09/10/2024 1:27 AM

Themonet-ART

Adorn your Feelings

The Greatest Teacher of America’s Great Art Form

Harmony is the art of resolution, but not all resolutions are equally artful. A story circulates about how Franz Joseph Haydn’s son, returning drunk from late-night partying, loudly played a single dominant chord on the living room piano before going to bed. Startled awake, the great composer got up, went to the keyboard, and resolved the son’s argument with single soft tonic before returning to peaceful slumber.

As it turns out, the story is apocryphal. Music theory is just as unreliable, though most musicians would agree that tonic follows dominant. In European music, the tonic is the home key, and a primary constellation of three notes struck together (a “chord”) is the tonic triad. Tension and release is achieved through departure from the tonic, often to the nearby constellation of four notes known as the dominant, and then a return home. Answer follows question. Consequent follows antecedent. Day follows night.

The history of black music in America can be framed as a kind of guerrilla warfare against traditional European harmony, a subtle battle waged as every generation upgrades the two towers of rhythm on the one hand and blues on the other. (It’s no accident that literal “Rhythm and Blues” or “R&B” is itself a genre of black music.)

Jazz commanded the greatest sway in popular culture during the so-called Swing or Big Band era, which took place from about 1933 to 1947. Within black communities, playing in a big band was not just an artistic choice; it was a way to succeed in an environment offering limited economic options. All those bands stocked with all those bright and ambitious minds proved to be perfect laboratory conditions for those seeking fresh ways to make European harmony swing. The sixth chord, where a mild dissonance perches on top of a tonic triad, was key to black music of that era. (Guerrilla warfare: The sixth chord connects to non-European pentatonic scales.)

Ok, we’ve got our sixth chord. How do you set chords to a melody? “Do, re, mi, fa, so…,” up and down the scale? How do you make those lines thick and hip, so that they roar out a five-person-strong saxophone section? The result of big-band experimentation was the application of another aspect of European harmony: the diminished chord. It is a way of moving through music, from home to a far-off destination and back again, but rarely heard since those halcyon days of jazz’s mainstream popularity.

For nine decades, a lonely outpost held out defiant hope for the return of the diminished chord. Jazz pianist Barry Harris, who died last week, was born in Detroit in 1929, heard the Big Band era in person, and devoted himself to a lifetime of bebop.

While jazz is black music, the huge military-industrial complex of jazz education has predominantly been a white man’s affair, and the music has certainly suffered from this imbalance. The classical music of Africa offers the most advanced rhythm in human history, and the African perspective is just as important to jazz as any kind of European harmonic theory. It is much harder to explain rhythm in a textbook than harmony. One must have a professional demonstrate the oral tradition in person.

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