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Breen · July 31st, 2012, 06:26 AM

As found on Quora.com:

Rather than attempting the impossible task of explaining how everything in jazz works, I'm going to pick a specific, fairly mainstream tune and talk you through it: "Someday My Prince Will Come" by Miles Davis, off the 1961 album by the same name.

First of all, here's the original version from Snow White.

Once you've got the tune in your head, listen to the Miles Davis recording.

The extended intro section uses a pedal point, which just means that bassist Paul Chambers plays the same note over and over. The pedal point creates a feeling of floating suspense. Drummer Jimmy Cobb plays gentle waltz time with his brushes: one-and-two-and-three-and, one-and-two-and-three-and. (Most jazz tunes are in four-four time, so each bar would be one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and.) Pianist Wynton Kelly plays some improvised figures based mostly on arpeggios, broken-up chords.

At 0:40, Miles Davis enters, playing the melody on muted trumpet. Even though he interprets the tune's timing very loosely and adds some ornaments of his own, you should have no trouble singing the words along with him. This section is called the head, and as is the case with a lot of jazz tunes, it's thirty-two bars long. Here's the chart, if you're a music reader: Link Here.

At 1:17, Miles begins his solo. Over the same thirty-two bar form of the original song, he improvises a new melody. He chooses his notes spontaneously, but not randomly -- the solo has to make sense against the song's chords as they go by. You can keep track of the form by continuing to sing the words. As you do, hear how Miles' playing interacts with the original melody. Miles is famous for his dark and moody sound, and for his unhurried pacing. He plays fewer notes than his virtuosic sidemen, using frequent silences. You can hear him going back and forth between a tuneful style that refers back to the melody and a more abstract approach, choosing notes that form patterns for their own sake, sometimes rubbing tensely against the chords.

Each pass through the form of the song is called a chorus. Miles plays three choruses -- you can sing the words three times over his solo. At 2:26, Miles ends his second chorus with a funky repetitive riff on one note. At 3:05, the end of the third chorus, he reiterates this one-note riff and extends it, allowing it to spill over past the end of the form with a nonchalance that's typical Miles.

At 3:11, there's a more energetic feeling in the drums as Jimmy Cobb switches from the soft-sounding brushes to the louder and more percussive sticks, and Hank Mobley begins his tenor saxophone solo. While Hank is an excellent saxophonist, he doesn't come off on this recording too well -- he was new to Miles' band, and didn't yet have his feet under him. Also, his softer and more lyrical improvisational style sounds a little schmaltzy compared to Miles' acidic tone. (In fairness, if you want to hear Hank at his best, check out his classic album Soul Station.) After two choruses, you can hear Hank pause awkwardly at around 4:18, not deliberately like Miles, but out of uncertainty as to what to play next. He finishes his solo lamely, with a banal concluding phrase. This kind of moment is a reminder that improvisation is an intrinsically risky undertaking. Any jazz soloist has to face to possibility of an unsatisfying improvisation, or even a complete trainwreck. The risk of failure (or incomplete success) is exactly what makes jazz the exciting art form that it is.

Next comes Wynton Kelly's piano solo, at 4:26. As in his intro, Wynton plays a lot of arpeggios, short fragments that call and respond to each other. Wynton sounds a lot more relaxed and on his game than Hank Mobley, no surprise since he was a veteran Miles Davis sideman. Wynton gets a chorus and a half, and at 5:24, Miles takes over, restating the second half of the melody. Then there's a short interlude, using the same pedal point as the intro. This reiteration of the head and intro mid-song is an unusual structural move. Miles is setting the stage for the tune's dramatic climax, the entrance of John Coltrane.

A little back story is helpful here. Coltrane had played tenor sax in Miles' regular group on and off through the second half of the 1950s. Together, the two of them created some of the best and most famous recordings in jazz history, including Round About Midnight, Milestones and Kind Of Blue. (Go buy them! You won't regret it.) At the time of the "Prince" recording session, Coltrane had recently left Miles to lead his own staggeringly great band, but he happened to be visiting the studio that day, so Miles invited him to sit in.

What you're hearing at 5:52 is Coltrane playing with zero preparation, just sight-reading the chord chart. That may sound impressive, but it's actually pretty common for jazz recording sessions. What you should be impressed by is the effortless intensity and power of Coltrane's improvisation. His solo gradually builds in complexity until by the start of the second chorus, he's playing doubletime, cramming twice as many notes into each measure as the pulse of the tune would suggest. His lines twist and spiral with a complexity unmatched by anyone else in jazz at that time.

It isn't just his technical ability that makes Coltrane great. Even at speed, his note choices all make emotional sense, and his lines have a rock-solid melodic structure to them. If you slow Coltrane's solos down, they become quite tuneful, even catchy. It's one thing to be able to throw a lot of notes around; it's a lot more rare to have all those notes tell a compelling story. The "Prince" solo is just a taste of Coltrane's firehose-like stream of brilliant ideas, cut short by his untimely death only six years later.

After a short interlude, Miles plays the head out, the final statement of the melody. Usually the head out is identical to the head, but in this case, Miles just plays the first half of it. Then there's an outtro, much the same as the intro, a piano groove over the pedal point in the bass. Wynton Kelly plays more freely than he did on the intro, using darker and crunchier harmonies, probably inspired by Coltrane. Finally, the tune winds to a spontaneous close, by a hand signal or eye contact among the players. You can hear that Jimmy Cobb doesn't quite land in the same spot as everyone else, he carries over a few extra beats. Then someone in the room makes a mysterious "pop" sound with their mouth, and the tune is over.

Most mainstream jazz recordings follow this same basic sequence of events, called the head-solos-head form. The band plays the melody, with or without an intro. Then different musicians play solos on the melody's form and chord progression. Finally, the whole band plays the melody again and the tune ends. There are infinite variations on this basic structure. You can get a taste for them just by listening to different versions of "Someday My Prince Will Come," which has been recorded many times by jazz musicians over the years. Miles himself was inspired by Dave Brubeck's 1957 recording, which is faster and doesn't have the moody pedal-point interludes.

I chose this example specifically because it's a well-known song to most of you reading this. Jazz is harder to understand now than it was back in the 40s and 50s because the repertoire is based around songs that were popular then but are esoteric now. Miles' repertoire in the fifties and early sixties would have mostly been as familiar to his audience as "Prince." Listeners would have been able to mentally sing along to just about everything, making all of Miles' intellectual abstractions easier to parse. Jazz was still commercial music then, and when jazz musicians wrote their own tunes, they had a tendency to be as melodic and catchy as showtunes and standards -- Miles' own compositions of the period, like "So What" and "All Blues," are about as catchy and hooky as music gets.

If you want to listen to jazz now, you're at a big disadvantage. Without knowing all those pop standards and showtunes, the improvisation based on them will just sound like random strings of notes. I had a much easier time getting into jazz through tunes like "So What" than through standards. Contemporary musicians are playing abstractions of references to abstractions of references to songs that were popular sixty, seventy or even eighty years ago. It's left to the listener to supply all the historical context. The best way to approach the music is to start on familiar territory with a tune you know and like, and check out how different artists approach it. Miles and Coltrane are great people to investigate, because they liked playing corny pop songs that are still in wide circulation, and because nearly everything they did was so awesome. Happy listening.

- Ethan Hein - Musician, Producer, Teacher

Seasicksailor · July 31st, 2012, 06:39 AM

That's very very interesting! Thank you!

delb0y · August 1st, 2012, 03:04 AM

Excellent! Thank you.

tweeddeluxe · August 1st, 2012, 10:28 AM

Very cool article. Thanks.

klasaine · August 1st, 2012, 04:26 PM

'Prince Will Come' speaks perfectly to my Tonal Center thinking thread.
SDMPWC is really just a variation on I Got Rhythm changes (in Bb with a few alterations ... very few). It's in 3/4 and it's usually played medium so it seems like there's a lot of chords but not really. Just another big 'overall' I to IV (2nd ending) and back.

*Folks love to dis Hank Mobley's tenor solo on this tune and for the life of me I don't know why. Yeah, he leaves a lot of space - even more than Miles - and it's decidedly bluesier than say Coltrane's solo but that's how Hank Mobley plays and there ain't a note out of place. Miles hired him, Miles recorded him and Miles picked that take ... what?

Brett Fuzz · August 2nd, 2012, 02:54 AM

Wow!

Thanks for the great post.

I recently bought Kind of Blue and will be checking out more of Miles & John Coltrane.

Excellent read.

Cheers!

maryjane · August 2nd, 2012, 03:05 AM

hey, that kind of explained country to me too

twangjeff · August 3rd, 2012, 12:26 AM

Ken +1 on you Hank Modley comments. Very underrated cat, I dig him a lot!

slowpinky · August 3rd, 2012, 01:04 AM

Listen to Hank Mobley on Miles Live at the blackhawk... And the reason why he got the gig in the best small jazz ensemble on the planet becomes very clear. His solo on oleo i can only describe as perfect bebop architecture...beautifully melodic and as Ken says. Not a note out of place.

klasaine · August 3rd, 2012, 12:07 PM

The crack about Mobley on 'Prince Will Come' is common in jazz writing.
'Possibly' either Stanley Crouch or Leonard Feather (both fine critics) said something about that particular solo(?) and since then everybody who writes about jazz says basically the same thing.

*The OP article helps to explain practically any type of music that employs improvisation - not just jazz.
Here it is even simpler: play the song, improvise on the form of the song using various musical devices for melodic embellishment, play the song again. Jazz, rock, country, bluegrass, klezmer, south indian carnatic ... basically, it's all 'sonata' form.

emu! · August 10th, 2012, 11:50 AM