You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Listener Question: Arranging - #138

Episode Date: June 19, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam field a user question about voicings and arranging. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Peter Martin. And I'm Madam Manus. And this is the You'll Here at podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Yeah, and we almost didn't come at you today due to some technical issues here. Man, I'll tell you what. You're sweating there. I know.

Well, you know, there's a lot going on here. We've got to come over with topics. We've got to try to entertain the folks. And then if anything on the computers don't work, we're all screwed. So your 1991 MacBook is still documenting everything correctly. I have those ones from like 98 with the fluorescent backs, you know, the old IMAs. Yeah, those are great. Good.

So today we're going to have, we're going to delve into some issues about arranging, I believe, right? Yeah, we had a user question on You'll Hear at dot com, which, as you know, you can go to and leave us a written question or you can leave us a voice question. This was a written question from a man named Charles Nesbitt, and he says, I take arranging lessons and often reharmonized tunes for the arrangements. I'd like to be able to function a lot better in terms of playing through these reharmonized changes. and quite honestly, lead sheets in general. As we know, voicings play a big role in how the harmony sounds to the ear. Do you two have any practical tips in terms of practicing voice leading that still allows you to play great voicing? I think it's a great question.

It is. And you, I know you always preach that, you know, there's no such thing as one great voicing, that a voicing is within context for what happened before and what happens after. And that is all voice leading. Yes. Yeah, and I'm so glad. Thank you, Charles, for the question. I'm so glad that you included voice leading with voicing several times within that question because I, yeah, I'm a big believer in, you know, voicing's being part of progressions and really, you know, it's, whenever we think we hear a brilliant voicing, it's always been set up by something.

That's what I was just going to say. Sometimes very simple voicings sound amazing to us because of the voice leading that has taken place to get there. Yeah. You know. And so I mean, yeah. And so I think that the study of harmony is as much about counterpoint and, you know, how individual lines work. And then also certainly what the harmonic function of different chords and voicings are, but then how those work together.

So we're always, I think the easiest way to think about it is horizontal and vertical. You know, vertical being being the harmony and horizontal being the counterpoint. And that constant kind of interplay between those. A lot of times when we start. really delving into re-harmonization and different types of advanced harmony, it's very easy to get stuck and thinking a little bit too vertically. So if you're visually oriented especially, and then also in terms of just the timeline,

like the horizontal is the time going. And so the timing of the groove and how these harmonies work within that have such a big impact on the sound as well. It's so true. And you know, as pianists, we often, we get in, into these bad habits or can get into the bad habits of just plopping our hands down. Yeah. You know, in blocks on the keyboard.

And that could be a sound. There's definitely a sound to that, you know, F7 burnout. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever it is. But the masters of this art form of jazz piano and of voicings, people like Herbie, of course, we're the number one always, but Keith Jared and Bill Evans and anybody who really has this, you have this, all the greats have this, is this really master of the, you know, individual voices within these voicings that move from one to the other. And, you know, Charles,

this was really, I really unlocked this by going all the way back. Take it back. Take it back. Take it back to study classical harmony, to study four-part sort of choral style voicing. Yes. You know, like there's a great book actually called The Study of Counterpoint. This was a book that Hayden himself studied under Beethoven. use this book. Yosef Hayden? Yosef Hayden. And Ludwig von Beethoven.

Use this book, and you could still buy it, which is amazing. Use this book to learn counterpoint. You can get in like this little tiny paperback, and there are a bunch of rules and exercises to practice those rules. Now, when you do this, you're going to sound like that era. Like that's kind of the goal of the book. It wasn't written with a time machine. It wasn't.

No, no, no. But it's actually really, really hip, and you can apply these same. voicing, these same ideas to ninth voicings and 13th voicings. It's just, you know, we've kind of complexed up the harmony and the core changes. Yeah, the concepts stay the same. The concepts stay the same. And even when you break these rules, it's really good to know these rules.

I use these rules all the time about, about, you know, what intervals can move where they can move to together, you know, parallel or against each other. I mean, it's really cool. So it's called the study of counterpoint. Sorry. It's called the study of counterpoint. I'm nervous because there's a name here that I'm not sure how to pronounce,

but it's from Johann Joseph Fuchs, and that's FUX. So you're going with Fuchs? That's interesting. Well, it started off with Fuchs. I don't know, it's getting dangerous. But it's FUX.

It's a family podcast. It's FUX, yeah. It's from his gratis and Parnasam, and it's translated and edited by Alfred Mann. Like I said, I got it in paperback for like eight bucks and it totally changed the way I thought about voicings. Wow.

No, that's great. I mean, I think that, you know, what you just mentioned about knowing the rules and then knowing what it sounds like to break them, I think is so important. I mean, you know, it's the same way I learned harmony. I think I learned out of a book. I don't know if it was the original one, but I definitely studied it later on, Walter Piston, Harmony. And I think Counterpoint was by Piston as well.

And this is much later than the fuchs that you're referring to. But I mean, same principles, you know, parallel fists, parallel octaves and stuff. But, you know, thankfully, McCoy Tyner didn't feel restricted by parallel fifths with his left hand. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. But it's good to know both. It's good to know where that. And what it sounds like. And what it sounds like.

And what it means. And, I mean, there's, I think that there's times, you know, to your point of knowing what it sounds like and then knowing what it sounds like to break the rules. Then you can let your ears, then you'll hear it. For sure. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things. and I was just looking back at your question, Charles. You said any practical tips in terms of practicing voice leading.

One thing that helped me a lot was actually not even really within jazz. And that was, I remember my father, who's a classical music. Actually, he plays a lot of different styles of music. Just a great musician has great ears. When he saw I was getting interested in jazz and kind of some arranging and trying to learn voicings, he didn't know, he knew a lot about hearing jazz and he could play piano, but he didn't play a lot of jazz piano. So, but he was, he understood how you had to be able to hear those inner movements to be able to

effectively play and, man, be creative within this, this idiom. So he, I remember he took me up to, like, the local Methodist church, a couple blocks from our house. We walked up there in the middle of the day and he's like, come here, I got something that's going to help you with, with your voicing. I was like, what's, what's in the church? Are we going to pray for better voices? I mean, hey, I'm, I'll try it. It might work. I try it for once. But we went in and he nabbed one of those Methodist hymnals. And this is very unlike my father because he's very straight-laced, law-abiding. And I was like, damn, you're just going to take?

He's like, no, we're just going to borrow it. He's like, all this stuff is the word of God, the music of God. It's supposed to be freely available. So we take this, we'll bring it back. And so we got home and he just showed me. He's like, this is what you do. Go through and play these four-part hymns and, you know, leave out the tenor or the bass voice and sing that as you're reading them.

Nice. so that you can start to hear it and then feel it the independent, you know, it's kind of ear training, but it's also to see that very basic four-part voice leading. And you talk about there's no breaking any rules in that. You know, it's very straight. It's not even like the Bach four-part corrals, which I got into later. Right, right. Which are really cool because he breaks some of the rules at interesting places.

Right. He's a super musical genius and that's whatever he wants. Yeah, yeah. But I took that, the Methodist hymnal, and then, you know, just worked on that, kind of got my ears together there, and then moved on to the Bach corrals to do the same thing. sing the missing parts as much as I could individually and then try to sing those inner voices. And you can kind of just choose whatever your range is, you know. You know what's so great about that and what's so great about working on these choral

voicing and working on four part, four part harmony, the SATB stuff, is that, you know, the human voice, all of these arrangements for choral music, they come because the human voice, it's easiest to move in steps, right? And it's, or certain intervals. It's hard to hear certain things. That's why great jazz choirs are amazing that can do all these tight, whatever. That takes a lot of work a big year. But for your average churchgoer in Europe

in the 1700s or whatever, you know what I mean? They're a farmer, and they have to sing these things on Sunday. So they wrote with these stepwise motions, these easy-to-hear intervals. And it actually makes a lot of sense as people to play these for people on the piano

because your listener can hear each movement. You know, there's no, like, there's no crazy jumps of faith that they have to take. Like, they can hear what you're trying to do. Even when you're doing complex harmony, it makes it that much richer. Yeah.

And I mean, I think it gives, even as, you know, even at the piano in which we can, in theory, play any jump just about on the instrument. It doesn't mean we should. Exactly. You know, this kind of simplification of the inner voice movement can be very effective. And then, if you want to have a jump every now and then,

you start to learn what that sounds like and what that takes. Because, yeah, maybe it's not going to be sung so you can do things. But you have to also think about arranging, you know, like for saxophones and trumpets and stuff. They can't make certain jumps like we can on the piano. Or they can, but they're going to be out of tune. You know, like the trumpet, you have to learn about the different vials and how they have to kick it out. There's certain interval, like major sevens from like a flat to a natural and stuff.

You have to be very careful and either, you know, learn a little bit about the trumpet or grab a trumpet player and just say, can this? I mean, yeah, it can be dumb. But can this be done without playing out of tune? And if you needed to be in tune right at the beginning, you might need to make another choice. Yeah. Some kind of other note to go. And those are all covered in good counterpoint books.

Right. You know, those decisions. Yeah. I think it's really crucial. And we're talking like, oh, you know, this is basic stuff. But if you haven't done this before, you're going to discover some things here that sound really, really good. Absolutely. And then I'm just thinking about, you know, other practical things.

And then to get into, like, and I love building up from the very simple. So those, you know, Methodist or Baptist hymnals, like Catholic. I don't know what their things are. They might even be like two voices. They're going old school. Yeah. Well, you know, Lutheran hymns, there's a lot of Bach stuff in there. So that's a little bit, a little bit more complex probably.

Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, all that stuff is great. And then I think getting into jazz, you know, certainly some of the Duke Gallington arrangements are great. But even I'm thinking, like, at the piano, the crepuscule with Nelly by Thelonius Monk, which is actually based upon a hymn from, I believe, because I remember when I first was listening to my dad said, he's like, oh, that's an old hymn from, I think it might be. Aphodist or something, yeah. Wow.

And please hit us up at you'll hear it.com if I'm incorrect on that. But that's a great. And there's a couple of different arrangements that he did solo piano. And then he did the one with, I can't remember who's, but with the horns and stuff. You know, speaking of like the hymnal arrangements or whatever, I'm just reminded, I just kind of rediscovered this book by Jack Riley called The Harmony of Bill Evans,

like a very famous book that Mr. Riley wrote about Bill Evans, how he got to his voicing. and he, I think he knew Bill Evans and apparently Bill Evans when he learned a new tune, the first thing he would do, would do SATB voicings through it, closed and open and combinations

and really trying to get that sound we're talking about and then he would expand from there. I mean, that tells you, if you want to go for voicing and voice editing, you can't get much better than Bill Evans for that kind of stuff. Well, great stuff. Thanks, Charles, for the question,

and folks, please keep the questions coming. We love them. Well, we don't love all of them, but we love about what, 35% of them. Hey, yeah, most of them were good. Some of them were not great. We actually had a quote, we had when we can't even mention here.

We had a very politically incorrect. So try to keep it. I mean, you could say whatever you want or ask whatever you want, but just no. Like, this is a family podcast. Certain stuff don't ask because we're not going to answer it. You know, that's not the way we are. That's right. And as always, you know, you can leave us a rating and review.

We really appreciate those. Someone said today, they're going to leave us seven stars. Now, come on. Now, look at Peter's like, oh, that's ridiculous. That's incredulous. After months of... Can it be none, though? Well, let's find out.

So maybe try leaving us seven stars on iTunes. I don't know. Let's see what happens. Well, it's possible. You know, I heard about this... I was in Oman last month doing a gig. I was in Oman. Yeah.

And there's... I think we stopped over somewhere, Dubai or Abu Dhabi or something, and we're changing planes. And there's supposed to be this hotel. There's a seven-star hotel. The world's only seven-stare-old. That's not real, though.

No, no, it's a real hotel. Oh, please. You know. So if that's possible. But that seven stars just paint it on. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, good stuff.

You'll hear it.