You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - What To Do With One Chord - #159

Episode Date: July 18, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam discuss some techniques for doing more with less. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Adam Maness. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Did you notice how I tried to change my pitch a little bit on that way? You did, and I was trying to react as a good jazz musician would, but I wasn't classy enough because you're really classing things up today. What's up? I'm just trying to like, well, first of all, I have a orchestra gig later tonight, so I'm going to be on a tuxedo.

I only do a handful of occasions a year. Is this a tuxedo or tails? No, this is actually... Because a lot of these orchestras just put those... penguin things with the tail and everything on. You know, don't tell anybody, but it's really a black suit that I'm going to be putting on a bow tie. You know, it's an old trick is if you take a black suit.

Well, I mean, now a tuxedo can be a black suit. It doesn't matter. But, you know, I remember we used to, like, wear a black pants and then you put that, like, shiny black tape on the side, and that becomes tuxedo pants. I might do that. I think we have some right here in the studio, man. Yeah, that would be nice. So we have a listener question today, which is also pretty classy, too.

So let's take a listen to that. Hmm, that is interesting. Yeah. That's a great question. Thank you, Peter. Well, we should be, I mean, how many times have we both been in this situation, same as what Peter's talking about. So we should have some good answers for this, right? Yeah, it's difficult because it really depends on the context.

You know, is it a ballad and you're on a minor chord? Is it a up-tempo swing and you're just on a B-flat major six for four bars? Or a burner. Or a burner. Yeah, like there's a, there needs to be a little context. Now, there are some options, of course. you know, there are turnarounds. You could do melodic content.

You can definitely do some chromatic stuff if there's room, as long as the singer's not singing anything. Right, right. Well, I think it's, I'm just trying to kind of think about the question. There's two parts. There's the two facets to it, I think. There's the one chord, which seems to be, maybe he's a little bit hung up on that.

It's like, wow, it's one chord. And I remember being like, you know, getting to that point where you feel like one chord's almost harder than a progression because if you're going to interject something melodically or whatever, you don't have as much, you think it's easier. And at first it kind of is, but then you don't have kind of these harmonic guide posts for your melody to weave around.

But like what you said, you can sometimes put a turnaround if it's the appropriate thing to do. And then that gives you some of that so you don't, if you feel like it's too stationary. But sometimes you just really need to be confident. And I know we say number one, listen a lot, but it's really for this situation, having that space in between something a singer's doing,

it's not necessarily like a mini solo situation as much as like what fits into the situation for what he or she has just sung and what they're likely to do next in the context of that. And then being confident over that one chord, you know, be a major, minor, whatever, to just create something, you know,

maybe it's not a melody, maybe it's just, you know, a series of really nice chords. Yeah, it could be colors for sure. Yeah. Yeah, there's a few options there. I would start, just as Peter was saying, and start with very simple colors. And the key to that, like you said, man,

is being confident about it, right? It's like, this is what I want to do here. There's not a lot happening harmonically, but we're going to give you these colors. You know, for pianists, this is why you develop things like right-hand voicings. You know, so you can play the bass note and you can do some colors up high

and make these little textures in space. I'm especially thinking, like, if this is a ballad, perhaps. Yeah, I know I keep thinking valid, too, because it's like you're sitting. I mean, if it's up-tempo and it's just a couple measures on one chord, I mean, it's going to kind of fly by. Oh, you know what would be great is Peter and everybody, you guys check out Shirley Horn. There you go. You know, she's such, I mean, look, she's got the advantage of accompanying herself usually. But, I mean, she's really, like, these kind of situations, you can find these a lot, especially on, like, that here's to life.

album, although there's a lot of things happening with the orchestra, but there's some places where it just breaks down as a trio, and they're definitely sitting on different kinds of chord for a while, and she'll just do some nice octave sometime and just kind of laying in the groove, like an octave with the right hand, and some really simple nice voicing in the left hand. And then just a little bit of octave movement, which gives it that melodic thing that's needed kind of in between. I mean, she's such a patient singer, the way she phrases and really just sits on those. lyrics at the right place and give space then to the piano. I think there's a wealth of information and ideas just in studying her piano playing. That's really good advice, actually. And then you could throw in, you know, if you're all in some kind of groove, you could throw in a melodic line with two hands. You could throw in a melodic line with the bass, I do often. If you absolutely need some kind of chord change, you can start with throwing in a five. you know, if you have two bars of B-flat or whatever,

on beat four of that first bar, put in an F-7-sus chord going back to B-flat. It just gives you this nice... And then you can... It gives you a little mini-tension and release is what that's kind of doing, right? Exactly. With the dominant. And you can alter it up a little bit if you want to have a... If the situation is appropriate...

Right. To have that in the music, that's the key. That is the key. Yeah. And I mean, whatever the appropriate situation is, you know, depending on how loose the gig is and what the music is calling for, You can do all sorts of crazy stuff in two bars of one chord. I mean, you can do a whole turnaround where you end up on the chord again

in the last beat of the second bar. You know what I mean? Yeah. There's a whole host of things you could do. And I think there are occasionally times when that would be appropriate. I mean, that would be less common. Yeah. But if you catch the appropriate time to do something,

I mean, you could even go up like kind of giant steps kind of cycle, you know, minor third, perfect fourth, minor third, and then come back. And that could work really well at the right time. You could do the ladybird turnaround. up to the minor third and then in fourths until you get back to the one. You know, there's a whole... You could take a package of lady fingers and make Terry Missou as well. I don't know if you have time to do that.

That would be fun. Yeah, I mean, the key to this is to experiment and maybe find some movements. Oh, you know, here's another thing is maybe some voice leading movements on one chord. You know, I'm thinking of like, you know, one, all with like the root on the top. one, two, you know, sharp, sharp to diminished to one over three, those kind of movements. There are a ton of stuff like that that you can do.

Yeah, and I think the general thing for this to be like a nice sort of continuing education thing is to find musical examples on recordings, you know, hopefully that you already like or know because they're already kind of spinning around in your ears. And then go to those exact things. like if you want to learn how to do it in between a vocalist on a major chord, you'd go to one of these Shirley Horn examples, and there's so many others. And I think it'd be very similar in between a horn player playing something. It's not that much different between a vocalist from the piano standpoint in terms of filling in a lot of the same kind of things.

But to find these examples, and you might each day or maybe every two or three days, transcribe exactly what they're playing as close as you can get it. What a great ear training thing. But that gives you an example. Now, the great thing about these is they can work over a number of different two. it's not going to just be for that tune. It's going to be for that situation. So you don't have to worry about like,

oh, I want to play the tune so I can try it out. Now, you're going to have a technique in your hands and more importantly in your ears that will kind of spring up, just like learning vocabulary. I mean, you want to learn it in an organic way. You read the newspaper. If you read a, you know, a book or something, you find a word that you don't know.

You figure out the definition, but you've learned it in context already, and then you'll be able to say it at some point, but you'll be able to do it in context. That's right. You know, the thing that we might be overlooking here too is that sometimes it's okay to not do anything like sometimes it's okay to just let you won't hear it kind of yeah it's all right to let some space happen we as pianists we tend to

always want to fill every gap we can think of we just gave like 80 examples and the 81st was you know silence but absolutely whoever composed that tune was probably just like I just wanted that one core yeah thanks for the the diminishes the dominant everything really just in two bars yeah it's it's okay to let some stuff breathe occasionally nah nah No, that is. And actually, you know what? That you'll hear a lot of that with Shirley Horn on that here's to life record for sure. Another great one.

I'm just thinking of some examples. She did a record called I Love You Paris, and it's kind of dodgy to get it. For some reason, it's been out of print a lot and like not on Spotify or whatever. But if you can get your hands on that, that's, you know, trio, live record, fantastic album. And great examples of this. Nice. Yeah. That's great.

Cool. Well, Peter, we hope that helps. Yeah. Yeah. I think that we covered pretty much what you can do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of very ways. Yeah, just use it at, you know, use it at the appropriate times. That's the thing. Try it out. As always listen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, number one, listen. So normally we talk about all the wonderful ratings and reviews, but I'm feeling like my self-esteem is so high today. I think we could skip it. Should we give a day off? Yeah, we should. All right. So tomorrow, tomorrow we'll be back. But please leave us a rating of review because it really, beyond just our self-esteem, even when our self-esteem is a little higher, it does some great things because we found out it actually helps other people. It's not about us. It helps other people discover this. And, you know, we actually didn't think that highly of ourselves until we started hearing from people that this was really fun and useful. And we're glad. I mean, we're really doing this for you guys and as a nice little antidote to our other things that we have to do here.

What else do we do here? oh, you know, we put some lessons together. We practice the piano occasionally. Just trying to make sure people know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think that because people are enjoying it, as long as people are enjoying it, we're going to keep doing it. Every day, day in and day out, you know.

But the ratings and reviews kind of help spread the word because then iTunes and Google Podcasts and all this kind of move us up in the jazz podcast rankings of which were number one of two right now, which is nice. That's excellent. I think we have number two as well. Yeah. And then, you know, the more people that can listen to the podcast, the more you'll hear it.