I know I'm jumping around a bit, but I thought I'd share the chords to Nice Work If You Can Get It, another tune I'm playing with vocalist Jeannette O'Toole right now.

The singer had a chart. Band-In-A-Box Groups has a BIAB file. I have a fake book with a chart. They're all useless!

Why are these charts so bad? Either because they are obviously wrong, or really because they're just too elaborate to play with on a gig.

All of these charts seem to want to put a chord on each beat of the last couple of measures of the A section. That's fine for a custom arrangement, but I want the freedom to fill in those chords spontanteously, elaborating a simpler version, rather than having it all spelled out for me.

I went back to the sources - I listened to 5 versions of the tune on free.napster.com, and decided that the Joe Pass and Carmen McCrae were the ones with the most straightforward statements of the harmony. I picked one and listened in SlowGold for a while, but I have to confess, it still took some puzzlin' and thinkin' until I came up with a sufficiently boiled-down version of the A section, as follows (in C):

E7 A7 | D7 G7 | C7 F7 | D D#dim |
C A7   | D7       | Dm7 G7  | C B7alt |

Well, that's not too hard. A couple of observations:

• All the charts I saw had the first 2 chords altered in some way. You don't need to play or remember the alterations, but it might be useful to remember that the melody in the first measure is E - F - F - E, so E7b9 - A7+ would be the alterations that invoke or fit the melody best (which is most useful during the actual head, so you don't play, for instance, a regular E9, which would be nasty against the melody).
• In terms of memorization, this is just a cycle of 5ths for 3 measures, a little transition, and then a stretched 1-6-2-5 (and the B7 is just the transition back to the top).

I'm experimenting with stories and visuals as memory aids. It is a staple of memory theory.  Cycles of 5ths happen so often and are so easy to play through without much conscious thought that I am picturing them as Buddhas. Yup, that's right. And the 1-6-2-5 cycle is so common, I call it "Home" and visualize a house.

So I visualize the A section of "Nice Work" like this: 3 Buddhas roll down a 3-step staircase, crawl a very short distance up a very short dirt trail, and enter a very long (stretched) ranch-style house.

That's it, but what's it mean? The 3 Buddhas are for the fact that the first sequence starts on III7, and also continues for 3 measures (take me from E7 though the F7). Rolling down the staircase is another basic image I've created for the common move of descending by 3 half-steps (usually I-VI, though not so here, where we go F7 down to D).  A crawl up is a metaphor for hitting the diminished transition chords as you move up by half-steps, so it covers the move to the D#dim. Finally, the elongated ranch house is the "stretched home" which means I VI II ii V7 in this case.

OK, here's my story for "How High The Moon" - we covered the chords earlier in the blog, and it relates to the String of Pearls pattern: You're walking along a moonlit (naturally) path, and you encounter a pile of 4 gigantic pearls, each about 8-feet in high, stacked as a little pyramid (3 on the bottom one on top). (exaggeration and specificity are both important in memory. that's why the pearls are so large, and stacked in a particular way). You pass that stack and encounter another stack just like it. After that is a single 8-foot pearl. After that the path passes by one dark-colored house and then to a light-colored one.

If Footprints isn't exactly one of those "embarassing not to know" tunes, then it's pretty close. At any rate, it's fun to play The chords are easy, and this time I'll start to talk about memorizing melodies a little bit, too.

Here are the chords:

| Cm7 | x 8

| Fm7 | x 4

| Cm7 | x 4

| D7 | D7 | Db7 | Db7 |

| Cm7 | x 4

So what is this, really? It's a 24-bar minor blues in ¾ time with a II7 where you'd expect the V (I'm assuming that you'll just naturally remember, or hear or feel that the D7 goes down to a Db7). A 24-bar blues feels just like a 12-bar blues, so you probably will reduce the concise description to:

minor blues in ¾ time with a II7 where you'd expect the V

As far as the melody goes, first, a reference: How to Learn Tunes, by David Baker, Volume 76 in the Jamey Aebersold Jazz series is an interesting book, especially insofar as memorizing melodies is concerned. He has a system for memorizing chords as well. It shares certain elements with the system I'm developing here, but of course the fact that I'm developing a system at all shows that I didn't really find Baker's chordal system that effective for me personally, for whatever reason. Nonetheless, he has a lot of good ideas about memorizing melodies.

Before memorizing the melody, let's try and understand what key it's in, and something about where it stops and starts and where the jumps are.  So, before trying to describe it concisely, let's note some facts:

• Even though the tune is notated as being in C major in the Real Book, that can't be the real key! That's just mental laziness on the part of the transcribers. The tune starts and ends with Cm chords - the natural guess for what the key should be would be the key of Cm, or 3 flats. But, in fact, if you examine the melody closely, you'll see that all the A's are natural. The melody (with the exception of the II7 section) is really rather clearly in the key of Bb - two flats. So you can think of the tune as being
  • in Cm with natural A's (when you play a minor key, you often find that either a natural 6th degree of the scale or a flatted 6th work in a song, but not both).
  • OR/ALSO in Bb major, with the melody note beginning on I and ending on V.
  • OR/ALSO in C dorian
• The first phrase is scalar, starting on I (thinking in Bb maj), with skips coming off the high C and the F near the end
• The second phrase also begins on I, but goes up before going down, with only 1 skip, off the Bb, before repeating the last motif of the first phrase.
• The II7 section starts on B natural and has several m3 skips up.

I don't think this is quite enough description to memorize the whole melody - but it'll probably get you close enough to fake it, until you've played the tune enough to know it. I may have more to say as I continue to internalize the melody.