The Classical Tinge Part 8: Tin pans and twelve tones DAVE JONES continues his series on the relationship between classical

music and jazz

The Great American Songbook com­prised a collection of songs from Mid­town Manhattan's Tin Pan Alley (the

flfSt songwriting "factory" of its type) in the 1920s and 1930s written, e.g., by George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rogers and Jerome Kern. The melodies and chord progressions from these songs inadvertently became vehicles for vast numbers of jazz interpretations contin­uing up to the present day. The songs have many Western classical music traits, includ­ing the circle of f1fths, tonal sequences and whole-tone scales; they are also often har­monically advanced.

Jerome Kern's All The Things You Are is a great example of this advanced harmony: the chord progression glides cleverly through numerous keys via the circle of ftfths and transposition, and the influence of Chopin is evident in the enharmonic change in the middle eight, which was rad­ical for a song at this time. Subsequent bebop interpretations of this · song often included brief introductions and conclu­sions that parodied Rachmaninoffs Prelude op. 3 no.2 and have become part of the jazz repertoire, but strangely seem to have little to do with the song, either in melodic or harmonic terms.

Autumn Leaves, initially composed under the name Les Feuilles Mortes with music by the Hungarian-French composer Joseph Kosma and lyrics by the French poet and

writer Jacques Frevert, was later generally regarded as part of the Songbook following Johnny Mercer's adaptation with English lyrics. This generated more widespread usage, including many jazz interpretations. It was initially expected to be used in a bal­let entitled Le Rendez-Vous by Roland Petit, but was discovered by the fJ!m director Marcel Carne who had other plans. Mercer's lyrics for Autumn Leaves shorten the song­in line with songwriting developments at the time - whereby the verse, typical of ear­lier Broadway songs, became redundant, making the chorus the focus of the song.

The chord progression for Autumn Leaves is based on a tonal sequence that is common in Western classical music from the baroque period onwards. It starts like a circle of f1fths as per All The Things You Are, but then alters its harmonic direction in order to stay within the same key, cleverly moving between relative major and minor keys via a pivot chord (a chord which exists in both the relative major and minor keys). This chord progression is largely comprised of ii­V-1 chord patterns in both major and minor keys; these patterns form the basis for most of the tunes we have come to regard as standards in jazz. Given the French origin of the music for Autumn Leaves, it seems wholly appropriate that pianists such as Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock would later apply advanced impressionistic harmonies to this most familiar of tunes.

I Got Rhythm, composed by the Rachmani­noff and Alban Berg-influenced George Gershwin, spawned numerous tunes based on the same chord sequence that became known by jazz musicians as "Rhythm Changes". Examples include Oleo (Rollins), Anthropology (Parker), The Flintstone's Theme (Hoyt Curtin) and the more harmon­ically complex Tippin' by Horace Silver with its chromatic middle-eight. The Rhythm Changes form has been one of the most heavily used in jazz, whether live or on record.

J.J. Fux, the Austrian composer and author of The Study Of Counterpoint (1725), says of musical harmony: "The purpose of harmony is to give pleasure. Pleasure is awakened by variety of sounds." If Fux had the beneftt of time travel to immediately experience developments in European classical music around two centuries later, he is likely to have found displeasure at what might be regarded as the antithesis of conventional

Arnold Schoenberg: truly monstrous?

Western musical harmony, namely the seri­alism of The Second Viennese School com­posers Schoenberg, Webern and Berg. They temporarily abandoned the conventional wisdom of the system of major and minor keys to compose with a method that exploited all 12 notes of the octave.

They replaced melodies in major and minor keys with "tone rows" composed of the 12 different notes in a particular order for each composition; these were then developed by means of inversion, reversal and retrograde inversion. The resulting music w.ould, at the time, have sounded tuneless and discordant to audiences, and in fact often does to this day. Schoenberg in particular remains a controversial f1gure amongst musicians and listeners; classical pianist Mitsuko Uchida said: "In many ways I fmd him a truly mon­strous f1gure!" Incidentally, the innovative pianist and composer Franz Liszt composed a melody using the 12 notes some 50 or so years earlier, but without using the much more formalised method developed by Schoenberg et al.

Perhaps the most obvious examples of the influence of serialism in jazz are pianist Bill Evans's Twelve Tone Tune and Twelve Tone Tune Two, composed I suspect partly because of his admiration for classical pianist Glenn Gould, with whom he shared an interest in the music of serialist composers. In Fred Binkley's cover notes for The Bill Evans Album, Evans says "I think something about the [tone] row has some validity in music .. . but I wouldn't want to base a composition on it except as a challenge". In Twelve Tone Tune, Evans generates the melody from a tone row, but otherwise doesn't follow the exact compositional rules of serialism, and uses its influence skilfully as an additional flavour within what sounds otherwise like a typically Evans-like piano trio tune.

In 2005, Alexander von Schlippenbach, the German jazz pianist and composer known for his work in free jazz, released Twelve Tone Tales: Volumes 1 and 2 for solo piano. These pieces are said to include a serialist interpretation of All The Things You Are. Interestingly, the chord progression for All The Things You Are utilises chords which are based on each of the 12 notes of the octave.

THE CLASSICAL TINGE JAZZ JOURNAL 13