I wrote a post telling the story of the experimental editing you hear on the record. That editing is really the "main idea" of the project: more significant than the details of the tunes or the performances, I'd argue. But of course the project began with standard jazz fare: tunes, read off lead sheets, with blowing. A core of more-or-less traditional jazz, modulo my own special interests, sits within the music. I want a transparent record of how this album came to be, so as a counterpart to the post on editing, here's a reflection on the (jazz-) compositional thinking behind the 6 tunes on the album.
0. Big Picture
Jazz is night music. Even a morning person like me has to admit it. Jazz creates a luscious backdrop for smokin' and drinkin' and seducin'. You even see it in the venues; the Village Vanguard, the best and most famous jazz club in the world, is self-consciously dingy. High Firmament opposed the nocturnal spirit of jazz by drawing on Mozart and constructivist, mathematical thinking. Ferment Below instead embraces and celebrates the nocturnal jazz spirit. Trade coffee and carbohydrates for booze and fat. The tunes: simpler but more open. The mix: murkier but more romantic. The performances: rougher around the edges but more verklempt.
And as High Firmament's abstract narrative unfolds over the first half of a day, Ferment Below's spans afternoon-to-late-night.
Mini golf under a sagging sun;
Holdin' hands, on a walk, as that sun dives below the horizon;
Dionysian group dance, ushering in the night;
Flirtation and romance, chemically hazy;
A delicate touch after all is said and done;
The late night trip to the deli, suspended in impossible fluorescent light.
Not the healthiest night of your life. But if the candle's already burnin', might as well light up the other end too.
1. Hole in One
It doesn't get more fun as a player than diatonic free jazz. Rip the scale up and down. It's meant to sound good over itself! A key is much richer than just its notes and the steps between them; it's more like a city, full of landmarks but also back alleys and weird little neighborhoods. Hole in One visits the landmarks of A major and mostly travels well-worn paths...but I know some shortcuts. The main idea is a quick trip through IV, then I, then V, then the minor side: vii, vi, ii; you can guess where that ii leads.
But why? Why not just declare "go nuts in A"? The answer is more about psychology than the exact musical outcome. I want everyone's ears open and perked up for the tonal moves that give diatonic music its rich structure. The secondary dominants, the modal shadings that leak in from nearby keys. The safety net of generic A major noodling remains underneath it all. But to give in all the way to the entropy of free jazz is to trade away a lot of what we love about lots of other music. On a formal level, the same thinking applies. Nothing about this tune screams "I need a bridge," but just having a bridge at all opens a little mental space. A little opposition, a little voltage.
The bridge stacks two sharps onto the key signature, one at a time, to pave the way clear-as-day B major scale. This enables the trick of F♯-as-V, not just of B but also of D, the chord of the downbeat of the [A] section. Relative to D, F♯7 hits the most delicious and beautiful notes of a dominant: the ♭9 and the 13. This ain't exactly a new idea, but it ain't gettin' old either. When I play this tune live, I encourage the bass player to really push ahead, to anticipate changes. One semi-coincidence of this harmony is that the changes sound especially beautiful if the bass is one chord ahead. As in: F♯7/D; D/E; E7/A; A/B; ...
2. Short Way Around the Hill
Children find it intuitively clear that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But that idea only applies in flat Euclidean space (a fiction), where the notion of "straight line" actually makes sense. Picture a tall but narrow mountain. Imagine you are at its base and you must travel to a point on the other side of its base, a 180 degree revolution around the peak. What's the shortest path? A "straight," direct line, all the way up and back down, is clearly not the best move. Should you instead walk around the base of the mountain and never climb at all? Or is there a compromise: a little elevation in exchange for less wraparound? The technical word for the kind of path we are looking for is geodesic, and if this puzzle erects your neck hair, dust off your calculus and drink down some differential geometry. A musician may take inspiration from the rock-climberly oblique paths a master voice-leader takes, the non-obvious moves that balance parallel and contrary motions in high-dimensional chord-world. Now I wish I could reveal my lovely and unexpected harmony-algorithm of Einsteinian phlegm. In no pocket do I possess such a thing. And in fact, most of the harmony of this tune is rather pedestrian. The cutest move, the one most in line with my mental image of a young-love stroll, is the meager brightening of a minor-7 chord into a dominant by raising its third.
Those moments get a little extra weight from "mini-fermatas" that break up the pacing of the form, like a little skip to realign your gait with your girlfriend's so that you don't have to let her hand go. Another effect that surprises me, if only a smidge, is how those dominant ninth chords both lead to A♭ø7 despite being built on different roots. A♭m7, A♭9, A♭ø7 makes sense right away to me; Schumann pulls that kind of trick with aplomb. G♭9 to A♭ø7 feels fine too — Strayhornish — but I can't put my finger on why both moves kinda sound the same...I don't feel any tonal whiplash from one or the other. It likely has something to do with the near-symmetry of the dominant chord opening many ports to many nearby islands in the sea of harmony. The middle section exploits another old trick: two phrases whose melodies start the same but whose divergent harmony lead them away from each other.
Finally, just to clear the air, it is not without some guilt that I write double flats. But I believe in the rules, and on top of that, as a transposing-instrument-player, I would rather see music written "correctly" in an ugly key than confront horrendous OJ-and-toothpaste-sharp-and-flat mixing just to accommodate a snowflake who can't lower the pitch of an F by a semitone. I even wrote out two versions of this chart, one in G♭ and one in F♯! But it's in G♭. The same G♭ as dovunque al mondo and un bel di, vedremo; you could not force me to call those F♯ at gunpoint.
3. Hot Rain Dance
It's an eight-bar vamp.
If anything, this is more of a game than a tune. Charge up energy — tension, friction, heat — by looping the hypnotic upbeat-only vamp. Once in a while, release the energy, Beyblade-style, with 16 bars of walking over an admittedly stupid twist on some bebop changes.
Repeat, but do not rinse. Stay dirty. The ancestors of Hot Rain Dance are tunes like St. Thomas that build up energy and then let it rip with hard swing. I'm no Sonny Rollins but boy oh boy do I try.
4. Moments Away
Opera: a world of contradictions. At once the most intimate and romantic art, but also inaccessible, snooty, anachronistic. To a composer's eyes, opera scores so often look dreary and basic, but the sound seduces and bewilders the ear. The illusion of objective time wilts away under the three-way-negotiation of singer, conductor, and orchestra; they all push and pull against each other, but the miracle is that it works. And not only does it work; the spaghetti-flow of time twangs your spaghetti-heartstrings in a way no other music can. A jazz quartet starts from a different place and commands different resources than an opera production, though. We can be more nimble and we can improvise. We can read tricky rhythms and then nudge them away from mathematical precision, into romance territory. This was the compositional puzzle of Moments Away: simulate some of the huge-lumbering-organism rhythmic tilt of romantic opera with a jazz quartet playing funky tuplets, and stride the harmonic line between Italian opera and American jazz.
The trick as a player is not to tense up for the tuplets. They must flow. It's tough and I admit that I regret my strategy for improvisation on this one as it appears on the record. I thought I could compound the operaticness by floating doubly over the floaty surface of the tune. If that band loosened up to the mega and followed me through the changes this could have worked (it may have devolved into a generic rubato wash, though), but better yet would have been playing it fairly straight over the form, lining up where you're supposed to. Better luck next time, self. The second [A] varies the first a little bit, cycling back to the home key rather than ending on V.
The bridge flips the scheme from the [A]s. Instead of the melody following the shifting rhythm section, the melody in [B] pushes against the beat and sits over a more stable and conventional harmonic rhythm.
I stooped not so low as to write this in F♭.
The last [A] provides another variation on the first two, embracing triplets even more and centering on the pungent-piquant-purple-power-punch chord ♯ivø7.
That chord really functions viiø7/V, here and elsewhere.
The Coda is just the sad and then briefly angry version of the bridge.
Stayed on the flat side here. Thought I could get away with it.
I will not be apologizing for the E𝄫 chord — you can stop asking.
5. Soft
This composition doesn't require a whole of explanation. It's Tchaikovsky-jazz: melody-driven, unafraid to loop, shamelessly conventional in its accompaniment layer.
This oughta have a two-flat key signature. Apologies.
If only because there isn't much else to talk about, I will point out the E♭ major 7 chord — the IV in B♭ — in m. 7. I find this sound difficult to pull off.
"How could that be true? That's the most basic, week-one tonal destination in major!"
Correct. I find it hard to deploy IV as a pre-dominant, as an active lubricant, not as a destination. IV-to-V appears constantly, ubiquitously in rock and pop. The Classical version, ii6/5, is almost the same chord. But jazz likes its ii-Vs with 2 in the bass — understandable! — and chords built on 4 struggle to plug into the usual Hotwheels-track that shoots you to a resolution. Maybe just to my ears. Anyway, in this case, IV prolongs ii from the bar before and slows down the pace of harmonic action. I wouldn't know how to make this work on a faster or more aggressive tune!
6. Delicatessen
Looking back, Delicatessen and Moments Away form a pair that surrounds Soft — naked and simple — with shifting-ground semi-advanced classical-derived modern jazz. If Moments Away reaches for Puccini and Soft for Tchaikovsky, then Delicatessen reaches for someone German. Mahler will do — final answer. And indeed, this melody could be better commanded by a violin section or a solitary trumpet over strings than by an operatic soprano. It's just a bit too clever to earn the voice.
Try out the ♯6 on a half-diminished chord. Sour and salty, like a pickle.
In blowing, we played around with and ultimately committed to compressing the [break] bar to 7/8 so as not to interrupt the lithe 7/8 flow with a flabby 4/4. As in Moments Away, the bridge smooths out the harmonic rhythm so that the melody can sway.
Four-times-two bars of the circle of fifths. If you don't like this chord progression, you don't like music.
The 4:7 tuplet is not so much about its own sound, but rather psychology and strategy. A rhythm that forces you to tighten up and lock in saves the tune from getting too dreamy and moreover perks up our confidence when we all rendezvous there. That mental effect matters much more than communicating exact double-dotted eighth notes, or whatever. Jazz composition is about psychology and strategy! Beautiful music ain't enough. Write something that unlocks and strengthens the skills of your players. Don't get in their way. That's not to say musicians don't rise to challenges. But there's a difference between a rewarding challenge and a tedious one. I'd rather grapple with a math problem than a jigsaw puzzle.
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Email me for sheet music if you want it. Read the corresponding post for High Firmament here.