*time change* show on thursday / an examination of structure

first, housekeeping: my upcoming show has been changed to 6:30 pm on thursday 7/11, an hour earlier than previously advertised.

with this change I am excited to announce that I will be joined by a few freeloading friends of mine for a song or two. the aforementioned friends are Trevor Robertson and Charles Colizza, who will be playing a set of music with drummer Eric Lippin immediately after me.

so head down to Shrine this thursday for an all-time hang!

I find myself compelled today to write today about musical theater. I grew up listening to musical soundtracks in long car rides to and from Massachusetts or Illinois, as something to kill the time until it was my turn to pick a cd again.

these soundtracks were sometimes excruciating to listen to, as for me the overt storytelling detracted from the experience of listening to the music. many of the songs themselves were too theatrical, with lyrics and orchestration that seemed so far removed from what I was used to that I felt they lost the plot entirely.

yet my family loved these shows, and so we listened to everything from Chicago to Wicked to the Drowsy Chaperone to Spamalot to South Pacific—the latter being in poor taste thematically but extremely memorable for me melodically. that was how I connected with even the silliest of productions: each show led to the unveiling of a beautiful, dramatic, and emotional musical resolution.

then I started listening to jazz, which gave me a different framework to experience theater:

jazz takes the loose melodic and harmonic structure of just about any song and translates it to new musical contexts.

here’s a primer on song structure, but basically across genres and styles of music, we see common patterns emerge for how to build tension and create resolution. even if we don’t recognize it, these are pretty familiar to every one of us—we’ve been hearing them in some way, shape, or form our whole lives.

once you’ve established the structure of a song in your mind, you can a) learn it more easily and b) mutate it as you see fit. listen to Sergio Mendes’ version of Joni Mitchell’s Chelsea Morning. it’s subtle differences, but by imposing a more rigid rhythm and song structure they change the feel of the composition immensely:

by making it easier to learn songs, these structures also make them easier to play with other people.

have you ever heard of the real book? it’s the jazz student’s bible of songs to reference until they’ve memorized every single one. flip through the pages and you’ll find classics like Have You Met Miss Jones, I Could Write a Book, and My Favorite Things, simplified almost to the point of being exercises for improvisational practice.

and indeed, by memorizing this ever-growing list of songs referred to as “standards,” you internalize the cadences and patterns that songwriters use to build their compositions. in the end, each new song is a rearrangement of progressions you’ve already learned—you just have to know what order everything comes in.

this allows jazz musicians to show up at just about any jam, call a song and a key, and break immediately into playing. the final piece is learning the “hits”—the specific hooks of each song that make them memorable. if you have mastered all that my good friend you are now a jazz musician.

in the future I may dive more into modal jazz and why folks like Miles Davis evolved to play music with less progression and more open-ended harmonies and structure, but for now I want to go in a different direction.

consider reggae, and please forgive me as I use Jerry Garcia in my primary example of how a reggae song can be built.

yes, Jerry—someone who is no stranger to a 15-minute song—manages to stretch Jimmy Cliff’s 3:07 original into nearly a quarter hour of music. how does he do it?

“The Harder They Come” is built of three sections: the musical theme/intro, the verse, and the chorus (“soon as the sun will shine … ”). each represent relatively straightforward cadences, keeping the same tonal center and introducing minimal and digestible amounts of tension. the repetition makes everything feel familiar and thus more listenable for the audience.

once the band plays through the chorus, they return to the musical theme, indicating they’ve begun the form again from the start. from there, Jerry can either choose to sing another verse or play trippy noodling guitar for as long as desired. either works, and all the band has to do is start the cycle over once it finishes. then you repeat the chorus a few times on your way out to indicate the end of the song.

jazz performances are constructed similarly: repeating the acknowledged progressions until an appropriate amount of soloists have had their turn.

none of this experimentation is possible without a worthwhile original composition—and this is what brings us back to broadway.

past the drama and camp (much of which I’ve grown to love) you are left with these immense (and meaningful!) songs that have embedded themselves in the american musical consciousness. it’s no surprise heads are still playing songs that are over six decades old: these are songs written to be consumed by popular audiences. jazz allows us to examine them with a deeper level of thought.

you can make the argument jazz over-intellectualizes things. you can argue that Jerry plays for about three times longer than he needs to.

what is inarguable is that these songs symbolized something meaningful and inspirational to the artists that played them and provided a means explore the mysteries of life and the universe through a new lens. and the direct and intentional storytelling made possible by musical theater enriches the life of whoever has the pleasure of listening to it.

“there is one rule in the garden above all others. you must give to nature more than you take.“ —Alan Chadwick