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Insights in Jazz
Written by Alain
I had the pleasure of interviewing John Elliott. He wrote the book Insights in Jazz,
which provides a systematic method to analyze and recognise chord
progressions. It is based on the “LEGO bricks” approach and is a highly pragmatic
(rather than theoretical) way to learn to play jazz standards by ear, and in any key.
Hello, John. Before we start talking about your book, can you tell something
about yourself?
I live in Edinburgh, Scotland. I teach jazz piano, and I play in a jazz trio every week.
During 2007, I helped Conrad Cork produce the final version (2008) of his
Harmony with LEGO bricks by reviewing the whole book in detail and contributing
summaries of the main parts.
In 2009 you wrote Insights in Jazz. In this book you analyze hundreds of jazz
standards. Is it another Fake Book?
The 'chord book' resources have improved immensely over the last 20 years. But,
as someone commented to me recently, everyone has all the Real Books these
days, but they know fewer and fewer tunes.
While sight-reading is an important skill for playing in large ensembles like big
bands, it is fundamentally not what jazz is about. You cannot play meaningful
solos on a song until you have internalised that song. This means learning both
the melody and the chord changes.
My book contains the chord progressions for over 230 songs analysed according
to the method in the book. There are no melodies because these are copyright
protected and also because these are best learned from recordings, rather than
sheet-music.
A popular method of learning chord changes is by doing a harmonic analysis of
songs (also called Roman numeral analysis or functional harmony). What's
wrong with this theoretical approach?
Basic functional harmony is still used in this method. However, the student is
directed to the chunks of functional harmony that actually occur, rather than
shown an abstract approach that they will never need to use. The regular II- V7
IM7 cadence is a well known example, and the student is shown the common
variants that will occur. And each is given a short name so that we do not need to
discuss Roman Numerals which can be difficult to communicate and translate
into the aural tradition. The student learns to associate the feel with the short
label and the job is done. They are not left wondering what other combinations
might appear in the future.
Many theories of jazz harmony seem to contrive to present jazz harmony as
difficult, which makes no sense in an aural tradition. There are lots of resources
available to the jazz student, suggesting what can be played over particular
chords and why functional harmony works the way that it does. The problem is
that neither of these approaches is well suited to the problem of actually playing
live jazz gigs.
Instead, we need to be aware of what kind of 'musical events' will happen and
how to respond to them, in any key. A probabilistic approach is by far the best
approach in the real world. If we know the most common events that occur in jazz
standard chord progressions, then we can focus our time on making sure that we
can improvise over them.
The Insights In Jazz book lays out a framework for the student to easily identify
and name the events in a song. This is then applied to over 230 songs to show
how it works. For example, you have supplied a roadmap from your book for the
jazz standard What is This Thing Called Love.