Positioning Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks for Jazz

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bophead
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Re: Positioning Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks for Jazz

Post by bophead »

John Ruggero wrote: 21 Feb 2022, 13:41 Maybe someone out there knows about international fake books.
Regarding European fake books: There are the French ones that as far as I know were compiled by French jazz musician Philippe Baudoin (who also wrote the two volumes of “Jazz – Mode d’Emploi”). They consist of two parts (two books? I have only PDFs):

One has lead sheets with melody and chords, the other a French specialty, “grilles harmoniques”, harmonic grids that are written in a certain way and can be found in many books about gypsy jazz as well. The Baudoin fake books are far more accurate regarding chord changes than e.g. the original Berklee Real Books compiled from transcriptions done by probably Steve Swallow and others.

The Dm7b5 in the end of All Of Me is also in the original sheet music but nowadays mostly played as plain Dm7 (and the Ab in the melody is swapped for an A)
baudoin_melody.png
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By the way I see a tendency to left-alignment of chord symbols here ;-)

Quelques grilles harmoniques – on the side of the grid are recommended recordings:
grille_harmonique.png
grille_harmonique.png (258.18 KiB) Viewed 3168 times
My guess is that the accuracy of this fake book has to do with the fact that many Afro-American jazz musicians lived in Paris after WWII fleeing US racism. So the French learned from those old cats who knew the right changes. That and maybe also the vivid gypsy jazz tradition in France. Most gypsies were totally illiterate regarding sheet music. But that made them strong transcribers by ear.
bophead
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Re: Positioning Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks for Jazz

Post by bophead »

Fred G. Unn wrote: 21 Feb 2022, 15:46 One brand of legal ones were Tune-Dex cards. Plenty of illegal ones too of course.
This is what they looked like.

Is the music written with a music typewriter?

https://blog.library.gsu.edu/wp-content ... uneDex.jpg
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Fred G. Unn
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Re: Positioning Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks for Jazz

Post by Fred G. Unn »

bophead wrote: 21 Feb 2022, 17:12I only hear the top melody of “Skyliner” like this
Oops, yeah I was too quick in throwing that pyramid together and was off by a beat. I still hear the top as Ab, but there's an A natural somewhere in the chord, maybe in the 3rd Trombone? I'm hearing maybe something like this (concert key):

Image

That 1930s Charlie Barnet version is arranged by Billy Moore Jr, not Neal Hefti, and there are some published versions floating around. I don't have one though and have no idea if they are new copies of the actual music, a transcription, a terrible "stock chart" or what. I would be curious to see what the score has in those couple of bars if it was accurate.
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Fred G. Unn
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Re: Positioning Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks for Jazz

Post by Fred G. Unn »

bophead wrote: 21 Feb 2022, 17:50 Quelques grilles harmoniques – on the side of the grid are recommended recordings:
This is pretty interesting, I hadn't seen this type of notation before. Changes look pretty accurate too. On Angel Eyes, the last A7 of the A section should really be A7+5 (melody would be an F there in this key) but that's nitpicking a bit. (Everyone would naturally play Em7-5 in the 4th bar too.)

The dyslexic flats on the flat 9 chords always strike me as odd whenever they pop up. I was Slide Hampton's copyist off and on for 20 years or so and he would do that in his pencil manuscripts. I always notated it the modern way so the rhythm section wouldn't be confused.
bophead
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Re: Positioning Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks for Jazz

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This looks to me like they cut off the piano part from xeroxed original sheet music and put a lead sheet together from only vocal, lyrics and chord names. It is from a fake book called "Million Dollar Library" that came in ten volumes a few hundred pages each! No wonder the FBI was chasing the people producing and selling fake books …
angel_eyes_m$lib.png
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Centered chord alignment here
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Re: Positioning Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks for Jazz

Post by JJP »

I've always preferred left-aligned chords, especially in cases where sight-reading is important.

When there are busy bars with chords on every beat (or more frequent), it is difficult to determine exactly where the chords line up. I remember this being a particular issue when doing work for Ian Fraser. He would cram so many darn chords in a bar that we had to adjust our chord fonts and kerning to make them fit.
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John Ruggero
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Re: Positioning Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks for Jazz

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No offense taken, bophead. You've added a lot of great new input. But I guess I was really asking a question about the slash notation to show bass notes. I don't see it in lead sheets before the 60s and I don't see it in the Monk. Does anyone know when and how it came into use? When I first started improvising using lead sheets I was always bothered by the fact that the bass lines were not present, having done quite a bit of theory using figured bass. (You'll have to factor in that I am a "classical" musician and think of the bass line as just as important as the top melody.) So I thought the slashes for bass notes were a real advance.
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Fred G. Unn
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Re: Positioning Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks for Jazz

Post by Fred G. Unn »

John Ruggero wrote: 22 Feb 2022, 03:43 When I first started improvising using lead sheets I was always bothered by the fact that the bass lines were not present, having done quite a bit of theory using figured bass. (You'll have to factor in that I am a "classical" musician and think of the bass line as just as important as the top melody.)
I did catch that you mentioned Mehegan the other day. He's very interesting from a pedagogical standpoint. His first book was published in the 1950s when jazz was more or less still tonal and using functional harmony. (Kind of Blue, The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Giant Steps were all recorded 1959, so that year was a bit of a turning point.) Mehegan is really the only one I'm aware of that tried to incorporate any figured bass into his chord symbol nomenclature as below:

Image

His system of thinking numerically is quite good, and not much different from how I think of most standards myself. As my primary instrument is alto sax, I end up learning tunes in at least two keys (Eb and concert) anyway, so thinking of them numerically so I can play in any key is pretty natural to me. The turning point really was around 1959, when jazz tunes now didn't necessarily follow that system at all, but could be modal, free, or have very complex or non-functional harmonic systems. Sure, I can play "If I Could Write a Book" in any key, but no one is ever going to call Wayne Shorter's "Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum" in any key but the original. The David Baker / Jamey Aebersold chord-scale approach obviously has won out over Mehegan's system. It of course is very useful, but there's a bit of "here's an alphabet, now write me a short story" issue with it. By learning jazz from a chord-scale approach and not a musical "language" based approach, we end up with a lot of very technically proficient players that can always play "correct" notes, but don't have much to say.
bophead
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Re: Positioning Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks for Jazz

Post by bophead »

John Ruggero wrote: 22 Feb 2022, 03:43 When I first started improvising using lead sheets I was always bothered by the fact that the bass lines were not present, having done quite a bit of theory using figured bass. (You'll have to factor in that I am a "classical" musician and think of the bass line as just as important as the top melody.) So I thought the slashes for bass notes were a real advance.
I do not think the importance of the bass line was disregarded in any way. You have to take in account that a big part of jazz is oral tradtion. People learned from transcribing by ear and by rote listening to radio, records (sometimes with pitched down manipulated grammophones as reported e.g. from Charlie Parker, by Barry Harris or by Lennie Tristano’s students) and last but not least at all they would learn on the bandstand. A bassist would stand on the left side of the piano and watch the pianist’s left hand, so if he didn’t know the tune called he could “fake” it by sight and ear. There were no fake books back then, everyone was playing by rote and by ear.

What makes playing everything by rote easier is that many of the chord progressions were often very similar. The bridge of Gershwin’s “I got rhythm” was so commonly used that it was called “Sears Roebuck bridge” after Sears, Roebuck and Co., another one used e.g. in “Sunny Side of the Street”, “When You're Smiling”, “Satin Doll”, “Honeysuckle Rose” was called “Montgomery-Ward bridge”.

[Big bands of course did not play by rote apart from the “head arrangements” of Kansas City Bands like early Basie or Jay McShann. And the above said doesn’t mean nobody could read music. Musicians were learning tunes from original sheet music, too. But they would not take the music to a jam or a gig. Many learned classical music or played in marching bands in high school. If you were from a poor Afro-American family that was a huge opportunity, especially as you could borrow instruments from school, at least those available. AFAIK that great system of music education in the US has has totally declined in the last decades in public schools.]

So people simply “knew” how to interpret the chord symbols regarding bass lines or piano left hand (or improvisation as well of course) from those simple chord symbols – they knew the “language”. (Or they even became innovative and invented new “dialects”, like e.g. the beboppers.)

There is an educational book by Ron Carter about double bass playing. For every quarter of a bar he notates a chord with all the chord notes of the correspondent chord available on the bass. Then he tells you to develop walking bass lines by connecting one “dot” (note-head) of one quarter with another “dot” from the next quarter. This was an eye-opener for me: The bass doesn't always have to play the root on the one. Or as pop, rock, soul and funk studio bassist legend Carol Kaye (who started out as a bebop guitarist) likes to put it: “You have to know your chordal notes”. And you have to know ways using passing chords and substitutions so you can play “movements” instead of static chords (a term Barry Harris caught from Coleman Hawkins).

I do not know much about figured bass but I think its rules of stricter than that. Jazz is more about freedom and experimentation. Often a piano would reharmonize every “chorus” (playing once through the chord changes of a tune for those who don’t know the term) or even change the key. Which made it not easy for those playing with him. The bandstand was a tough place also (ca. 1st minute of the video):

https://invidio.xamh.de/watch?v=d3S3XIaM9cs

In a nutshell Jazz is a lot about experience.

John, am I getting you right that at that time starting improvising you were frustrated because you had no real explanation of what to do in the left hand? I know the kind of frustation when you are stuck. (By the way I play guitar, my piano skills are very rudimentary. I practice Musescore editing in the moment if I want to know how a piano score sounds, listening to the built-in synth.)

Nowadays everything is so much easier – you have so many tons of educational books, music schools, colleges and universities, online master classes, skype and zoom lessons, Youtube videos, software. The hardest thing today is separating the sheep from the goats. If you want to listen to a certain piece it is a few clicks on Youtube or Spotify instead of staying up all night with one ear on the radio.

[By the way: AFAIK people like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Paganini, Liszt (to name just a very few) were all great improvisers but the art got lost later on, after everything got written out, even the (is that the right term?) cadencas.]
Last edited by bophead on 22 Feb 2022, 10:32, edited 1 time in total.
bophead
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Re: Positioning Chord Symbols and Rehearsal Marks for Jazz

Post by bophead »

Fred G. Unn wrote: 22 Feb 2022, 04:38 By learning jazz from a chord-scale approach and not a musical "language" based approach, we end up with a lot of very technically proficient players that can always play "correct" notes, but don't have much to say.
Can’t find the exact source in the moment but there is a quote by saxophonist Joe Henderson, something like: “I don’t wanna sound like the pages of a telephone book.”
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