musical thoughts

Been a while since I posted a video. This isn’t a new vid, just one I have been getting good comments on lately. Mercy, Mercy, Mercy by Zawinul was made famous by the Cannonball Adderly group. And it’s been played to death on jam sessions since.

My Youtube version attempts to build a reasonably long solo arc over the simple two chord progression. In order to effectively do that, I am employing several specific techniques, which are possibly worth discussing in detail, to manipulate tension and release. (Even if they aren’t worth discussing, I do it anyway, so there.)

(scroll down and start the video so it’s playing, then scroll back up and read my analytical blab.)

After a leisurely stroll through the head, I come in soloing fairly sparsely in the middle register. The chord accompaniment in the left hand is long and sustained at first. This continues for something like 45 seconds before I shift gears upward for the first time. I add more motion into both the left and right hands. I start to approach the chords chromatically instead of just alternating between them, which adds some interest and texture. By about 3:20 I’m wandering into more extremes of register–first low, then high by 3:45. By 3:55 I’ve settled into a fairly busy right hand line with stacatto offbeat comping in the left, adding a lot of tension. The phrases are longer, building tension. Phrasing is perhaps the most underused device for manipulating tension and release. Good players do it more or less instinctively, and it’s hard to teach.

At 4:17 I slide back into a little echo of the feel I began with, but then use it as a base to strike farther out into more adventurous lines in the right hand that stray farther from the underlying chords around 4:40. The ternsion builds more this way until I land on a tremolo on the one at 5:01, which I hang onto for a while, backing off some of the tension that’s been built. By 5:20 I’ve found a new lower register extreme with my linear playing. Working back up, I lay down some church-like triad voicings at 5:56.

I play some hemiola-style repetitive figure at 6:23, ratcheting the tension higher. By 6:33 I’m grabbing a right hand figure that holds a single note steady on top while the inner voices move around in a bluesy way.

At 6:46, I play a voicing that has the interval of a major second (very close and pretty dissonant sounding) on top. I like the tension from the dissonance, so I keep that shape and walk it up chromatically for a while, further ratcheting up the tension. Right at this point I’m manipulating spacing (the dissonant second), harmony (upward chromatic sequences in both hands), register (moving upward building tension), and dymaics (iI’m whacking away happily on the keys). There’s not a lot of tricks left, so this had better be close to a climactic moment, eh?

No way. By 6:54 I decide I can wail out some more (violation of expectaions can build tension, but you have to be judicious here–ultimately you do have to deliver the goods), so I open up the right hand interval, and play a repetitive figure where I hold the root constant on top, and walk the inner voices upward to close the interval and (you guessed it) build tension. My left hand is playing stacatto on upbeats, filling holes in the right hand part and seriously propelling the rhythmic feel forward. Between right and left hands I have something firing on almost every sixteenth note (this is a swing sixteenth or half-time shuffle feel). The accents occasionally line up between hands which makes for some powerful hits now that my hands are covering a fairly wide compass. Finally (7:11) I decide there’s nowhere left to go and I back down to the middle register for my return to the G7 pedal figure from the head to set up the return.

The big hole at 7:49 is important. It gives the most release of anything yet. If there were a decent rhythm section behind me, the return to the head figure would have been played very big, and they would have stayed out of that hole, and come back in at a reasonably calm volume for the beginning of the final trip through the head (leaving someplace to go).

Piano players don’t have volume knobs. So it’s important that you have a decent command of these kind of techniques (register, spacing, dissonance, rhythm, repetition, compass, and manipulation of expectations) to build a solo that takes an interesting shape. I think this solo was fairly successful (with some room for improvement). Coming in burning after the head would have been disastrous. Or at least it would have been damn difficult to sustain anyone’s interest for a six minute ride that way. Your rhythm section needs to have their ears open too. A sensitive rhythm section would have added immensely to this performance. If the band was wailing behind the beginning of the solo, it would have lost a lot of the effect of the sparseness of the playing. Maybe even the audience would get confused about who is blowing. This can happen a lot at jam sessions with less experienced players, or when there’s a parade of soloists.

Anyhow, hopefully this is illustrative of some of the things that can be done to make a solo interesting. Please share your thoughts with me about this.