My Piano Riffs
tips & tricks for the rhythmically & harmonically-challenged
The Legendary Lewis: Jazz pianist writes what he knows
Jun 20th
Ramsey Lewis is exactly where you expect him to be – at his grand piano, tinkering with his latest composition.
“Composing makes me feel like I’m 12 again,” said the celebrated jazz pianist, who turned 75 on May 27. “When I get up in the morning, I feel giddy and I’m so happy to get to the piano and start working.”
Lewis will pull himself away from composing to celebrate his more than seven decades at the piano with a special concert tonight at 7 at the Ravinia Festival.
He estimates he has composed between 500 and 600 songs so far and shows no signs of slowing down. His latest work, “Colors: The Ecology of Oneness,” is a seven-movement opus that will premiere later this year in Tokyo.
“I’m still in the beginning stages here,” he said. “I’m trying to get my mind out of the way and just compose from my feelings. Writing is about what you know. Composing is writing about what you don’t know and letting the music take you where it will.”
Ramsey said he can recall a time when he was less eager to sit down in front of those 88 keys, though.
“I started piano when I was 4. My teacher was our church organist, Ernestine Bruce,” he recalled.
“Most of the time I had good lessons, but my older sister – who was also taking piano lessons at the time – remembers one time when I didn’t look at the lesson and Mrs. Bruce hit me with a ruler on my knuckles.
“Had I known back then what I know now, I might have been able to say, ‘You don’t know whose knuckles you’re hitting; that was an original piece,’ ” he added with a throaty laugh.
He stayed with Bruce for seven years, at the end of which she told Lewis’ parents she had taught her pupil all she could. While she had imparted the essential musical fundamentals, his next teacher ignited his passion for music.
“My next teacher was Dorothy Mendelssohn, and after several lessons with her I fell in love with the piano,” he said. “There is a moment when you strike the keys and they sound these notes that seem to weave around you. From that moment, I was in love.
“I would spend four or five hours a day at the piano practicing or writing music – not for achievement or fame, but simply for the love of music.”
Although the early years saw Lewis trained in both classical and gospel music, he credited his father for first exposing him to jazz.
“He would bring home these records by Art Tatum and Duke Ellington. I heard the music and kind of liked it, but didn’t get into it,” Lewis said.
“Art Tatum intimidated me, though. He was the greatest jazz piano player ever and he played so much piano, it sounded like he had three or four hands at the keys.”
Lying about his age as well as his knowledge of jazz, Lewis played his first paying jazz gig at age 15 with the Cleffs.
“I had to join the musician’s union and you had to be 16 to do that, so I told them I was,” he said.
“They also thought I knew standards and jazz tunes, and when they asked me to play Charlie Parker’s ‘B-Flat Blues’ it ended up sounding like boogie-woogie by Meade Lux Lewis,” Lewis said.
The Cleffs’ band leader, Wallace Burton, saw something in Lewis’ playing, though.
“He ended up writing out some blues changes and told me to learn them,” Lewis said.
“He also told me to go downtown to some of the record stores, go into the listening booths that they had at the time, and learn what jazz is all about.”
And learn he did. Though Lewis still professes a love for European classical music, he said no other form of music speaks to him like jazz.
“If I wake up and I’m feeling a certain way, with other music I have to thumb through my music collection to find that tune that will fit the moment,” Lewis said.
“With jazz, I just sit down at the piano and express my feelings with my own notes. There’s a certain freedom there.”
Ravinia Festival president and chief executive officer Welz Kauffman said the birthday celebration was a bit of a no-brainer.
“Ramsey has been a part of the Ravinia family for a long time. Not only as the artistic director of our jazz program, but he’s been performing here since the 1960s,” Kauffman said.
“It is our honor to celebrate not only his longevity, but the breadth of music he brings to us.”
In addition to performing with longtime collaborators Larry Gray and Leon Joyce, Lewis will be joined in concert with three-time Grammy award-winning vocalist Nancy Wilson and 2009 Kennedy Center honoree Dave Brubeck.
Wilson said she wouldn’t pass up a chance like this.
“I’ve known Ramsey for forever. We were both with John Levy Management for a long time and he’s like an older brother. It’s always fun to watch and listen to him play,” Wilson said of Lewis.
“And, in addition to it being a birthday celebration, it’s hard to say no to Ravinia. It’s such a great venue and I enjoy playing there whenever I can.”
Since a music education led Lewis to his passion and gave him a career, it’s perhaps most fitting that students from Ravinia’s Steans Institute for Young Artists will open the concert with a set.
“Just because they’re stu dents, that doesn’t mean they aren’t musicians,” Lewis said.
“Those kids are good enough to hold their own up there. It’s an honor to be sharing the stage with them.”
BY MISHA DAVENPORT, Sun-Times Media
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Jazz Up Your Rhythms – Rhythmically Rephrasing Melody Lines
Jun 11th
This time around I would like to tackle one of the more important elements in playing a jazz tune, that is, to rhythmically rephrase an existing melody.
If you play from lead sheets, you will often notice that the melody line to a number of jazz standards usually consists of quarter and half notes, e.g. Autumn Leaves. This is because these lead sheets were mainly conceived for the singer, who is given the basic shape of the melody, without constraining how the singer would like to phrase the line. Likewise, other instrumentalists are free to explore the rhythms and contours of the melody.
This is how Autumn Leaves sounds without any rhythmic enhancement:
Autumn-Leaves-(original-lead-line)
When we start interpreting the piece, especially in swing style, we need to “jazz up” the rhythmic aspect of the melody. The most basic approach to this would be to apply anticipations and delayed attacks. [For a thorough discourse on anticipations, please go to my previous posts here and here.]
A delayed attack (DA) is just the opposite of an anticipation. Instead of pushing the beat ahead, you pull back, according to the rhythmic feel of the song, i.e. in 8ths or 16ths, straight or rolled, or even laying back as long as a quarter note sometimes.
With that in mind, let’s jazz up the melody of Autumn Leaves!
Take note of the analyses — how I mix the bag up by using anticipations and delayed attacks, and also shortening or holding on to notes.
On this first take, I maintain the 4-to-the-bar left hand comping pattern as in the earlier example, so you can hear how the melody line now differs with the application of a few rhythmic tweaks here and there 
On the second take, I play a simple walking bass line in my left hand, while playing the melody and light chord-comping in my right.
Autumn-Leaves-(rhythmic-lead-performance)Rhythmically rephrasing melody lines is an essential part of interpreting jazz. Remember you don’t have to constantly anticipate or delay the attack of a note — as the example shows, some notes are played as is while others get rhythmically modified. Sometimes singing or vocalizing the melody helps us make the phrasing of the line much smoother and less mechanical. Give it a try!
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Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons – A Poem by Diane Wakoski
May 16th
I’m sure you know by now poems relating to the piano intrigue me. So it’s no wonder that when I chanced upon this one by a Michigan State University English professor during the period of Mother’s Day, I had to blog about it. Personally, I thank both my parents especially my late father for piano lessons — and also a favorite aunt, I definitely can relate to parts of the message of the poem.
Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons
by Diane Wakoski
The relief of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
as if you were walking on the beach
and found a diamond as big as a shoe;
as if
you had just built a wooden table
and the smell of sawdust was in the air,
your hands dry and woody;
as if
you had eluded
the man in the dark hat who had been following you
all week;
the relief
of putting your fingers on the keyboard,
playing the chords of
Beethoven,
Bach,
Chopin
in an afternoon when I had no one to talk to,
when the magazine advertisement forms of soft sweaters
and clean shining Republican middle-class hair
walked into carpeted houses
and left me alone
with bare floors and a few books
I want to thank my mother
for working every day
in a drab office
in garages and water companies
cutting the cream out of her coffee at 40
to lose weight, her heavy body
writing its delicate bookkeeper’s ledgers
alone, with no man to look at her face,
her body, her prematurely white hair
in love
I want to thank
my mother for working and always paying for
my piano lessons
before she paid the Bank of America loan
or bought the groceries
or had our old rattling Ford repaired.
I was a quiet child,
afraid of walking into a store alone,
afraid of the water,
the sun,
the dirty weeds in back yards,
afraid of my mother’s bad breath,
and afraid of my father’s occasional visits home,
knowing he would leave again;
afraid of not having any money,
afraid of my clumsy body,
that I knew
no one would ever love
But I played my way
on the old upright piano obtained for $10,
played my way through fear,
through ugliness,
through growing up in a world of dime-store purchases,
and a desire to love
a loveless world.
I played my way through an ugly face
and lonely afternoons, days, evenings, nights,
mornings even, empty
as a rusty coffee can,
played my way through the rustles of spring
and wanted everything around me to shimmer like the narrow tide
on a flat beach at sunset in Southern California,
I played my way through
an empty father’s hat in my mother’s closet
and a bed she slept on only one side of,
never wrinkling an inch of the other side,
waiting,
waiting,
I played my way through honors in school,
the only place I could
talk
the classroom,
or at my piano lessons, Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary always
singing the most for my talents,
as if I had thrown some part of my body away upon entering
her house
and was now searching every ivory case
of the keyboard, slipping my fingers over black
ridges and around smooth rocks,
wondering where I had lost my bloody organs,
or my mouth which sometimes opened
like a California poppy,
wide and with contrasts
beautiful in sweeping fields,
entirely closed morning and night,
I played my way from age to age,
but they all seemed ageless or perhaps always old and lonely,
wanting only one thing, surrounded by the dusty bitter-smelling
leaves of orange trees,
wanting only to be touched by a man who loved me,
who would be there every night
to put his large strong hand over my shoulder,
whose hips I would wake up against in the morning,
whose mustaches might brush a face asleep,
dreaming of pianos that made the sound of Mozart
and Schubert without demanding
that life suck everything
out of you each day,
without demanding the emptiness
of a timid little life.
I want to thank my mother
for letting me wake her up sometimes at 6 in the morning
when I practiced my lessons
and for making sure I had a piano
to lay my school books down on, every afternoon.
I haven’t touched the piano in 10 years,
perhaps in fear that what little love I’ve been able to
pick, like lint, out of the corners of pockets,
will get lost,
slide away,
into the terribly empty cavern of me
if I ever open it all the way up again.
Love is a man
with a mustache
gently holding me every night,
always being there when I need to touch him;
he could not know the painfully loud
music from the past that
his loving stops from pounding, banging,
battering through my brain,
which does its best to destroy the precarious gray matter when I
am alone;
he does not hear Mrs. Hillhouse’s canary singing for me,
liking the sound of my lesson this week,
telling me,
confirming what my teacher says,
that I have a gift for the piano
few of her other pupils had.
When I touch the man
I love,
I want to thank my mother for giving me
piano lessons
all those years,
keeping the memory of Beethoven,
a deaf tortured man,
in mind;
of the beauty that can come
from even an ugly
past.
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Can You Spare a Chord or two or more, Please?: Borrowed Chords or Modal Interchange
Apr 18th
I’m back! And I need to borrow something….No worries, I’m referring to our little bag of harmonic tricks. I hope by now you have gone through the diatonic triads and 7ths of both the major and minor scales (all three variations). In this post, I’m going to show you how you can spice up your diatonic chords by applying a technique called modal interchange or borrowed chords.
Check out this song by James Morrison “You Give Me Something”:
Here is the sheet music:
You Give Me Something – James Morrison & Eg White
The very first two chords of the introduction point to the prevalent use of borrowed chords in this soulful song, i.e. Ab-Fmi6-C or bVI-IVmi6-I in the key of C major.
Modal interchange or borrowed chords is a harmonic device where chords from the parallel scale of the existing scale or key is taken (or borrowed) and used in that key. A parallel scale is one that shares the same first note or tonic or root note, e.g. the parallel minor scale of C major is C minor — any one of the three, i.e. natural, melodic or harmonic. Technically, you can also borrow chords from the parallel modes* that has the same root note, e.g. C Dorian, C Lydian, etc. The most common though is from the minor scales.
Using modal interchange adds chromaticism or extra colors to your chords and chord progression because it veers away from just the seven diatonic chords of the current key.
Let’s go back to Mr. Morrison’s song. As mentioned, it starts off with a 3-bar intro of bVI-IVmi6-I. Both of these chords are from the parallel scale of C natural minor. It’s like replacing an ordinary diatonic VImi-IV-I progression, with IV-I being a classic Plagal or “Amen” cadence or phrase-ending chords.
The verse goes through a very diatonic progression of mainly triads, then moves the same way through the chorus and ends with the parallel minor cadence.
In the bridge section, the first half starts off with the following chords: Ebmaj7-Dmi7-G-Bb/F-F-C7-Ebmaj7-Bbmaj7 which works out to bIIImaj7-IImi7-V-bVII/5-IV-I7-bIIImaj7-bVIImaj7.
And what parallel scales are we seeing here? Ebmaj7 or bIIIma7 is either from C natural minor or C Dorian. C7, Bb/F and Bbmaj7 (I7, bVII/5 & bVIImaj7, respectively) are from the C Mixolydian mode, giving the song its bluesy character. Arguably, both the Bb structures could also come from the C Dorian mode. But I’m more inclined to go with the Mixolydian mode because of the bluesy nature of the section.
And there you have it! Just by borrowing chords from the parallel minor key and modes, Morrison has managed to make a simple song sound bluesy and soulful.
Let’s look at another example. Just in case you think modal interchange equals the blues sound, listen to this old pop classic by Spandau Ballet, “True.” I’ll spare you the cheesy-looking ’80s video and let you have an mp3 clip instead.
True/Spandau-BalletHere is the first page of the sheet music that contains the two main borrowed chords featured in the song:
On the third line, the first chord Fmaj9 or bVIImaj9 in the Key of G major; and the last line second chord Eb or bVI of the key. Later on in the song during the sax solo, the group vamps on Ebmaj7 and Abmaj7, which are bVImaj7 and bIImaj respectively.
So where do these borrowed chords come from? bVI definitely comes from the parallel G natural minor scale; bVIImaj9 is from the G Mixolydian* (the fifth mode of C major scale); and bIImaj7 from the G Phrygian* (the third mode of the Eb major scale).
As you can see, employing modal interchange to a composition does not equate adding a bluesy sound to the song. Generally, it just adds color that otherwise will not be there in an entirely diatonic song.
So all in all, we can see that the popular borrowed chords are the bVI and bVII, coming from the parallel natural minor scale and the parallel mixolydian mode, respectively.
[All video & music clips and music sheet used for educational purposes only.]
* The major modes are made up of notes from the major scale but are being repositioned or displaced to start on different degrees of the scale, e.g. playing the C major scale but starting and ending on the D note will give us the D Dorian mode; similarly, beginning and ending on G but playing notes from the C major scale will result in the G Mixolydian mode. I will cover the major modes in depth in another post.
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The Piano – An Animated Short by Aidan Gibbons
Apr 10th
I’m still trying to get back to posting my original articles. So, in the meantime, enjoy this animated short of an old man playing the piano (Yann Tiersen’s evocative and reflective “Comptine d’un autre été: l’après midi”) while reminiscing about his life…
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