Rule # 62.4.7

I have been asked to write about my resentments with the Major Seventh Chord.

For lucky non-musicians this is a sad, pretty chord used in jazz but not in blues, rhythm and blues or funk.

Since the 1940’s it has been the dominant chord played in jazz.

As it is two of the primary chords in any key, you hear it played, hegemoniously, in all it’s prettiness, like Southern Steel Magnolias, the iron fist in the velvet glove, or Blanche Dubois in “A Street Car Named Desire, drawling I always depend upon the kindness of strangers”.

It is a pretty women in 3/4 length white cotton gloves, an Hermes scarf and Prada evening loafers…at her teenager’s baseball game. Wildly overdressed, but so hot that no one ever questions whether this is simply unbalanced taste…or borderline personalty disorder.

It is a “livery collar” chord, educated beyond its intelligence, that lobotomizes any genuine expression of honest feeling with the smell of nickel lilac perfume from Woolworth’s Black Friday Bargain Bin.

But how do you really feel about it, Steve?

This was not true of jazz in the Dixieland Era, The Reign of Louis Armstrong or The Swing Era.

It was used upon occasion, as the Seven #9 is currently used, but with respect for its force and restraint in its use.

During the Second World War Jazz entered its “Romantic period” as Classical music had done more than 100 years before.

In both styles of music heavy chromaticism and absurd changes of key, pointlessly going nowhere and having absolutely no musical value, except in saying “Oh, look at me and my chromatic jewelry, aren’t we fine some fine babes, here?”

I don’t like Bop for the same reason I don’t like Wagner, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Berlioz, Holst, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Smetana, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, Liszt, Bruckner and that insufferably self-pitying Gustave Mahler…excess.

As John Cage would say “ There is too much there, there”.

Am I opposed to sad and pretty? 

Of course not, the “Inner child” in me is sad, and the “Inner egomaniac” certainly sings Bernstein’s ” I’m so pretty!” with great assiduity.

The only use of that most potent and pretty chord, the major seventh, that I find agreeable is in Eric Satie’s Trois Gymnopedie No. 1.

It is elegant, simple, straightforward and used for purposes worthy of its grace and charm.

When you are that pretty, that much of a “genetic celebrity”, it is important that you know your affect on people…and to act in ways appropriate to your listeners.

This is not exclusively true of the major seventh chord…

Rampant, indiscriminate use of augmented, fully diminished, half diminished, minor-major sevenths, augmented sevenths and a bevy of chromatically altered chords more resemble the commercial trashing of the Amazon rainforests than the intelligent expression of artistic experience, judgement and intuition…but don’t get me started.

Thank God that Stravinsky would come along in 1910 and put and end to this madness in Classical music and in 1959 Miles Davis would stop the mayhem with the album “Kind of Blue” and bring purity and simplicity back to jazz.

The first tune on that album “So What” is where you, as students, will start…with the birth of “Cool Jazz”.

Let’s turn to our studies…

In America there have been essentially two schools of thought in music:

1)Literate Tradition

2)Oral Tradition

These two traditions have, in the main, fallen on racial lines.

The reason is that, in America, from 1619 until 1865, slavery was legal.

Wikipedia quotes: “The comprehensive “Negro Act of 1740” was passed in the Province of South Carolina, during colonial Governor William Bull's time in office, in response to the Stono Rebellion in 1739. The act made it illegal for enslaved Africans to move abroad, assemble in groups, raise food, earn money, and learn to write.

As appalling, morally, and as sad, emotionally, as that is, it would also have long reaching effects, musically, on American music.

Since African Americans were forbidden from learning to write letters, they were also, collaterally, denied access to writing notes.

That being the situation, as all people have a need to express their creativity, the African Americans, who were drawn to music as a form of creativity, had to learn to play by ear…not sight.

This divided music into two camps:

1) Those who took pride in their ability to execute flawlessly the notes they saw written on the page

2) Those who took pride in their ability to create melody…on the spot

As we are studying Improvisation we will be exploring the second group.

Steve D.

Rule # 62.4.8

My longest running sponcee used to go deep sea diving in Micronesia and claim to have found G.O.D  (Great Out Doors).

Then he drowned, someone resuscitated him and he decided it was probably safer to find God in his church on Wednesdays.

I’ve seen a lot of beaches and I’ve seen a lot of mountains in my life, but I never saw a desert, up close, until  9 months ago.

It impressed me with it's stark, austere beauty. But, going a second time, two months ago, really impacted me:

1. My obsession with food was lifted…after 67 years.

2.I started getting up at 4:00am every day, sometimes earlier…considerably earlier.

3.My wife and I entered our third 60 days celibacy period…(we’ve only got two more weeks to go…Thank God

4.I have started a new job teaching jazz.

5.I am launching a new website on physical health

This third trip has already yielded:

1.stopping writing for horns, at least for today.

2.Surrendering all musical performances, at least for today, and focusing on writing fun one minute music videos for the people I like to talk to