A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am a member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
John Coltrane died fifty years ago today. (The rest of this post is a bit technical. My apologies.)
The “Giant Steps” album of 1959 was a turning point in jazz. The title tune represented a new idea in chord sequences. “What are those chords, man?” everyone seemed to be asking. “B D G Bb Eb - how do you play through that?” Even the great Tommy Flanagan, the pianist on the “Giant Steps” date, seems to be struggling with the changes.
As Wikipedia says, “The ‘Giant Steps’ cycle is the culmination of Coltrane's theories applied to a completely new chord progression.”
Instead of the usual progression (C, Am7, Dm7, G7) and its small variations, “Giant Steps” is based on the augmented triad B, G, Eb, with passing chords in between. Wikipedia charts the usual ii-V-I sequence against the Coltrane version.
That progression soon became part of the jazz vocabulary.
Of course, nothing is totally new. One night as I was sitting at the bar at Bradley’s, the guy I was talking to said, “You know, the ‘Giant Steps’ changes are in the verse to ‘Till the Clouds Roll By.’” That song was written by Jerome Kern (lyrics by P.G. Wodehouse) in 1917 – the earliest days of the golden age of the American popular song. I was skeptical. Coltrane’s revolutionary changes? C’mon, man. Eventually I found the sheet music, and sure enough, there they were.
(Click on the image for a larger view.)
Here’s the classic recording, with Coltrane’s solo transcribed and animated.
Today is Ella Fitzgerald’s centennial – she was born April 25, 1917 – and this my only Ella story.
One night I was sitting at the bar in Bradley’s with two pianists who had been accompanists for great singers – Dave Frishberg, who worked briefly with Carmen McRae and Anita O’Day, and Tommy Flanagan, who for many years was Ella’s musical director. “I can’t play in sharp keys,” Frishberg said, exaggerating, and Tommy agreed. Jazz musicians prefer flat keys. That’s what they’re familiar with.*
“Did you ever try to change a key with Ella?” Frishberg asked.
“Yeah, if she did a song in A, sometimes I’d try playing the intro in A♭” Tommy said. “And she’d look over at me. ‘Is that my key?’”
In addition to everything else, she had perfect pitch.
Here are Ella and Tommy doing Errol Garner’s “Misty.” Ella does the first eight bars in B♭ but then moves up to the key of B (five sharps) for the remainder of the song. You can be sure that the modulation was not Tommy’s idea.
------------------
*Rock, folk, bluegrass and other guitar-based music is usually in sharp keys – G, D, A, E. Anyone who starts guitar learns those chords first; they’re easy because of the open strings. But jazz is horn-based. Jazz musicians are more likely to be playing tunes in five flats (D♭ major) than in one sharp (G major).
An op-ed in the Times framed the first debate, and by implication the entire presidential election, as “The Minivan vs. the Maserat.” I preferred David Plotz’s take – Bart vs. Lisa.
Like Bart, Trump is often the impish devil, the bad boy. He does things his supporters would like to do were it not for the stultifying forces of political correctness. He doesn’t care about being offensive. He lives to offend. He mocks and insults those who would try to inhibit him. He pranks the smugly superior. And he never apologizes.
This persona plays well to White working-class men. An ABC News poll from Sept. 22 shows that support growing.
If White working-class men were the only voters, Trump would be a shoo-in. Nothing can alienate them. As Trump himself said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.” Well, he wouldn’t lose any of that core demographic.
But what about White working-class women? The ABC News poll shows them favoring Trump 52% - 40%, still pretty strong, but that poll was taken before the first debate. I have not found any post-debate data about those women, but I wonder how they will respond to Trump’s latest – defending his fat-shaming of Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe, then tossing some slut-shaming on top of that.
Will the Wal*Mart women appreciate Trump’s views on a woman carrying few extra pounds? Or will they sympathize with Ms. Machado? Might they see this as Trump’s version of political correctness? In both cases, working-class people are being measured against the standards of some cultural elite, and they resent it. If men resent having their attitudes characterized as “racist,” maybe women will resent having their bodies characterized as “disgusting” (one of Trump’s favorite adjectives).
I also wonder how they will react to the new anti-Clinton strategy Trump just announced. “She’s nasty, but I can be nastier than she ever can be.” What is he going to be nasty about?
Will White working-class women appreciate nastiness the way men might? And will they support nastiness directed at a woman because her husband strays? Trump thinks so.
Trump defended his choice to bring up Bill Clinton's sexual infidelities by speculating it would steal away female voters from his opponent. (NY Times)
I have absolutely no poll data on how Trump-supporting women feel about other women whose husbands cheat. But I did find this document – a song that spent three weeks at #1 on the country charts and rose to #19 on the pop charts (behind, among others, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Build Me Up Buttercup”). That was in 1969, but in the song had many subsequent covers. I am referring, of course, to Tammy Wynette’s classic “Stand By Your Man.”
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman
Giving all your love to just one man
You'll have bad times, and he'll have good times,
Doin’ things that you don’t understand.
But if you love him, you’ll forgive him
Even though he’s hard to understand.
And if you love him, oh be proud of him
’Cause after all he’s just a man.
Stand by your man, give him two arms to cling to
And something warm to come to
When nights are cold and lonely.
Stand by your man, and show the world you love him
Keep giving all the love you can.
Stand by your man.
Here is a very recent performance – Kellie Pickler at the Grand Old Opry last year.
Gone is the Tammy Wynette big hair and big mascara of nearly 50 years ago. But the sincerity of the performance and the reaction of the audience suggest that the underlying sentiment still resonates, especially in Trumpland.* Will Trump win votes by reminding women that Hillary stood by her man?
---------------------------------- *The song is such an emblematic cultural artifact that I have used it before in this blog here) and here.)
January 23, 2015 Posted by Jay Livingston (Not sociology but, to borrow Chris Uggen’s term, “self-indulgery.”)
Ward Swingle died last week. A few weeks earlier, I had been listening to this video of Andras Schiff playing the Bach C-minor partita, and I heard him play a wrong note in the Sinfonia. Maybe not wrong, but not what Bach wrote – a C instead of a B♭.* Ward Swingle was the reason I knew.
In 1963, Phillips released “Bach’s Greatest Hits” – Bach compositions done by the Swingle Singers, a vocal octet, plus drums and one of Europe’s top jazz bassists, Pierre Michelot). I listened to that record so often enough that I knew every note in the Sinfonia. I even got the sheet music, and since the left hand was mostly eighth notes at a slow tempo, I could play it in my own clumsy fashion.**
Here are the Swingle Singers lip-synching to that record. Funny, but what sounded so cool then, now sounds thin, even cheesy, especially with the drums, and I think it would be better a capella.
Because the Swingle Singers were based in Paris (many of them had been in the Double Six de Paris), I was surprised to learn from the obits that Swingle himself was not French (he grew up in Mobile, Alabama) and that Swingle really was his name rather than a nom-de-disque he invented because of its jazzy overtones.
------------------------------
* It comes at about the 2:00 mark.
** I am entirely self-taught (i.e., untaught) at the piano, and my left hand is pretty much useless for anything but chords.
The conventional story is that in the 1940s, Parker and a handful of other musicians revolutionized jazz, with bebop taking precedence over swing. The kernel of truth in that version is that Bird, Dizzy Gillespie, and others really were playing different notes and with a different sound. “Go up to Minton’s and listen to how this kid plays Cherokee,” musicians would tell one another. And swing bandleader Cab Calloway told Dizzy to “Stop playing that Chinese music in my band.”
But the Great Man version of history – great musicians getting together to create a new music – leaves out the economic, social, and technological context. For example, the 1942 musicians’ union strike primarily against the major record companies (RCA, Capital, Decca, and a few others) allowed smaller labels into the game. Those labels recorded small groups, not the big bands. So we get Bird’s legendary quintet and sextet sessions for Dial.
Even the idea of the jazz-musician-as-artist (or even genius) owes much to the decline of big bands. Big bands are the medium of the leader (also of the composers and the arrangers, but they remain largely anonymous). The musicians are more or less interchangeable. But in small groups, it’s all about the soloists. The melody is merely something the horns play in unison at the beginning and end, just to let listeners know what the tune is. Far more important are the many choruses of solos in between. Most people who listened to Duke Ellington didn’t know or care who the trumpeters were. But if you’re listening to Charlie Parker, you really want to know whether the trumpeter is Dizzy or Miles.*
Also, what seems like revolutionary change often incorporates conventional ideas. Here’s Parker’s 1953 recording of “Confirmation,” probably his best (and best-known) composition.**
The chord changes for first four bars are the substitute changes Parker often used for his solos on the blues – they’re sometimes known as “Bird changes.” But they are just a logical way to get from F in the first measure of the blues to Bb in the measure five.
F | E-7 A7 | D-7 G7 | C-7 F7 | Bb . . .
Even this chord sequence is not completely new with Parker. Tin Pan Alley composer Harry Warren used the same changes a few years earlier in “There Will Never Be Another You.”
---------------------
* I think that Marc Myers covers this territory and more in his recent book Why Jazz Happened, but I have not yet read it
**To see Bird’s solo go by in real time note by note, see this animation, which for some reason is written in the key of G, not F – which is fine if you’re playing along on trumpet or tenor sax.
“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” kept popping into my head yesterday evening. I do not like the song, though that’s irrelevant. There are other songs I dislike that frequently and against my will filter into my brain. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” even in July for example. Need I say more? But “Raindrops” is not one of those frequent unwelcome visitors to my consciousness.
So why “Raindrops” yesterday? There was no rain; I had not seen any Butch Cassidy references; nothing.
This morning, I turned on the radio (cue the “Twilight Zone” music) and heard that Hal David died yesterday.
David’s lyrics tended towards the romantic, but some of his songs are very funny, like “What’s New Pussycat,” the title song for the film written by Woody Allen. The final word of the lyric – held and extended over three notes – is “nose.” I can’t think of any other songs that end on that word.
And then there’s a hilarious version of an originally romantic song. “Parenthood” is a great movie, and it has many funny moments. One of them is Rick Moranis’s rendition of “Close to You.” (The clip below gives you a sense of the context - his wife has told him she wants a divorce, which is understandable because Moranis is such a schmuck - but I strongly recommend seeing it in the context of the full movie.)
In yesterday’s post about Ann Romney’s speech, I left out something important. I had remembered a 1978 sociology article, but there was something else in the speech, something familiar that I couldn’t quite bring to the surface. Then I read Amanda Marcotte’s Slate article, “Ann Romney Acknowledges, Embraces Sexism.” Says Marcotte, Ann Romney
offered up a . . . list of the very injustices feminists have worked, with some success, to eliminate. . . .There Ann Romney was, acknowledging that even conservative women know it to be true: Women work harder for less pay and less respect. She described sexism in fairly blunt terms.
But while Mrs. Romney aptly described the sexist inequality,
she framed it not as a problem to be fixed but a trial that women have to endure. . . . Instead of demanding equality, she encouraged her female audience instead to take their payment in martyrdom.
Then I remembered. Not a 1978 article but a 1968 hit song.
Yes, just as Mrs. Romney says, sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.
I blogged this song several years ago, making essentially the same point that Marcotte is making. On the surface, the woman is offering support for the status quo. But the text is actually a critique of the system. (My post, including the full lyric, is here,)
The contradiction is clearer if we imagine a Saudi version
Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman,
Sharing your man with three co-wives,
And knowin’ that you ladies
Get lashed if you drive the Mercedes
And wearin’ clothes that only show your eyes.
Stand by your man, . . .
When I’ve mentioned “Stand by Your Man” to students, I get only blank stares. But it might be big this week at the False Consciousness karaoke bar in Tampa.
