Jazz, blues, gospel and pop

Jazz, the blues, gospel and the popular music that grew from them fill several submenus of File > Demos > Songs: Jazz, Blues, Soul, funk and R&B, Pop, Rock and more. This chapter follows the harmony from ragtime to the big bands, and then looks at the songs everyone knows.

Ragtime

Ragtime is the piano music jazz grew out of, around 1900. The left hand keeps a steady oom-pah, bass then chord, while the right hand pushes against it, landing between the beats and holding on across them: that is syncopation (see Rhythm and meter). Rags come in strains, like marches, often A A B B A C C D D, with the third strain, the trio, in the key of IV.

• The Entertainer and Maple Leaf Rag, by Scott Joplin. In the Maple Leaf Rag, listen for the F♭ chord, ♭VI, that darkens the third bar.
• Golliwogg’s Cakewalk, by Claude Debussy (1908): a cakewalk with a blue note, a C♭ that keeps falling onto B♭. In the middle it quotes the opening of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, marked “with great emotion”, and the cakewalk’s chords answer it each time.

To play your own chords this way, pick Ragtime in the Library’s Jazz group: the pianist’s left hand alone, a bass note on each beat and the chord after it. Ragtime band adds drums, a banjo and a tuba, and Stride piano is the faster Harlem piano that grew out of ragtime.

New Orleans and the twenties

• When the Saints Go Marching In: the brass band classic, the tuba on two beats to the bar.
• Tiger Rag (1917): four strains, and the key drops a fifth twice, B♭, E♭, A♭, each new key reached through a dominant seventh on the old tonic. The second strain stops dead for two-bar breaks, left for a soloist.
• Charleston (1923): a chain of dominants, D7, G7, C7, F7 (III7, VI7, II7, V7), each the V of the next, under a rhythm that gave its name to a comping pattern: a note on beat one and another just before beat three, held over.

The standards and the big bands

Most standards are built on one move, ii, V, I: Dm7, G7, Cmaj7 in C (see What chords do). Two-Five Walk, written for Ferrous Lineup, spells it out in sixteen bars. Then hear how the songwriters played with it:

• Take the “A” Train, by Billy Strayhorn (1939): the second chord is D7, the dominant of the dominant, where C major’s own ii would be D minor, under a long G♯ in the tune, its raised eleventh. It settles to Dm7 and G7, a ii-V back to C. For the bridge, Gm7 and C7, a ii-V in F, lead to F major 7.
• Tea for Two, by Vincent Youmans (1924): one little figure, long-short, turned over a ii-V twice; then the same game a major third higher.
• I Got Rhythm, by George Gershwin (1930): its chords became rhythm changes, the progression jazz musicians wrote most new tunes on, after the blues. The A section turns I-vi-ii-V twice; the bridge is a chain of dominants falling by fifths.
• In the Mood (1939): a riff, a B♭ arpeggio, over a twelve-bar blues.
• Sing, Sing, Sing (1936): a minor-key riff tune on i and V7, E minor and B7.

The big-band demos have a horn section behind the saxophone’s tune, a brass section punching the chords in the Charleston rhythm (see A bigger band and the horns). For your own chords, the Library’s Big band style brings the whole band: a walking bass, the guitar four to the bar, and the horns riffing together over a jazz blues. Big band ballad holds the chords on the saxophones.

The blues

The twelve-bar blues is three lines of four bars: the first on I, the second starting on IV and the third on V, each of those two coming home to I. A singer sings a line, the same line again over the IV chord, and an answer. The blue notes, such as the flat third and the flat seventh, clash with the major chords under them, and the clash is the sound of the blues.

• Midnight Shuffle, written for Ferrous Lineup: the twelve-bar blues as a shuffle, the A blues scale over major chords.
• Trouble in Mind (1924): an eight-bar blues in 12/8; the tune falls onto B♭, the blue third, over G7.
• St. Louis Blues, by W. C. Handy (1914): a blues in strains, like a rag, with a tango introduction and a strain in the habanera rhythm.
• Hit the Road Jack (1960): four chords walking down, C minor, B♭, A♭, G7, under a rhythm-and-blues shuffle.

Spirituals and gospel

The African-American spirituals of the 19th century are under Soul, funk and R&B, dressed in styles from gospel to funk. Many use the major pentatonic scale, five notes with no semitones: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is all G A B D E, and so is the hymn Amazing Grace. Wade in the Water sits on its minor home chord and rocks to iv; the leading tone comes only at the cadences.

Two short demos written for Ferrous Lineup show the harmony of soul and funk: Sunday Seventh, seventh chords with two secondary dominants, E7 to A minor and C7 to F; and Dorian Strut, two chords in E Dorian, whose IV chord, A7, is major.

Songs everyone knows

The Pop, Rock, Electronic, Hip hop and lo-fi, Reggae and ska and Country and folk submenus hold folk songs, carols, nursery rhymes and famous classical tunes, often dressed in a modern style. They are short and well known, so they are good for hearing one idea at a time:

The jazz demos in odd meters, Take Five and the Mission: Impossible theme, are in Odd meters and the Balkans.