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.

here's a real quickie: I just noticed that one of my favorite tunes, Kaper & Washington's Invitation is composed almost entirely of the up a fourth pattern. Of course, one of the tricks is that the chord changes tend to occur in unusual places (the first change is at bar 6 instead of at bar 5, where most people seem to expect it). But, aside from that, the entire A section is up a 4th. Then it's a switch to the minor to start the bridge, and continuing on the up-a-4th pattern up to the last 4 bars of the B section. After that it's a turnaround-from-iii back to the top (where a "turnaround from <degree>" could be considered to be a sequence that cycles in 4ths or descending half-steps, or a more generalized concept of "play any turnaround of appropriate length" for a more free-thinking approach). Memorizing the coda is an exercise for the reader.

Invitation is kind of amazing in how relentlessly it pushes up a 4th, without ever being tempted to resolve back to i until the very end of the AB form. It goes through every root in the chromatic scale!

Ok, now can you play the song in another key?

In my ideal universe, I'd never have to memorize a tune. I'd just hear all the changes as they come by and know what to play.

Unfortunately, my ideal universe appears to be on backorder, so I have to use alternate strategies. Like, the other day I was listening to a recording of "How High The Moon", and I recognized some of the chord patterns we've been talking about in the last couple of entries. So I decided to see how many of the changes I could write down off the top of my head, just from recognizing the patterns, without trying to work out the chords one-by-one with SlowGold.

Now, I basically know that the tune has kind of an A-A' structure - you might call it an AB structure if you wanted to be formally correct, but that misses the point that the "B" is just the A with a slightly different turnaround. So I decided to concentrate on the A part - the first 16 bars.

I could hear our old friend all over the place in this tune - this friend being the major-to-minor minipattern where the minor chord is then treated as the ii of a ii-V7-I. I knew the tune began on GMaj7, and I could readily hear 2 repetitions of this sequence at the start. That gave me the first 8 bars:

| G | G | Gm | C7 |

| F | F | Fm | Bb7 |

That seemed to work pretty well. Now, I thought the pattern might continue on to the Eb, but I wasn't sure. So I decided to call that unknown for now, and skip forward to a part of the song I had a good deal of confidence in: the turnaround at the end of the A section.

Knowing how the song is usually played, I recalled that the last couple of measures have a chord change every two beats, and there's an obvious descending by half-steps pattern that commences the turnaround. We haven't talked about this pattern yet, but, briefly, it's a variant (through tritone substitution) of the up-a-fourth pattern. For example, E7-Eb7-D (which might appear as various 7 and m7 chords with alterations to taste) is essentially "the same" as E7-A7-D, because the A7 and Eb are a tritone away from each other (try spelling out an A7b5 chord and an Eb7b5 chord - they're exactly the same!), which gives them a similar-enough-but-different-enough sound to make for an interesting substitution.

So, anyway, I can mentally hear that the section ends with descending by half-steps. Since I know that "the law" says that the last two chords of this section have to be the ii-V7 in order to turn around back to the I, the chords leading into the ii must be first 2 and then 1 half-steps above the ii. So that allows me to fill in the last two bars as:

| B Bb | Am D7 |

Now, I'm not sure whether those first two chords are going to be minor or dominant (I'm pretty sure they're not going to be Maj7 because passing chords rarely are). But I know that the key is G, so that at least tells me the B is likely to be Bm. As far as the Bb goes - well, the truth is that you can get away with either Bb7 or Bbm7 here (or even the tritone subs E7 or Em7 or Em7b5...) so you don't have to worry about it too much. Dominant 7th is often the best bet, since it is frequently used in place of m7 anyway, and in this case it's positioned between two minor chords and a little variety couldn't hurt. So, I'd go for

| Bm Bb7 | Am D7 |

as my "final answer" for the last two bars of the A section.

Filling in the rest of the A section was a little more tricky. This is what I had so far:

| G | G | Gm | C7 |

| F | F | Fm | Bb7 |

| Eb? | ? | ? | ? |

| ? | ? | Bm Bb7 | Am D7 |

This is the point at which I decided to consult the Real Book to fill in the gaps. I don't feel too bad about not getting the whole song this time around - I've written down a good large chunk of it easily and with confidence, which is better than I would have done before I started working on memorization. Here are the full chords:

| G | G | Gm | C7 |

| F | F | Fm | Bb7 |

| Eb | Am7 D7 | Gm7 | Am7b5 D7b9 |

| G | Am7 D7 | Bm Bb7 | Am D7 |

OK, now how do we memorize the rest of what's going on here, and describe the whole shebang concisely? Before describing the entire song, let's introduce one new piece of imagery to our lexicon: let's find a way to describe this very common combination of the the major-to-minor minipattern where the minor chord is then treated as the ii of a ii-V7-I that we've seen in this tune and Solar. I don't know if there's some standard description of this, but for my memory purposes, I'm going to call this the String Of Pearls patttern.

The succinct mental description

This is always the core of memorizing the tune. The succinct mental description of the A section is: Starts on I, follows String of Pearls through the first 9 bars. Then plays with ii-V7-I, first back to the minor and then the major. Then turnaround. Pretty soon, this becomes "Pearls, then ii-V-Is." Then we imagine lassoing the moon with a lasso made of pearls, and we can never forget it (there are a lot of other interesting general, non-musical, memory tricks and principles that you can also apply, and one of them is to create vivid, somewhat ridiculous mental images).

The B section is nearly identical. Just play the A section but omit the first ii-V-i to the Gm, and fill in with the obvious ii-V at the end of the form to make up the space.

- Warren

Memorization is much easier once you start to recognize certain chord patterns that occur over and over again in jazz - you'll be able to memorize phrases and sentences instead of letters and words, if you will. This will get you going in that direction, with the example of Miles Davis' jam classic, Solar, as an illustration.

Here are the chords to Solar (every major chord below should be understood as a Major 7th):

|   Cm  |   Cm   |   Gm   | C7     |

|   F    |   F      |   Fm   | Bb7   |

|   Eb   |  Ebm - Ab7 | Db  | Dm7b5 - G7+ | 

Principle 1: Most alterations reduce to 7

This is a key ingredient to memorization. You emphatically don't have to memorize all the nitpicky little extensions  (such as 9, 13b5, 11, etc.) that you sometimes see in jazz charts. Once in a while, a chord alteration is critical to the feel of a chord, but often the alteration is only introduced into the chordal notation in order to accomodate the melody note. Great guitarists such as Joe Pass and Jimmy Bruno can be found on their (excellent) instructional DVDs saying things like: "there are only 3 main types of chords: major (or major 7th), minor (or minor seventh), and dominant seventh chords. Don't take chord symbols that literally - when you see a dominant 7th chord, play an alteration: a 9th, 13th, or whatever seems right."

I think this advice is generally right, with a few caveats:

• In addition to the 3 main types of chords mentioned above, augmented and diminished chords are also fairly common. Although you can, indeed, think of both of these as altered 7th chords, it's often better to think of them as augmented or diminished, because their "flavor" and scale implications are so strong. (A Bb diminished chord can be thought of as an altered A7, for instance, and an augmented chord is basically a 7th chord with a raised 5th). In terms of memorization, you will rarely try to memorize a diminished chord as such, because diminished chords are almost always passing chords in larger patterns that you will know.
• There's also that half-diminished chord, otherwise known as the m7b5 chord, which has a unique character and almost always appears as the ii chord in a iim7b5-V7alt-i pattern when you're in a minor key.

The Chord Pattern Dictionary - Part 1

Let's start establishing a pattern dictionary - there are a handful of chordal patterns that show up in jazz again and again.

Two Chord Mini-Patterns

First, there are several mini-patterns for chord changes - suppose you're playing a chord, and you don't know what the next one should be. Now, if you're going to take a WAG (wild-ass guess) at the next chord in a jam, it might be a good idea to keep it at a pretty low volume until you know whether you're right or not. However, let's talk about the relative frequency of "binary" (two-chord) mini-patterns.

1. Up a fourth. By far the most common pattern in jazz and, indeed, most Western popular music. The very common ii-V7-I pattern consists of two repetitions of the Up a fourth mini-pattern. The B section of a tune, if there is one, seems to begin on the chord a fourth up from the tonic (the main chord of the A section) at least 75% of the time! The first chord change of a standard 12-bar blues for is almost always a move up a fourth. In Miles Davis' Solar, for instance, there are 12 chord changes (counting the change from the last chord of the turnaround back to the first chord at the top). Of these, eight!!! of them are up a 4th (and two more of them are the next pattern, leaving only a tiny bit left to memorize that's not in either pattern).
2. Major to minor - major chords often turn to minor, turning a I into the ii of a ii-V7-I. It's a way of modulating to the key a whole step down. In Solar, this happens twice: the Fmaj7 in bar 5 goes to an Fm7 chord in measure 7, and then Ebmaj7 goes to Ebm7.

Patterns

This is just a start on patterns. Please add your own in the comments if you have some.

1. Of course, if you have played much jazz at all, you know that the ii-V7-I pattern is everywhere. In fact, it's so pervasive that we mostly don't even have to memorize it - we just follow along.
2. In minor keys, the analogue to ii-V7-I is iim7b5 - V7alt - i. In my experience, the preferred alterations (but not the only) for the V7 are augmented and 7b9.
3. ii-V7-I patterns are often used sequentially, connected by the Major-to-minor minipattern. In fact, Solar is almost entirely composed of this. Everything in Solar, except for the first 2 measures and the move to the turnaround (measure 11 to 12) is composed of this pattern!
4. The last measure or two of a piece is always a turnaround leading to the I or i, and it's usually pattern 1 or 2 above.

Putting it together - learning Solar with Patterns

There are only two easy things you need to remember in order to memorize all 12 chord changes in Solar, in any key!

1. The first chord change is from i to v (Cm to Gm). This s a pattern we haven't yet discussed - it's really a roundabout way to get from Cm to F major. Normally a Cm tonic would go to an Fm as its 4th degree, but the move to the the Gm, which fits just fine in a Cm scale, sets up the modulation to F.
2. The song basically follows pattern 3 above.

You shouldn't need to explicitly memorize the fact that, at the end of the form, the Db goes to a Dm7b5, because the turnaround to the tonic is almost always present in jazz tunes, and the fact that pattern 2 is used here is almost required, since the tune is in a minor key.

Well, what do you think? Are these principles helpful? Can you analyze and learn other tunes successfully with it? Can you play the Solar chords from memory? Can you play it in Ebm without writing down the chords?

- Warren