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Elements of Jazz
8 minute read
There are certain building blocks of music that you use to create a piece of jazz music. Actually these building blocks apply not only to jazz but to all music in general. Knowing what these building blocks are is important to help you figure out what to practice, what to think about when you’re soloing, how to play over a standard, and how to craft your approach to learning jazz. In this article I will be explicating these building blocks of music as well as certain skills that must be honed for playing jazz. This article isn’t meant to be a deep dive into each of these topics, but more of an overview and a roadmap for studying jazz.
Melody
Melody is the forefront of what the listener hears when listening to a song; it’s the linear sequence of notes that the listener hears when hearing the song. When you’re humming a song stuck in your head, you’re most likely humming the melody. When you look at a jazz standard, the melody is the notes written on there. Taking a look at the first 4 bars of the jazz standard, “Autumn Leaves”, the melody is as follows.
Melody has a relationship with harmony that I’ll further explain in the section about improvisation.
Harmony
Harmony is the underlying quality of the music you are playing. This quality can be described with a chord name and type. This is “Autumn Leaves” with the harmony specified (A-7 means A minor 7).
Harmony is expressed through playing chords.
Voicing is how you create the chords: what notes you use to create the chords and in which order you stack them. Jazz chords commonly have extensions of the 9th, 11th, or 13th degree which you can incorporate into your voicings. These extensions are also sometimes further altered by a sharp or a flat, most commonly with dominant chord voicings. A good rule of thumb for voicings is to always include the shell in your chord and avoid doubling notes other than the root and fifth.
Above is an example of “Autumn Leaves” with more interesting voicings utilizing concepts such as rootless voicings, extensions and alterations, and voice leading. Context is very important! Try playing the D7 voicing alone and then the D7 voicing within the chord progression. It sounds very dissonant by itself, but the dissonance goes well within the context of the surrounding chords.
Next, harmony is not stagnant and can be modified through reharmonizations or chord substitutions. This means adding new chords between existing ones, or substituting in different chords for existing ones.
Above is an example of “Autumn Leaves” with a common jazz substitution on the D7 called a tritone substitution.
Rhythm
Rhythm is the moments in time in the music where you play the notes. You can play around with rhythm by changing when you play the chords and the melody notes. Swing is a common rhythmical element of jazz where the eighth notes are slid back and played a little later.
Above is an example of “Autumn Leaves” with more interesting rhythms incorporated into both the melody and the chords. Playing specific chords with specific rhythms is called comping, and this is an essential skill for jazz piano. Sometimes when you’re playing solo piano, your left hand may be comping for your right hand as shown above, or sometimes when you’re playing in a band you may be comping for the band. By comping, you’re providing a layer of harmony and rhythm to the music. The little symbol on the top left of the example is the symbol for swing (on the lead sheet the composer may just write the word “swing” and this means the same thing). By equating eighth notes to triplets, the music is indicating that the second eighth note should be played further on the back of the beat. The less you swing, or the more straight you play, the less back you play the second eighth note. Jazz songs are swung by default.
Not all types of jazz music swing and not all types of jazz music swing the same amount. This intuition, same as the intuition for melody and harmony, can be gained through listening to more jazz.
Rhythm can be used to create grooves or completely change the sound of your music; it is an equally important contributer to the sound of your music as melody and harmony.
Play the above arrangement of “Autumn Leaves” with straighter eighth notes, a more laid back beat, and a little pedal if you’d like, and you’ll hear that the sound has completely changed to something more reminiscent of music you’d hear on a tropical beach (Bossa Nova).
Improvisation
Improvising is spontaneously creating new music using the three elements described above: melody, harmony, and rhythm. The harmony is spelled out for you in the chord changes. Deciding the melody to improvise can be done by ear, but can also be explained through music theory by realizing that each chord implies a number of scales. First play a C major scale over a C maj7 chord. Sounds pretty good right? Now play that same C major scale over a B maj7 chord. That doesn’t sound as good.
By “sound good,” I mean sound consonant. Improvisation done well plays around with building tension and releasing tension. One way of building tension is by playing over scales that don’t match with the chord.
Going back to the example of a C major scale over a C maj7 chord, what this means for when you’re improvising is that when you see the chord is a C maj7 chord, you can view the C major scale as an available pool of notes that you can use to play a consonant note against the C maj7 chord.
Listening
The ear is the most important tool when learning jazz. Jazz wasn’t created with the music theory in mind, but music theory is just something used to explain it.
I believe proper listening in jazz comprises of two components: listening to music and ear training. Listening to music should be obvious, and should also be easy. Why would you play music if you don’t enjoy it. I believe everyone has their own internal capacity for music, but by listening to a lot of music you become exposed to more musical ideas and get a sense of what you think sounds good and doesn’t sound good. I also believe that the music you listen to trickles into and has a hand in shaping the subconscious improvisational mind. The music shapes your improvisational mind not in the form of musical notes, but in the form of something that can’t be intellectualized.
I read somewhere that creativity is copying with extra steps. I think this is true. This doesn’t mean that your improvisations should become some Frankenstein monster of all the bits and pieces of other past improvisations you’ve transcribed and practiced, but you should study the works of past musicians to see what ideas they incorporated in their music and see how you can apply or build upon those ideas in your own music. One of my teachers taught me a technique called active listening. What this is, is when you listen to a musician play, you note something that they’re doing that you could add to your own repertoire. For example, I could listen to a recording of one of Wes Montgomery’s solos and be really impressed with his dynamic range of his solos. I would then try to practice incorporating that dynamic range into my own solos.
The second component is ear training. This is sitting down and training the ear to recognize intervals or chords and conditioning it to know what note or chord to play next when it hears a certain sound it wants to play. It’s a process that requires daily training, and although the results aren’t immediate, they will come.
Technique
Technique is the part that comes after the ear. After your ear is able to translate the sound you want to play into note or chord names, technique is the muscle memory that comes in that allows you to find the correct voicing, or run up and down the scale of your choice. Technique is what allows you to produce the sound you want through your instrument. This is practiced through rote repetition of scales, arpeggios, voicings, etc.
Final Note
This concludes my overview of the elements that make up jazz. I believe most things one learns in their study of jazz can be categorized into one of these categories. It’s helpful to be cognizant of these elements, because this way when you feel like your music is lacking somehow, you can relate it back to these elements and get a better idea of what is missing in your music. It also gives you a better idea of what to practice when practicing jazz and not tunneling in too much on just one element. Also, having all of these elements in mind is helpful for music composition and improvisation, when you have to create music from scratch.
Written on May 27th, 2020 by Chris Cheung