Giant Steps

Tonight Ben Prentiss, Shea Ellis, Graham Duval and I are scheduled to have rehearsal for a performance in class tomorrow.  We had a rehearsal on Friday, but we didn't seem to be getting into the groove, so we called it early.  At that practice we were working on 12-bar blues.  Perhaps it was mostly me who wasn't getting into the groove on that one.

I feel that 12-bar blues are about the most simple and boring music to perform (perhaps that presents a challenge in itself...how to make it interesting, but we won't go there).  I have been playing 12-bar blues since I was five.  In fact just the other day I visited my friend, and his young son had just taken up guitar lessons.  The first chords the teacher showed him were E, A, and D.  I showed him how that easily translated to a 12-bar blues (especially on guitar, because one can use the open strings), and he was quite excited to know that he could now play a song after only one lesson.  It just goes to show that 12-bar blues are one of the simplest things that can be played though.

I feel limited by only three chords, and solos consisting primarily of either a seven note diatonic scale, or even worse simply a minor pentatonic scale.  I was having a feeling like that in practice last friday, so I suggested we regroup after the weekend, and I would bring in some jazz charts that were essentially 12-bar blues, but "jazzed" up a little.

In my search for 12-bar jazz I went through all of my Fake Books and Real Books.  Boy did that bring back the memories.  When I first started guitar lessons my teacher and I used these extensively (he had just graduated from UMA's Jazz program, so naturally he would choose that route).  By the time I started perusing these books I had strayed very far from 12-bar anything.  In fact I ended up at John Coltrane's "Giant Steps."

In attempting to warm up on the chart, I was doing okay.  All of the chords are either major, minor, major seventh, minor seventh, or dominant seventh chords.  Nothing too tricky there.  The tempo is really quick, something like 280 beats per minute, but I was doing okay with it.  I had to put the chart down to go to Dr. Carlsen's theory class.  When I arrived I asked him whether jazz, such as Giant Steps, would be analyzed in the methods of tonal harmony, or twentieth century harmony.  Before I knew it we had spent an hour discussing this piece!  Boy did I learn a lot.  Giant Steps has so much depth to it.  There are sequences galore, and once we got to analyzing Coltrane's solo (which I had a transcription of) I found that Coltrane is quite a genius.  The way his solo arpeggiates and flies through scales show that he had a very deep understanding of music theory.

Before theory class my thought had been that we could play Giant Steps, and whoever was soloing could just play random notes as fast as they could the whole time, and it would sound fine.  In analyzing the piece I have now decided that I might feel embarrassed to show up to class and do such a thing (although to the untrained ear it would work, since the solo is moving at eighth notes...560 notes a minute!, it would be hard to try and judge the quality of the solo).  I also realized I might be embarrassed by how I was voicing the chords.

Like on a piano, one can play the same chord in many ways on a guitar.  With my rusty jazz chord vocabulary I was all over the place in my first attempt at Giant Steps.  My left hand was literally sliding up and down the neck between every chord.  Although I was playing the right chords, it would look very ridiculous to play this way on stage.  I could definitely sit down and figure out how to voice the chords so that they were all in first position for instance.  But these shapes would not be in my muscle memory at all, and haven't been since I played jazz in high school.  I am afraid that this piece may be too much to bite off for only one rehearsal the night before class.

So we will see what we show up to in class tomrrow.  I do want to do something more structured than just 12-bar in E though.  A theme that has been rolling around my head all semester has been, "How does one balance improv with structure?"  I am a believer that structure can lead to even greater depth in improv.  Dr. Pane quoted his wife Dr. Funahashi as mentioning something about how even classical pianists improvise.  I believe what she meant was that with a structured score, the improv gets even more exciting because the performers can improvise between the notes, or use rubato, or many other techniques.  No composition is so complete that it leaves nothing up to the performer.  Perhaps then the age old battle has been between performers and composers...the composers are trying to get the performers to stop improvising, and realize the vision of the composition completely.  And the performers are trying to stick their own improvisation in, in order to create a sense of individualism.

In closing, please check out this amazing YouTube video of Coltrane's Giant Steps.  It is an animation of the score, in which the notes fall into place as the piece goes along.