Saturday Transcription

Wayne Shorter's solo on "Witch Hunt" from one of my all time favorite albums, Speak No Evil released in 1964.  This music is 50 years old and still defines what is modern.  Stellar group featuring Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Elvin Jones.  Do I have to ask if you own it?

Saturday Transcription

Miles Davis' solo from the 1954 recording of "Solar", from the album Walkin'.  You have the recording, right?   Go get it.  I'll wait. 

Interesting fact:  Miles Davis is probably not the composer.  There is a recording of guitarist Chuck Wayne performing the melody from 1946.  Get the details here.  I'm not accusing anyone of anything.  Jazz journalist Marc Myers writes this on his site:

...who knows how Davis came to the melody line in the first place. For all we know, Wayne was whistling it in the men's room at  Birdland while Davis was in there washing up.

However, if you asked Bill Evans about "Blue in Green", you might get a different angle...

Another Mic Mod

Same cheap Chinese condenser (MXL 990), this time I used a different capsule, an Rk-7, also purchased from Microphone-Parts.com.  It's supposed to give a more vintage 47 type sound.  I'm looking forward to trying it out on the ole doghizzle (through a tube preamp).

Saturday Transcription

As promised, a transcription from Kenny Dorham's Quiet Kenny album.  This is Kenny's solo on I Had the Craziest Dream by Harry Warren.   Here is the music:

Saturday Transcription

A classic from Prez:  his Lady Be Good solo from the Count Basie small group recordings.  No further discussion necessary.

Mean Tone Scale

The next evolution from the Just Scale was an attempt to solve the problem of uneven perfect fifths, while maintaining the just major thirds.  This was accomplished at the expense of the Pythagorean perfect fifth and is called the Mean Tone Scale.  The idea is to keep all three major thirds: C to E, F to A and G to B at a 5:4 ratio, make all of the major seconds equal and then make the minor seconds so the math works out (i.e. everything fits in one octave.)

Some Harmonic Problems with Just Intonation

We noticed in the last Just Intonation Post that we encounter 2 different perfect fifths: between C to G, E to B and  G to D are all the Pythagorean ratio of 3:2, but the perfect fifth from D to A is 40:27, or one syntonic comma flatter than 3:2.  This leads to some problems with basic harmony.  If we only consider I, IV and V, everything works out fine, but as soon as we add some more interesting chords to the mix, namely ii, iii and vi minor triads, we encounter a phenomenon known as drift.