Eb9 is one of the trickier ones, needing the 4th finger as the pivot.
This one is not very practicable. But neither is the most obvious 5-3-2-1. The whole point of this series is to explore the Tatum 1-2-3 fingerings, fingerings to make for more even runs. Even though I'm running through all twelve 9th chords fingerings here, some are just not used, even by Tatum. Some phrases work great in one key, terrible in another. Eb9 is a bit of a conundrum to me at the moment. There are a few variations, such as:
As I mentioned previously, in offering my fingerings for these chords, I'm wanting to share my explorations and discoveries, investigate how they can be integrated into contemporary jazz piano practice, and maybe extended into big band or orchestral concepts. It's all music, but I like investigating the 'nitty-gritty'. And investigating Tatum takes us back to the source, as it were, because a lot of Chopin and classical piano involves harp-like runs, and we know Tatum was thoroughly grounded in the 19th century romantic piano tradition.
In no sense am I suggesting these are definitive fingerings; rather, I encourage you to explore them yourself. I'm simply attempting to illustrate this Tatum concept, backed up by my own research—the idea being to make the fingerings of these harp-lie runs as even as possible without resorting to hand/finger contortions.
Ab9:
Thumb on Gb and C. Thumb on the tritone, the Devil's interval!
You should be getting the general idea that the hand makes a crab-like motion, alternating (pivot) 2-3:
Db9:
Thumb again on the tritone, this time F and B (Cb), alternating 2-3
As I mentioned previously, any dominant 9th chord is like a minor 6th or a half-diminished, so you get three for the price of one.
Now we've come halfway round the cycle from C to F# - or is it Gb? We don't use the key of Cb major all that often, but I still seem to think of it more as a Gb9 myself. It's whether you like having Bb and Fb instead of A# and E. In this 'borderline' territory between sharps and flats, arrangers always should go with the simplest solution. It's OK to use the more common enharmonic names.
Gb9:
Thumb on the Bb & E, tritone.
If you prefer to see it as an F#9, here it is in the key of B:
B9:
Thumb on the D# & A, tritone again. E9:
Thumb on the D. This one needs the 4th finger as a pivot on the B to D (4-1). These excerpts are simply to show my current fingerings, not intended as any kind of specific drill or exercise. The only important point I would stress when practicing them is to play them in time, slow medium and fast, semiquavers or triplets. But they should relate to the basic pulse, they should always be recognizable subdivisions, at least in practice sessions. To reiterate on the bigger musical picture: all this work on runs amounts musically to fractions of seconds in actual performance, when playing (jazz) time. If playing rubato, of course the runs can be extended or stretched out. But to my mind, the run is all about gesture, not something to be itself 'noteworthy' - pun intended! A9:
Thumb on B and E, 3-2 pivot. D9:
Same fingering as A9. G9:
This one is quite difficult; I think the key (pun unintended) is to feel the pivot between 3 & 2. That concludes all the Tatum dominant 9th chords fingerings. In future posts we'll be looking at the more exciting 13ths, and some of the variations possible in mixing and matching these ideas.
Jazz Chords The history of the musical use of upper chordal extensions (9ths, 11ths,
13ths) in the last century and a half has developed in a way that echoes the
evolution of our modern society. In earlier times, supposedly life was
'simpler' and the music probably reflected that. Folk music and church music
used simple triads based on one tonic note, key or 'ground bass'. We surmise
that music began as simply melody, sung in unison or octaves. 'Homophonic'
in its original Greek sense. If you read music history, it seems like we're
expected to believe that music was 'unison' for thousands of years, I guess
with the odd 5ths thrown in. Then evidently around the turn of the 13th century, at newly-built Notre Dame Cathedral in
France, 'Perotin' was one of the first to use voices singing different
melodies that came together to form what we would call 'chords'. Separate voices singing over this ground bass (sustained bass or tonic note)
to produce chords, harmonies floating over this tonics or series of root
notes, you could say modal music. So that's a few millennia of unison, then a thousand years of harmony, if you believe Wikipedia or history generally. And now look at what
we've finally ended up - in our mainstream musical world.
The desire in artists to create is very similar to religious devotion, and
the goal of 'religious composers' like Perotin and Hildegarde of Bingen was
to reflect the wonder of the Universe and God through the magic of music.
The Pythagorean divided string, with its pure mathematical ratios of the
main intervals of the octave, 5th, 4th and 3rd, defined "Just Intonation". The same ratios also defined the architectural dimensions of their
cathedrals. Purpose-built, you might say. The sounds the made were pure, the major 3rds brighter - but in the
Pythagorean system there could be no real modulation possible, as any
chromatic notes, even the not-so-foreign ones (e.g., G# on a E7 going to Am)
were horribly out of tune. The history of piano tuning is fascinating. One is gradually made aware of
how much 'aural intuition' has played a part in the process, the trained
ear, as well as the introduction of technology - the tuning fork in 1711,
about the time equal temperament was gaining universal favour. After many years of experimentation the system of dividing the octave into
12 equal parts gradually became accepted, creating our current system of "Equal Temperament". J. S. Bach with his Well-Tempered Keyboard", in all 24 major and minor
keys, being the big one. Now modulation between any keys was possible, and it was a very exciting
development. To continue the analogy with human society: as human beings moved from a rural to an urban existence, things got
complicated. Now people were living cheek-by-jowl in a new environment,
learning how to get on. It's almost like the notes of the major scale are members of the same
tribe, some getting on naturally, some clashing; but over time we have
learned how to blend them and make their inherent dissonance more
agreeable.
What intervallic characteristics could we say constitute a 'jazz' chord?
Simply put, it's the presence of a tritone and a major 7th (or minor
second), that give the 'jazz' sound. And this is not unique to jazz, it
can be found in many other musical forms, Japanese, Spanish,
Brazilian. The simplest expression of this sound concept is a 13th chord, here on
C7. So it's the dominant chord in the key of F:
Note the tritone Bb-E, the Bb-A major seventh.
Really the 13th should be seen as an appoggiatura, a melodic suspension of the
5th:
These melodic suspensions, initially 'foreign' to the chord, eventually
get accepted as intrinsic to the chord. But the pay-off is the note that
was meant to be resolved to, in this case the 5th, is removed, out of the
picture. So you still get a four-note chord, but now the 13th has replaced
the 5th.
That's not to say you can't have them both, but you gotta work them
differently from your textbook stacking-3rds methodology. For example here's a
nice way of getting that 5th on top of the 13th:
If we might venture to say that 13ths are the characteristic sound of
bebop and beyond, then dominant 9ths are the sound of the swing era. But
let's not forget all these sounds were already part of classical harmony
tradition, from at least Chopin in the 1830s, to Wagner, Ravel, Debussy,
Satie. These musical ideas were well and truly established before Tatum
came to them. For example, here is a textbook example of this same C13th chord in
Ravel's Trio fro Violin, Cello and Piano, to me one of the greatest works of all-time. In the middle of the
second movement we get this:
[click to enlarge]
At the key change from A to F, (and after) the voicings couldn't get
more jazz:
Straight out of the jazz harmony books. And this is from 1914. We'll have
a look at some more of this work later. Ravel's intriguing comment while
working on this composition was: "I've written my trio. Now all I need are
the themes." I'm still trying to decode that statement!
Dominant 9th chords The 'forefather' of the 13th chord is the dominant 9th chord, almost like a
chakra 'one level down'. And that particular combination of notes in the 9th
can sound very different dependent on the bass or root note. Like the roots
of a tree, that bass note lays the foundation of the sound of the chord
quality. So, this C9 arpeggio is exactly the same as Gm6 and Em7b5: same
note family, different bass note, different sound quality or 'mood'.
Tatum's style was often described as 'orchestral', in that he could
literally sound like an orchestra. Often three distinct voices can be heard
simultaneously—stride bass and chords, a sustained middle-register ('cello') guide-tone melody, and amazing upper figures. How the hell did he do it? We know he had huge hands, and he could
easily span any major 10th. (That is freedom: two notes, and you have any
major chord. I can get a few but to be able to nail Bb-D, Eb-G, Ab-C, Db-F
would be heaven.) But there's more to Tatum than just tricks. There's some real musical
magic going on there, and as musicians we can and should investigate
what he's doing. And the more you do, you begin to realize that some of
this Tatum magic can be broken down and
explained. One of the most obvious examples that comes to mind is Tatum's
rapid-fire ascending diminished arpeggios, which seem to run the whole
length of the keyboard. But upon closer inspection what seems like a
6-octave run is more like 4, broken-up, divided between the two hands.
Beginning in the left hand with a diminished scale fragment which fits
easily under the fingers, which 'kicks off' a two-octave diminished
arpeggio, the right hand takes over an octave above, and continues for
another 2-3 octaves (top of the piano). If it was an C (or Eb, A, F#)
diminished arpeggio, you know he'd be hitting that top C. Like a great magician, he makes you hear that he's covered the whole
keyboard. It sounds like he's 'unzipping' the piano.
He's toying with the piano, literally 'playing' with
it in the most natural sense. That reminds me of Bird's doctrine of
learn everything and then forget it when you play. And isn't that
after all what we are all meant to be doing? 'Playing' music, with the
child-like spirit that hopefully hasn't been too crushed out of us by
all the relentless bullshit. But of course Art Tatum was only one man and like any other artist he
had his high and low points artistically. He was really a solo
performer; how many jazz musicians can you say that about? There
are many detractors that will try to tell you he wasn't a 'real' jazz
musician, probably because they hear him play the same arrangement the
same way, or else the endless runs and florid technique gets in their
ear and they can't get past it. But they gotta dig harder. You gotta
look between the cracks, between the runs and clichés; there is much gold to be found within his recordings. Tatum once said in a radio interview that he was far from happy with
his technique, that he still had a long way to go...if you can believe
that! But as great as he was, this very human sentiment may ring true
for some of us out there.
Side-on view of the Charlie Barnet band in action, mid-'40s; note the trombones and saxes lined up together in the front row (luckily (?) there's no dancers threatening the trombone slides)
At one stage I was going to knuckle down and transcribe this Johnny Richards arrangement. It's one of my favorite charts. It sits right on that line between swing and bop, capturing the the essence of both, while at the same time 'updating' the source material - which is of course Gershwin's "Rhapsody" - composed in 1924. What do I mean by 'updating'? What I'm talking about is the fundamental artistic principle of absorbing the past to produce the future. With this arrangement we're talking jazz 'updating' of the highest order - or 'transmutation', as I like to call it, because it reminds me of the alchemists' attempts to extract gold from base metal. If the word 'jazz' means anything at all, it means improving something, literally 'jazzing up'. Doing whatever it takes to make that spirit come alive.
Have a listen again to the Johnny Richards arrangement, played by the Charlie Barnet Orchestra in March 1949, featuring the then 22 year-old Maynard Ferguson:
Now, I'm not the world's greatest transcriber so I knew it was going to take me quite a while to get the whole thing down. But that in itself didn't worry me especially. What did worry me was the knowledge that at the end of it all, I really couldn't be 100% sure that what I wrote down was what the guys were actually playing in that chart on that day in '49. After all it's a mono recording in a big barn of a studio with the equipment of the late '40s. I'm not saying the recording equipment wasn't up to scratch back then; some audiophiles reckon it was just as good as they use now, if not better. But for whatever reason, I had no hope of being sure that in a full band chord, I could faithfully pick out, say, the 2nd trombone's note and be sure that it was the same note that Richards wrote.
So what does any arranger do when faced with a mountain of work? Why, go to the masters for inspiration, of course! I find page 70 of Russell Garcia's "The Professional Arranger Composer Part II" particularly helpful:
"The Art of Avoiding (A Common Arranger's Malady)" (Russell Garcia)
To that list we can now add going on the internet. Surfing the web is a procrastinator's dream. By the way, that reminds me of a great Lee Morgan tune - "The Procrastinator". If you like musical asides as I do, here it is:
Even this little aside can even show us something: notice the way Lee Morgan plays his composition twice, first 'straight', 'classically' with bowed bass, then 'hip' ('swung') as Ron Carter moves into a walking bass style. This is the kind of 'transmutation' or simply 'jazzing up' I'm trying to describe here.
Like a good student taking the master's advice, I immediately stopped working on the transcribing, and once more went on an internet search. This time, by using a different combination of search terms, I happened to stumble across a fantastic website (since disappeared) that had dozens of original scores from famous bandleaders of the '30s and '40s. Direct links to PDF files. Charts scanned by someone, somewhere, sometime (that is, not by the website host; he just put 'em up there). Separate pages for the different bandleaders with many well-known charts. Some scores - a few originals and some modern transcriptions - but mainly instrumental parts.
Then I see a section on Charlie Barnet, hit that link, and among several Johnny Richards charts, there she was! To my astonishment, right there on the page, were links to this very chart: scans of the individual parts, handwritten in what looked to me like an authentic style for the time (1949). After downloading, this is what I first laid eyes on:
It was like searching for gold - and actually finding some, for a change. I had the individual parts for almost the whole band, lacking only the first and
second trumpet parts. But now I could 'reverse-engineer' the score, put it back together by copying all the separate parts into a new score. If you gotta have missing parts, the lead & second trumpet parts are probably the 'best' parts to lose, if you have to lose two. It's pretty hard to mistake a lead trumpet line, as it's the melody line of the whole band; and by having the third and fourth trumpet parts, logic
should dictate what the second part should look like.
If my initial hunch was correct, and these might very well be the exact parts used by the musicians on the
recording - and not just somebody else's transcription - then by putting
all the parts together I'd have the closest thing possible to the
original Richards score. That part of my brain that does transcribing suddenly
experienced pangs of hope, joy, freedom!
Also linked on the page was a score - but not Richards' original; this one was done by someone else, in modern music software. So it seemed like somebody else had already got in there before me.
But first I had to check it all out, and start making observations. The largest file was a color scan, Barnet's part as above; but all the others were grayscale, looking like this:
Tenor 1, page 5
But they were from the same hand. And they certainly had that aged look about them, and I don't mean scan quality. For a start the copyist's handwriting is of the period, quick but accurate. Done with a proper music ink pen with the calligraphy nib, thin and fat lines possible.
To cut a long story short, when I put all the parts into a new score, there were many differences between the 'as written' version and the 'as played' (recorded) version. But they were all the same chart. This often happens in practice: charts were often amended to tweak the arrangement to suit the band. So, I decided to write two scores: one, a verbatim copy of the individual parts, exposing all the copyist's inconsistencies on the different parts, and another one - much more important to me - a score 'as played', or as close as I could get to it.
Why do I like this arrangement so much? The chart flows and builds, using the source material as a springboard; as I said, updating the 1924 Gershwin melodies, with their original rhythmic concept, to a then very modern-sounding swing/bop concept. Richards wrote the chart most probably in '48, from what I can gather; that means his version was written 24 years after the original. (2 x 24 = 48).
I don't want to tell the story of this arrangement in 'chronological order'. I want to dive straight into the 'nitty-gritty' and first pull out a couple of excerpts that will hopefully elucidate my use of the word 'transmutation' in relation to what jazz arranging is all about. Later on we'll get to the curious fate of this chart, and its ghostly presence in the jazz history books.
Here's one of the reasons I love this chart: after setting the (Gershwin) scene up, but before getting into the well-known melodies, there's a strange interlude that, as far as I can tell, bears no relationship to anything in the source material whatsoever. I can't find anything in the original that comes anywhere close to this passage. On the chart it happens at 1:35. This is what it looks like, in short score format, concert pitch:
It's a fantastic "late '40s" mood, and like I said, it's got nothing to do with the source material at all. But it really adds something extra to the chart. Remember, Richards had to fit in the six or seven definitive Gershwin themes somehow in a chat lasting just over seven minutes; which makes this interlude's existence all the more daring and unusual.
Just as interesting is the two-bar brass figure right before the interlude. Here it is, short scored with saxes at the top, brass on the bottom. The clefs are not showing, but it's the same as the above (treble and bass for both sections), chord symbol in between.
Richards had the use of six saxophones, as Barnet had a full five-piece sax section and himself played either alto, tenor or soprano - all three on this chart. On this excerpt, he's playing alto on the top note (B natural). The six saxes play an Eb7alt (Eb7#9b13, 'altered') chord, while the trumpets and bones play an almost, but not quite, retrograde-inversion figure, straight out of Stravinsky or Schoenberg. While he uses these modern classical techniques such as polytonality and his own very individual harmonization throughout - what he called his 'streams of harmony' approach - he manages to keep it organic the whole time.
