How Miles Davis Put Melody Back into Jazz-7
How Miles Davis Put Melody back into Jazz
Think Modal
David Such, Ph.D.
Think Modal
David Such, Ph.D.
Objectives:
1. Demonstrate an understanding of some of the main reasons why Davis’ Kind of Blue achieved popularity.
2. Demonstrate an understanding of how bebop musicians handled harmony and why that approach led to melodic improvisations that sounded abstract.
3. Demonstrate an understanding of how Davis’ modal approach marked a dramatic shift from bebop and allowed the improviser greater latitude in developing coherent, lyrical melodies.
Introduction
If someone came to me and said, “I want to buy my first jazz CD; what should I buy?” I would say, “Get Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. It is the most listenable of nearly all jazz recordings, most of which tend to sound a bit too abstract for most. Yet, despite its simplicity, Kind of Blue maintains all the integrity of jazz, including elements of the blues, excellent, imaginative playing and that hard to define quality—soulfulness.
Modern jazz today is far from being popular music. A modern day jazz musician who releases a CD can only modestly expect to sell between ten and twenty thousand copies. Compare that with Michael Jackson’s recording and video, Thriller, which in the first year sold around 80 million copies. At best, early styles of jazz came closer to being pop music in the sense that they had large numbers of sales. For instance, the sheet music for ragtime jazz (ca. 1900) sold in the millions. Later in the 1930s and early 1940s, swing band jazz became a countrywide craze. The swing band era rejuvenated the recording industry, provided entertainment for millions of dancers, and some of the band leaders, such as Benny Goodman, became pop idols.
After WWII, the popularity of jazz declined dramatically. In fact, the music went underground and rarely appeared in mainstream culture. However, there stands out one brilliant exception—Miles Davis’ recording, Kind of Blue released in 1959. It is the only jazz recording ever to sell more than four million copies (quadruple platinum). It continues to this day to sell an average of 5,000 copies a week.
This lecture’s objective is to familiarize you with the recording and some of the reasons why it became so popular. You will need to draw upon some of the knowledge you have learned thus far in the class about some of the elements of music. In other words, the knowledge you have gained thus far in class will help you to understand why this recording works musically. Hence, you will have an informed insider’s view and hopefully gain an appreciation for why this recording is special.
Background
The reason swing band jazz succeeded in the 1930s and early 1940s was because the music entertained throngs of dancers. The melodies of the songs were well developed, lyrical, and memorable. The music was simply about entertainment, nothing more.
That changed after WWII. The war had decimated the ranks of big bands. Band members left their bands to join the military. Gas and rubber rationing made it impossible for remaining bands to tour to other cities by bus. Hence, the war decimated big bands so by the middle of the 1940s only a handful of big bands were still playing.
After the war, jazz musicians performed in small bands ranging in size from three musicians to seven or so. Most of these bands played a new style of jazz called bebop that had been in development by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as early as 1939. The music was fast, intellectual, complicated, abstract, and at times dissonant. Jazz had gone from entertainment to an artistic approach; whereby musicians were less concerned about the listener as they were about developing the music into an art form. The music remained mostly instrumental and discouraged dancing.
Go to and view the clip of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie performing "Hot House" in the bebop style. Note how the melody lacks a lyrical quality. In other words, the notes are not arranged in such a way as to convey one discernible musical idea that connects in a predictable way with the next. The melody seems abstract, disjointed and certainly not something the average listener could memorize and sing back. This doesn't mean that the improvisations they perform on this clip are without merit. They are intended to be abstract, and they are performed with great ability.
Link
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Breaking down Bebop
Bebop never regained a popular audience because of the music’s complexity. Let’s explore for a minute what makes it so complex. To do that, you will need to recall some terms and concepts we covered earlier in the course.
In bebop the use of large numbers of complex chords played at fast tempos pretty much defined bebop, its complexity, and the reason why it appealed only to a relatively small audience. Here’s how it breaks down.
In bebop the use of large numbers of complex chords played at fast tempos pretty much defined bebop, its complexity, and the reason why it appealed only to a relatively small audience. Here’s how it breaks down.
Remember when we analyzed Billie Holiday’s rendition of the blues song, “Fine and Mellow.” Go back and take a look at the structure of the tune in your Handbook for the course or open the file I included in the folder for this lesson. You will recall that the tune had only three chords played throughout the piece. These were the I, IV, and V chords of the scale or key that the tune was played in.
If the tune was played in the C major scale, the notes of the scale as you recall would be C D E F G A B.
For instance, as we showed in class, the I chord in the C major scale would contain the notes C E G. In “Fine and Mellow,” recall that the I chord plays over the first four measures of the song.
Here is how bebop musicians took this idea and made it more complex:
1) They made chords more complex by adding additional notes to the basic 3-note blues chord. Hence, they might add B D F to the top of the chord, so that the chord was now played as C E G B D F—a much more complex design.
2) They added additional chords such as the II, VII and VI chords to the framework, which increases the complexity of the tune’s harmony.
3) Instead of playing a chord every two or four measures, they might write a song with two chord changes every measure or bar. Hence, in a 12-bar form, a bebop tune could have as many as twenty-four chord changes.
4) Bebop musicians dramatically increased the tempos of the tunes.
How did the above four things challenge the improviser? Remember, modern jazz could easily be defined as the art of the improviser. The improviser has to ensure that what he plays must be consonant with the chords. Thus, the improviser in bebop is constantly challenged to keep up with the chords by improvising lines that are coherent with a large number of fast changing chords. Only the most highly skilled players could do this well.
In Steps Miles
Miles decided that the complexity of bebop had gotten out of control. One of the things he noticed was that an improviser had little time to develop the lyrical qualities of an improvisation when the chords changed so rapidly. In other words, the lyrical qualities of a melody develop when the melody spans only one chord for a number of measures. The problem with bebop, according to Miles’ vision, was that too many chord changes never allowed an improviser to develop an interesting, coherent, lyrical melody. That is one of the reasons why many mainstream listeners rejected bebop—it sounded too abstract without lyrical type improvisations.
Imagine that the rules of grammar restricted you to write only two-word sentences. It would be difficult to get across a coherent idea in such a short framework or sentence. It’s the same for a bebop improviser. A bebop musician may only have two beats of a measure to complete a musical sentence. Then when the chord changes two beats later, he has to start a new idea. As a result, bebop musicians do not concern themselves with developing lyrically coherent melodic lines. Instead, the lines they play sound disjointed melodically, though harmonically they work. Since the average listener is conditioned to focus on melody and expects to hear coherent, lyrical melodies, bebop sounds too complex for the average ear.
Some musicians, such as Davis, wanted to focus on the lyrical qualities of the melody. His recording of Kind of Blue achieved this, mostly because he revised the harmonic approach to allow for the development of coherent and lyrical melodic lines.
Davis’ Simple Solution
Basically, Davis went back to the simple formulas of the blues, with which you are already familiar. In a typical blues, the first four measures are given only a single chord, the I chord. That allows enough time to develop a short, but coherent melody line as you can hear in “Fine and Mellow” when Holiday sings the first line, “My man don’t love me, treats me awful mean.”
For his tune “So What” in the album Kind of Blue, Davis uses only two chord changes over a 32-bar form. How simple is that? In other words, he uses a D minor chord over the first 16 measures, an Eb minor over the next 8 bars, and back to the D minor over the last 8 bars. The harmonic landscape suddenly becomes stable and allows Davis to play and develop very coherent and lyrical melodic lines. Hence, he brings the melody back to the foreground of jazz, which helped the recording to achieve the popularity it did. In other words, the average listener responds better to interesting, well developed melodies than a complex tapestry of rapidly shifting chords.
The approach that Davis uses on Kind of Blue is called a modal approach. I do not want to burden you with more technical details. However, just know that a mode is similar to a scale or key, which is a grouping of pitches. Hence, the idea of playing modally means that Davis can develop coherent improvised melodies due to the fact that he stays in one mode or key for long durations. Bebop did not allow this, since the improviser constantly had to alter his melodies to rapidly changing chords. That’s the difference between bebop and Davis’ modal approach.
The approach that Davis uses on Kind of Blue is called a modal approach. I do not want to burden you with more technical details. However, just know that a mode is similar to a scale or key, which is a grouping of pitches. Hence, the idea of playing modally means that Davis can develop coherent improvised melodies due to the fact that he stays in one mode or key for long durations. Bebop did not allow this, since the improviser constantly had to alter his melodies to rapidly changing chords. That’s the difference between bebop and Davis’ modal approach.