Firstly, apologies for my very dusty piano! Here's my inaugural effort at a weekly nugget of something improvised, unpolished and raw as it is. This one came out as a jaunty little thing in E major, using a sort of up-and-down the scale semiquaver motif thing which hops around a few adjacent keys and uses the note of E as a sort of pivot note to access these modulations.
But an observation that arose from this improvisation was to do with the cadence that I accidentally stumbled on near the end (at 1min 19-21secs). It immediately reminded me of a moment from beautiful recording by John Taylor, Palle Danielsson and Peter Erskine of "Touch Her Soft Lips and Part" (a composition originally by William Walton for his film score to Henry V) https://www.discogs.com/release/8728607-Peter-Erskine-Trio-As-It-Was. I was keen to suss out why this fleeting bit of harmony grabbed me so much as to have stuck in the memory years later...
At 3 mins, 41 seconds the trio return from soloing back to the second half of the melody for the "head out". In both Walton's original and the trio's arrangement, the original harmonisation of chord 6 in the second bar is with a D minor chord (we're in F major). But in the head out, John Taylor gives this moment a whole new level of poignancy with his reharmonisation. Many of us might think to turn that chord 6 (of the iii, vi, ii, V, I progression) into a dominant 7th chord, but JT adds another level of tension by actually landing on the dominant of D7, i.e. A7 which then resolves to D7, and then to the Gm7, the "2" chord.
But an observation that arose from this improvisation was to do with the cadence that I accidentally stumbled on near the end (at 1min 19-21secs). It immediately reminded me of a moment from beautiful recording by John Taylor, Palle Danielsson and Peter Erskine of "Touch Her Soft Lips and Part" (a composition originally by William Walton for his film score to Henry V) https://www.discogs.com/release/8728607-Peter-Erskine-Trio-As-It-Was. I was keen to suss out why this fleeting bit of harmony grabbed me so much as to have stuck in the memory years later...
At 3 mins, 41 seconds the trio return from soloing back to the second half of the melody for the "head out". In both Walton's original and the trio's arrangement, the original harmonisation of chord 6 in the second bar is with a D minor chord (we're in F major). But in the head out, John Taylor gives this moment a whole new level of poignancy with his reharmonisation. Many of us might think to turn that chord 6 (of the iii, vi, ii, V, I progression) into a dominant 7th chord, but JT adds another level of tension by actually landing on the dominant of D7, i.e. A7 which then resolves to D7, and then to the Gm7, the "2" chord.
At the same moment, however, Palle Danielsson on bass plays the normal root note you'd expect - a D, with the result being a chord of A7/D, which then resolves later in the bar to D7. For me though, the key to the emotional tug of this cadence is JT's specific voicing and the voice-leading it produces. In bar 2 of my transcription above, you can see he's played it as an A9b13, with both an E (fifth) and an F (flat 13th) in the chord - from the 5th mode of D melodic minor. When added together with the D in the bass, this gives us an aggregate of all 7 notes in the D melodic minor scale sounding fleetingly at once - a sound loaded with tension. In the second half of the bar, while the melody ascends to Bb, the lower two notes in both hands descend in parallel by semitones, with JT's left thumb holding onto the the F natural giving us a D7 chord with flattened 13th, sharpened and flattened 9ths - to all intents and purposes a D7 altered chord. Notwithstanding the absence of an A flat (which would have made it "fully altered" - and in fact Danielsson does oblige us with one a moment later in his bass tritone substitution), the second half of the bar has effectively become the sound of Eb melodic minor, a semitone up from the D melodic minor sound at the start of the bar, but all still underpinned by that D in the bass. Indeed, D and F are the two pitches common to both D melodic minor and Eb melodic minor and perhaps it's Taylor's retention of these notes from one chord to the next which provide a sort of anchor against which everything else moves. All this in the context of a piece of music which is largely diatonic - much of the piece including the improvising is firmly anchored within an F major scale, making this moment of arrival back at the head all the more powerful in its chromatic brevity.
In my own little improvisation which led me down this rabbit warren, at 1 min 19s I landed on a G# in the melody and a C# in the bass and it was the fact I harmonised that as a G#7/C# which resolved to a C#7alt with an ascending melody that just reminded me of that wonderful moment from Taylor/Danielsson/Erskine which seems to have embedded itself deep in the memory!
In my own little improvisation which led me down this rabbit warren, at 1 min 19s I landed on a G# in the melody and a C# in the bass and it was the fact I harmonised that as a G#7/C# which resolved to a C#7alt with an ascending melody that just reminded me of that wonderful moment from Taylor/Danielsson/Erskine which seems to have embedded itself deep in the memory!
Hammond organ - Pedal Bass
"Do you play Left Hand Bass or Pedals?" 08/08/24
One of the most commonly asked questions I encounter after an organ gig is "do you play left hand bass or pedals?". It's more or less a guaranteed question and one I don't resent being asked. For the vast majority of my gigs on organ, I'm transporting my Nord C2D with the Nord Pedal Keys, so the punters can see I've got a pedal board in front of me of which I make considerable use throughout the gig. But the question of where the bass line is being generated is a regular one, many quite fairly assuming that the presence of a pedal board must mean the bass lines are being created entirely by foot.
The explanation I've become accustomed to giving is that in the vast bulk of the jazz Hammond organ tradition, the bass line isn't conveyed exclusively by the feet on the pedals, (much as claiming to have done so would inflate my achievement in the eyes of the onlookers). But rather the bass pedals are used to reinforce and give a percussive kick to the bass lines being played by the left hand on the lower manual of the organ. It was the great Jimmy Smith who pioneered the technique of 'feathering' the bass pedals, much like a drummer 'feathers' the bass drum. Indeed, Jimmy used to tap just a single note, typically either a B or Bb which would give an additional percussive 'front' to the note he was playing in the left hand, with the light tap just giving a short, sharp, low frequency bit of 'oomph' to the note, and serving to replicate a little bit of the percussiveness that you'd get from a double bass.
One of the most commonly asked questions I encounter after an organ gig is "do you play left hand bass or pedals?". It's more or less a guaranteed question and one I don't resent being asked. For the vast majority of my gigs on organ, I'm transporting my Nord C2D with the Nord Pedal Keys, so the punters can see I've got a pedal board in front of me of which I make considerable use throughout the gig. But the question of where the bass line is being generated is a regular one, many quite fairly assuming that the presence of a pedal board must mean the bass lines are being created entirely by foot.
The explanation I've become accustomed to giving is that in the vast bulk of the jazz Hammond organ tradition, the bass line isn't conveyed exclusively by the feet on the pedals, (much as claiming to have done so would inflate my achievement in the eyes of the onlookers). But rather the bass pedals are used to reinforce and give a percussive kick to the bass lines being played by the left hand on the lower manual of the organ. It was the great Jimmy Smith who pioneered the technique of 'feathering' the bass pedals, much like a drummer 'feathers' the bass drum. Indeed, Jimmy used to tap just a single note, typically either a B or Bb which would give an additional percussive 'front' to the note he was playing in the left hand, with the light tap just giving a short, sharp, low frequency bit of 'oomph' to the note, and serving to replicate a little bit of the percussiveness that you'd get from a double bass.
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