V7. By contrast the subdominant sounds more relaxed than the tonic, and it also has a certain antique and sacred quality associated with what musicians call a “plagal cadence,” usually heard in church when the congregation sings “Amen.”
In jazz harmony the three functions appear as three different kinds of seventh chords, a major seventh for the tonic, a dominant seventh for the dominant, and a minor seventh for the subdominant. The sub-dominant function in jazz is heard with the chord on the second degree of the scale, 117, rather than the closely related IV in classical practice. Jazz pianists, however, rarely use these chords in their simple forms. They usually add the sixth and ninth to the tonic chord, the eleventh to the subdominant, and a variety of altered tones—flat ninths, augmented ninths, sharp elevenths, and thirteenths—to the dominant. You never hear a plain vanilla V7 chord in jazz (though it sounds fine in boogie-woogie or rock).
“Satin Doll,” Ellington's closing theme song from its appearance in 1953, can serve as a jazz harmony paradigm; in its deceptive simplicity, “Satin Doll” is, as the saying goes, as good as good bread. If you look at a lead sheet for “Satin Doll” (credited to Ellington and Strayhorn, with lyrics added later by Johnny Mercer), you will see that every chord name written above the melody except one has a “7” attached to it. The exception is the tonic chord C, but no jazz pianist would play this as a simple triad. The chords alternate between minor seventh chords and dominant sevenths, a series of ii-V progressions. (To evoke the sound of a ii-V progression just hum the opening bars of “Tea for Two.”) The harmonies begin close to the tonic key with d minor 7 and G7, which would usually resolve on C. The tune postpones that resolution with a series of moves that seem to take the harmony increasingly far from the tonic home base. Before resolving, the harmony moves to three dominant chords that don't occur within the seven pitches of the C major scale, A7, D7, and D7, each preceded by a subdominant. To a classical theorist several things might look odd. Most of the dominant sevenths don't resolve to a tonic, and the final cadence reaches C major by way of a D7 rather than the expected G7.
Jazz theory unlocks the mystery of this progression through the concept of substitution. The paired ii-V chords are taking the place of their implied resolution, so that we might say that the d minor 7 to G7 progression is filling in for the tonic C major chord. Likewise, e minor 7-A7 implies the subdominant (d minor 7), and a minor 7-D7 implies the dominant G7. In the fifth bar of the tune there is a subtle substitute for the a minor 7, a “borrowed” chord (either c minor 7 or a half-diminished 7) from the g minor scale, a device for harmonic darkening common in Brahms. The last two chords, the exotic-sounding A minor 7 and D7, are what jazz theory terms “tritone substitutes,” taking the place of chords an augmented fourth away, d minor 7 and G7. The idea of the tritone substitution comes from a common jazz practice of flatting the fifth in a dominant seventh chord, for instance, playing G, B, D, and F as a G7. These four pitches, however, are the very same ones you would play for a D7 chord with a flat fifth: D, F, G, and B. Two chords that seem far apart turn out to be interchangeable. Once we understand how chords substitute for others we can see that the harmonic outline of “Satin Doll” is really a Bach-like I-ii-V-I.
You wouldn't need to know any of this if jazz performance were simply a question of playing the sheet music as written. Jazz theory books label playing the tune in a way
that even resembles the sheet music as “cocktail piano,” a tentative first step toward actual jazz performance. The way a jazz pianist interprets the song, however, depends on whether it is a solo performance or, as is more usual, the pianist is accompanied by bass and drums. In either case the pianist is expected to recast the music while preserving its basic structure, introducing further substitutions and different arrangements of the notes in the chord, or what jazz musicians refer to as “voicing.” Chord voicings receive considerable attention in jazz piano textbooks because they will give an interpretation a personal sound, and also because of the relation of the piano to the bass. In order to keep out of the bassist's way, the pianist's left hand usually stays around middle C and avoids playing the root note of the harmony. When a jazz chart asks for a G7 chord the pianist's left hand therefore may play the pitches F, A, B, and E, but not the G. This takes both physical and mental practice.
“GOODBYE PORK PIE HAT”: HARMONY IN BLUE
While jazz musicians absorbed the “universal” harmony of European tonality they also inflected and enriched that idiom by applying it to the blues. Based on scales and tunings not found in European music, the blues, sung with guitar accompaniment in its rural folk style, presented a particular challenge for the pianist who could not bend pitches, an essential aspect of blues performance. Pianists had to find ways to square the blues style with the well-tempered tuning of the piano and also with the habitual harmonic patterns and voice leading of classical keyboard harmony. The blue note, especially the blue third, was part of a tonal idiom that the piano could not reproduce but could only simulate by using harmonies from the major or minor modes.
The clash of blues melody and piano harmony proved to be highly productive. Boogie-woogie piano styles emulated the blues guitar by using chords that were as much rhythm as harmony. This direction led to rhythm and blues and rock. The jazz piano tradition that came out of ragtime, Jelly Roll Morton and the Harlem stride pianists, James P. Johnson, Willy “The Lion” Smith, and Luckey Roberts was more engaged with what were known as “modernistic harmonies”: ninth chords, parallel motion, chromaticism. Stride piano, the stylistic foundation for both Ellington and Basie, reached its most sophisticated form in the virtuosic extravaganzas of Art Tatum. In the late 1920s Earl Hines perfected an alternative, more melodic approach, often called a trumpet style, to jazz piano playing; in the 1930s Teddy Wilson extended Hines's style. Billy Strayhorn synthesized his distinctive harmonic style from Tatum and Wilson. Since the 1940s jazz piano has developed dialectically between styles that extended harmonic modernism (Lennie Tristano, John Lewis, Bill Evans) and those that pulled back to the blues (Horace Silver, Wynton Kelly); both tendencies, however, are usually present in jazz harmony.
The persistent interplay between modernism and blues suggests that they were perhaps more related than opposed. There is much evidence to suggest that certain practices of European modern harmony, including added notes, polymodality, and polytonality, began as responses to jazz (or its predecessor, ragtime) rather than the other way around. This may be less a question of precedence than of parallel development. Like Bartók and Stravinsky, rag and jazz pianists were inventing an urbane harmonic style out of pretonal rural melodic material. The relation of rural and urban styles in both jazz and classical music is less a matter of replication than representation. Works like Stravinsky's Pribaoutki (1918) and Bartók's Improvisations on Hungarian Peasant Songs (1920) translated the nonclassical aspects of peasant music into jarring dissonances: double-inflection chords combining major and minor thirds, bitonality, and tone clusters. All these devices appeared as well when Stravinsky first imitated jazz in his Ragtime (1918) and Piano Rag (1919), harmonically gritty scores miles away from Joplin. Dissonance served as an emblem of the “primitive”; discords ironically represented the triads and seventh chords of Stravinsky's models. Jazz composers, by contrast, represented urban experience, the new African American milieu created by the Great Migration out of the South, with sophisticated-sounding harmonies that signaled modernity. Ellington built early works like “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” and “The Mooche” out of this contrast. In both European music and jazz the modern appeared as an atavism of the primitive. “The Mooche” was simultaneously modernistic music and jungle music. The European modernists were trying to bypass bourgeois values. Ellington was subverting the South.
The harmonic changes of the blues served to indicate its AAB poetic phrase structure by marking the caesura within a line and the end of a line:
I hate to see de evening sun go down
Harmonic change also aided rereading of the first line when it was repeated:
Hate to see de evening sun go down
and the completion of the thought:
Cause my baby he done lef dis town.
In the 1914 sheet music W. C. Handy harmonized this phrase (in G major) using only chords built on I, IV, and V:
G7 C7 G7 /
C6 C7 G /
D7 / G /
This harmonization simulated the blues third in several different ways. Handy used a grace note A# to color the B in the G major or seventh chords. The blue third appears as a B in the C7 chord, but also in the D7 chord where it sounds like an augmented fifth. If you listen to Bessie Smith you will hear that she also treated the added A in the C6 chord as a blue note. In a sense the pitches that Handy notated as B, A#, and B were stand-ins for a blue third that the piano cannot play. The frequent harmonic reinterpretation of those pitches gave them something of a blue quality.
Ellington employed an even simpler harmony in the opening of “Black and Tan Fantasy” (credited to Ellington and Bubber Miley). The first strain of the piece is a minor blues, and until its third four-bar phrase it only uses triadic harmony (in B minor): b minor (i) and e minor (iv). A seventh chord only appears with the V7, which is decorated with the one moment of fancy harmony, a G7 neighbor chord. The sparseness of the harmony reflects the melody, which is not a blues and does not contain blue notes but is a church hymn, “The Holy City.”1 The piece combines two “down-home” sounds by superimposing a sacred melody on a secular phrase pattern. In the next phrase, however, it jumps to a different world, entering B major by way of a G ninth chord. The richer harmony hinted at in passing now blossoms. This contrasting phrase presents a series of modernistic markers: a minor seventh chord, a dominant seventh with augmented fifth, a cross rhythm of against the , and an eight-chord circle of fifths progression packed into two bars with the right hand moving in parallel tritones. The piece reconfigures its stylistic opposition in its two most famous phrases: Bubber Miley's plunger-muted blues chorus, primitivism made modern through interjections of augmented-fifth seventh chords, and the closing quotation of Chopin's Funeral March. The music juggles “dicty” and down-home, North and South.
A challenge for many jazz musicians in the 1920s was to reinterpret the blues through modernism rather than in opposition to it. A strikingly modernized blues appears in “Sloppy Joe,” a rarely discussed but fascinating Ellington work from 1929 (co-credited to Barney Bigard). This piece sounds like a response (either as homage or parody) to the famous recording of “West End Blues” with Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines that had appeared the year before. It follows a similar format of solos, including a chorus of scat singing by Sonny Greer. But the highlight is Ellington's piano solo; it illustrates what Hines had to teach him. Ellington alternated bars in stride piano style with modernistic measures using five-note harmonies in parallel motion with the right hand voiced in fourths. These modern-sounding chords slide into the blues harmony from a third above or below. In the second phrase, Ellington used the logic of the harmonic sequence to repeat a bar on the expected IV chord down a step to a ninth chord on the flat third, outside the key but bluer than blue. In two final Hines-isms he implied a double-time feel for a trumpet-style piano arabesque and, for his final cadence, jumped (rather than slid) between two modern-voiced chords with the right hand stackin
g fourths and the left hand in an open seventh. Ellington could have played this solo twenty years later without it sounding in any way dated.
The blues progression found in “The St. Louis Blues” has survived for almost a century. It could be elaborated with ever more complicated chords, as in Art Tatum's versions of “Aunt Hagar's Blues”2 or it could be fitted out with many substitute chords, as in Charlie Parker's “Blues for Alice,” where the harmony changes twice per bar; or it could be further simplified, as in Miles Davis's “All Blues.” As an example of a later blues, at once rooted in tradition and exploratory, let's examine “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” Charles Mingus's elegy for Lester Young first recorded in 1959.
When you first look at the lead sheet, the chord structure looks bewildering.3 Traveling far from the three-chord blues, Mingus used nine different chords. The names of the chords and the notation of the melody also seem bizarre. The first chord is an E7 with an augmented ninth, the second a B dominant thirteenth, which would not appear to be in the key of E. Actually, though, it is a chord also heard in “Black and Tan Fantasy,” the lowered VI chord, borrowed from E minor, but when “Goodbye” continues with chords of E and A we start to run out of enharmonic fixes, and we have to begin invoking the idea of the tritone substitution. Mingus further confused things through the phrase structure, which sounds like 4 + 3 + 5 rather than the expected three phrases of four bars. All this fancy harmony, though, served a purpose very similar to the harmonic changes in “St. Louis Blues.” They constantly reinflect the blue third, the pitch G which appears in every bar. I'll tabulate the ways the pitch appears in each chord: