There's a current discussion about what key a tune in the BIAB forums at Yahoo Groups, http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Band-in-a-Box/message/28137 (presumably, if you try to go there and you don't have a Yahoo ID you'll be presented with the various registration options and can eventually get there). This is related to my discussion of the key of Footprints in the last entry.

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.

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