Greetings from Boston, where I’m about to teach my students at NEC….
Last week in the backroom of the Village Vanguard, I overheard Walter Smith III and Ben Street talking about teaching. Walter thanked Ben for an exercise where Ben asks seemingly competent horn players to play the bass notes of “Happy Birthday” as someone else sings the tune. Walter and Ben were having a good time joking about how student saxophonists who could play fast Coltrane-styled things sometimes had trouble doing this elementary procedure.
Harmony in jazz is still indebted to functional European tradition. Sure, there are a lot of modern compositions that float from one cool sonority to another without much tonal tension and release. But the best composers of that school — the original masters include Wayne Shorter and Kenny Wheeler — still understand I, IV, and V. Tonic, subdominant, and dominant.
All you need to do to play the bass notes of “Happy Birthday” is simply put the I, IV, and V in the right place. This is a pretty important skill! My students are all gonna pass this test today — I think — but they are all also pianists. Ben’s point is a good one: Horn players should be able to manage this topic as well.
(If someone is a true beginner, root positions are acceptable. But if you study with me and know anything at all, I’m going insist on second inversion for the penultimate bar.)
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Neville Marriner would have been 100 today. The beloved British conductor was in charge of literally hundreds of LPs from the postwar record boom, mostly as the leader of The Academy of St Martin in the Fields. There was something pleasingly middlebrow about the whole enterprise, it was “classical music for the people,” often sold on subscription like encyclopedias or the great works of literature.
Indeed, the very first LP of orchestral music I listened with any regularity was a random gift award received in the mail by my mother, where Marriner conducted the Academy in Handel, Vivaldi and Telemann.
The recording was released in 1985: I would have been 12 or 13 when taking off the shrink wrap.
I realize now how important this experience was to my development. I liked the Handel and Telemann too, but mostly I listened to the Vivaldi Concerto in B Minor for Four Violins and the Vivaldi Concerto for Two Trumpets in C. The basic message of Western tonal harmony couldn’t be missed. At some point I discovered I could even sort of play along with the record. Tonic. Dominant. The subdominant. Then you modulate to a new key and engage the same set of relationships from a new bass note…
I’m not an expert in this idiom, but the performances still sound great to me today:
In an unlikely twist, the lovely Handel G major Concerto Grosso that opens the LP would turn up again when I started working for Mark Morris many years later, for Mark uses the first two movements as an overture for his famous choreography L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato.
Raising my hand for that classic Ralph Vaughan Williams LP with the Thomas Tallis and Greensleeves Fantasias, Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, and of course The Lark Ascending. Gets me every time. Happy Birthday!
For me it was church choir and Switched-On Bach. So lucky to have that stuff floating around my ears while my brain was still soft and in language-acquisition mode! (I wish there'd been some Charlie Parker too but Miles' Porgy & Bess was close enough.)