11: Can’t Chain Up Me Mind

STOP PRESS! Details of a new composition challenge for the Grand Union Orchestra show The Golden Highway at the Hackney Empire on July 18th have just been published - details here

CAN’T CHAIN UP ME MIND

I originally wrote Can’t Chain Up Me Mind for Freedom Calls, which was premiered at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh during the Festival in August 1988, and subsequently toured the whole UK. A performance at Sadler’s Wells was recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio 3 – our first for them, produced by Derek Drescher, legendary genius of BBC jazz programmes – and became our first show released in CD format. (The Song of Many Tongues started life as a cassette.)

The theme of Freedom Calls was simple – a celebration of liberation in different parts of the world over the past two hundred years, and a reminder that it was still overdue in many other places.

We commissioned lyrics from several writers who – through personal or family history – had direct experience of the fight for liberation. Vladimir Vega, a Chilean exile, wrote about the coup in Chile (Pinochet was still in power in 1988); the late and much lamented South African actor and playwright John Matshikiza wrote about apartheid and five hundred years of European exploitation (Nelson Mandela was yet to be released); and Valerie Bloom, poet and children’s writer from St Lucia (see also below) contributed three passionate lyrics, including this one in Caribbean dialect, expressing Africans’ experience of slavery in the New World.

Looking back twenty-five years later, it’s difficult to recall how creative decisions were made; and the older and more experienced I get – and the more developed my composition techniques – the more I attribute to instinct or inspiration! However, authenticity is crucial to Grand Union’s work, and I clearly sought ways of matching the raw emotion of these lyrics in the music I wrote, and to the Grand Union musicians who performed it.

So, at some point I must have felt that homages to reggae and samba – as legacies of the slave trade in the music of the Caribbean and Brazil – were the way to go, but filtered through my own creative sensibilities (not just a pastiche of the styles). It’s also worth noting that in this recording the singer is Jonathan André, British-born of mixed African and Caribbean parentage; and Tony Kofi, from a Ghanaian family, is the saxophone soloist.

The structure of the song is very simple:

• a 3-bar instrumental intro which also serves as a link between verses and as a coda;
• three verses alternating with an unchanging chorus;
• a baritone saxophone solo improvised over a repeated 2-bar chord sequence and vocal riff taken from this chorus.

The verses sound as though they are in a minor key (G minor) and the choruses major (A major), but in fact the scales they are based on (and the harmonies they generate) are less conventional:

Scale 1a is an altered minor scale based on G, 1b very similar but based on E; both have in common a flattened, rather than perfect, 5^th. The intro/link combines both. I wanted the song to sound firm and defiant rather than angry, so it starts with this powerful unison ensemble statement:

The three verses have the same melody – basically in G minor, but with F minor the most significant secondary chord. The melodic shape and chord sequence also echo the 12-bar blues form (the chords in bars 5/6, on the subdominant, have the same tone-apart relationship as those in bars 1/2 and 3/4 on the tonic):

The harmony has something in common with how reggae sounds, and I wanted the rhythm to be equally suggestive of a reggae feel, yet different. Rather than a straight off-beat quaver, therefore, the first off-beat chord is delayed by a further semi-quaver throughout; and where an F minor harmony precedes the tonic G minor, the resolution is also delayed, and the up-beat quaver emphasised as well held over the down-beat. The effect is further exaggerated by delaying the entry of the rhythm section until the end of the first bar, after the voice has started:

With all this going on, adding any kind of reggae-type bass-line – which I love and often employ for its sense of space and airiness combined with a forward propulsion! – would have complicated and confused the whole texture. So I opted instead to double the vocal line with the bass guitar (and later also baritone saxophone or tuba), which not only keeps the texture simple, but also has the advantage of adding weight to the melody, and hence the lyrics.

After an extra bar of G minor held over a bass E (an awkward moment that I feel now doesn’t really work compositionally, and is difficult to bring off), the chorus comes in. The feel here is pure, conventional samba:

This entire sequence of intro-verse-chorus is repeated twice more, and an altered version of the intro/link (over the D flat 2^nd inversion chord at the end of the chorus) leads to a baritone saxophone solo. This is improvised over a 2-bar vocal riff, derived from the third and fourth bars of the chorus:

A final statement of the intro finishes the number.

Backstory and afterthought…

I first met Valerie Bloom when Grand Union was commissioned to produce its first-ever participatory show, Threads, in Manchester in 1986. Val had come over from the Caribbean perhaps 6 or 7 years ealier, and her warm and generous personality made her an invaluable link and arbiter between Manchester’s varied, energetic but sometimes fractious African and Caribbean communities, who were a central aspect of the show. Steel pans and West African drums made up two sides of the ‘triangle’ – complemented by a group of Indian musicians and singers – that lay at the heart of the show, the triangular trade in slaves, cotton and fabrics.

More importantly, Val got quickly to the idea that exploited at all points of the triangular trade – as slaves, cotton-pickers, weavers, garment-makers – were women, whether in Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia or England’s northern mill towns; and at the present day as much as in the past. So she produced powerful lyrics for a big chorus that brought together women singers from all these cultural backgrounds and occupations – one of the most memorable and moving sections in the show.

When people saw Threads – first performed (in promenade and in the round) in an unheated sports hall in the Abraham Moss Centre in February! – I wondered why they found the show so moving. The answer was (as a senior producer from Granada TV put it) its ‘authenticity’ – the fact that you could picture nineteenth-century events so much more vividly because they were portrayed by present-day African- or Asian-descended performers. This has remained a feature of Grand Union’s work – especially its participatory shows – ever since.

Furthermore, for me and for other Grand Union musicians, the fundamental affirmation in the lyrics of Can’t Chain Up Me Mind has another resonance: improvisation, playing music you have made up for yourself, is surely the most direct and individual expression of a musician’s personality; improvisation, for over a hundred years, has been irrevocably associated above all with jazz; and jazz is the musical form originally pioneered largely by descendants of African slaves. Is it fanciful to see a link here – that jazz is the music of the liberated, and therefore also the most liberated of musics?

Tags: music

10: Inspired by the Kora

CANO

THE SONG OF RECONCILIATION

If you have been reading these articles regularly, you will realise by now that I take inspiration from the musicians I work with, and develop ideas from characteristic techniques from their musical culture. This article is about two compositions built around the kora, and the kora-playing and singing of Sadjo Djolô from Guinea-Bissau. More about Sadjo below (and the dramatic narrative behind these two pieces), but in my view he is one of the very best kora-players in the world.

These two numbers come from The Rhythm of Tides (Por Mares do Imaginário), like the pieces featured in posts 8 and 9, but they are completely different in style. The first, Cano, provides the material for the second, The Song of Reconciliation, and it is in effect a big band version of one of Sadjo’s own songs.

Rhythmically poised between 3/4 and 6/8, it begins with a powerful unison brass theme (ex 1), then Sadjo sings the first strain of the song, which begins high and gradually descends a couple of octaves; this is repeated after an interjection by the horns, and I use it as the basis of one of the main themes in The Song of Reconciliation (ex 3, ex 8 & ex 9). After another horn passage he sings a second strain, which ends with an incantation of the word ‘Cano’ (which I also turn into an instrumental figure, ex 5).

Phrases and patterns from his kora solo that follows (and the endless stream of invention he produced in the sessions creating this show) inspired most of the brass and saxophone lines in The Song of Reconciliation. One other feature fascinated me, which I explored throughout both numbers: the key is B flat, but the kora seemed to be tuned in the upper register with a flattened seventh, but with a natural 7th (leading note) in the lower octaves; his vocal phrases adopt the same mixed tonality. This is also a feature of the opening brass theme:

The Song of Reconciliation itself – little more than two minutes long – is a fully-composed piece exploring the rhythmic and melodic features of Sadjo’s kora-playing and singing in Cano; the mood, however, is completely changed. Gone is the manic momentum: I wanted to create a piece that was relaxed, reflective, more reminiscent of South African township music than West African (eg Eleggua Ko, post 3). I also wanted to give the impression that all ten horn players were themselves improvising, and for the music to reflect the free flow of Sadjo’s kora, although it’s underpinned by the simplest of four-bar chord sequences (Bb-Eb-Bb/F-F7). For the same reason, the instrumental groups (trumpets, saxophones, trombones) rarely play as separate units: instead, the individual players continually re-combine in different ways.

It begins with a ‘string section’ that also includes sitar, pipa and Portuguese guitar as well as featuring kora, before the horns come in with a version of Sadjo’s original brass theme - now quite laid back and harmonised in sixths (as many of the other later phrases are):

The basic feel is African 12/8 (compare Eleggua Kó, post 3), floating between four beats to a bar and six to a bar; all the quavers in effect have equal weight, and so can be grouped in different ways to create rhythmic ambiguity. The fills in these first few bars are an example, others are sketched in ex 6; they are also used to punctuate the next figure, a variant of Sadjo’s first melody in Cano:

This is followed by more playing around with the groupings, emphasising different accents:

The ‘Cano’ incantation now appears (trumpet and tenor saxophone in octaves):

Then a number of short rhythmic figures grouping quavers in fours appear (these are also typical of West African djembe or conga patterns); here is a selection (there are other typical ones at the end of ex 4 and ex 10):

Against these, there are swaggering riffs that are pure township jive, finishing up with this one just after e) above…

…while in between (against the ‘Cano’ chant, now in the upper registers) comes another variant of Sadjo’s melody that makes 3 minims (rather than 3 crotchets or quavers) the basis of its pulse:

Next comes a unison version of his original melody (ex 9), a recap of earlier figures (ex 3 in trombones) and ex 6f, until this melody is  transformed into a long flowing statement in 3-part harmony:

The opening Cano brass theme (ex 1 & ex 2) now appears first in the low register against further variations of even-quaver figures (compare ex 4 – these are effectively tihais!) on trumpets and trombones, ex 10, before its last phrase rises higher and higher and eventually fades completely, leaving the kora with the last word.

Sadjo Djolô and The Rhythm of Tides

The four pieces covered in the last three posts – including Depois o Bosque se Fez Barco and A Country Conscript – form the heart of The Rhythm of Tides (Por Mares do Imaginário). Apart from an introductory number reminiscent of Portuguese fado – but with sitar and pipa joining the Portuguese guitar! – and Music at Last to round it off, Cano and The Song of Reconciliation frame the whole work (which is available on a much-praised CD). In my notes on Manuel Alegre (post 9) and A Country Conscript (post 8) I’ve already talked about aspects of the show which suggest why I chose this structure, but to go briefly back to the beginning…

I had first visited Portugal as a student in the sixties, when my trio was hired to open one of  the first night clubs in the Algarve; we were there for three months, and I fell in love with the country. At that time it was still under the fascist dictatorship; and Brazilian musicians dominated night-life in Lisbon (I don’t intend to imply any connection!). I did go back in 1975, a year after the Revolution, which had been precipitated largely by the ruinous African colonial wars, but then not again until 1990. My interest in Portugal had been rekindled by meeting a number of East Timorese exiles and support/solidarity organisations (especially in Australia), because in the meantime Grand Union had become established, and I was writing a show (Songlines) which centred on events around the Pacific rim.

When I did go back to Lisbon in 1990, I imagined that there would be a large number of Africans from the former colonies now living in Portugal, much as post-war migration to the UK was from British colonies slowly gaining their independence; and I assumed that these migrants would be enriching Portuguese culture in the same way. I was not disappointed – Lisbon’s night-life was now dominated by African bands, and the styles were very varied, from the commercial dance music and mornas of Cape Verde, through the Brazilian-tinged music of Angola and Mozambique to traditional songs and instruments from Guiné-Bissau.

Over a period of a couple of years I spent a great deal of time tramping the streets of Lisbon seeking out, listening to and talking with a huge variety of African musicians, but the most brilliant and remarkable was Sadjo. It is of course an accident – a tragedy, indeed – of colonial history that has divided countries like Senegal, Mali, the Gambia, Guinea and Burkina Faso into separate nations, and made them French-, English- or Portuguese-speaking (and indeed Christian or Muslim), since all share broadly the same language and cultural identity (Maninka or Malinka, Fula or Fulani).

Sadjo Djolô Kouyate comes from a long line of musicians, like griots, who in alternate generations took up the kora or djembe; his nephew Uïé (Queba Sissoco) is a traditional drummer who also appeared in The Rhythm of Tides tours. Sadjo is a devout Muslim – earning much of his living from busking and selling cassettes outside the mosque in Lisbon – but he also has a mischievous sense of humour: the gourd of his kora contains not only donations and small change, but other useful everyday items like batteries, toothpaste, a razor and often a piece of fried chicken… Above all, however, he a great musician – a true ‘force of nature’ Domingos Morais, my friend at the Gulbenkian Foundation, once called him.

The idea behind the Rhythm of Tides was to give an impression of the whole arc of the 500-year rise and fall of the Portuguese empire in 80 minutes, from the voyages of exploration of the earliest navigators, through the establishment of trading routes and colonial rule, to the wars of independence that brought about its collapse.

Portugal was the first European nation to establish a world-wide empire, and the last to give it up; but the tradition that Sadjo represents flourished in Africa long before the Europeans arrived, and will continue essentially unchanged long after their departure.

The Rhythm of Tides is available direct from the Grand Union shop; details and extracts appear on the Music Page of the GUO website.

There are standard big band versions of these scores, written for a project with the Guildhall School of Music, and available from Grand Union.

9: Duet with a great poet

DEPOIS O BOSQUE SE FEZ BARCO

In writing songs for Grand Union shows for singers from a wide range of musical cultures, I realised from the very beginning that – to preserve the distinctive quality of their singing style, which of course is what attracted me in the first place – I had to write in the language they generally sing in. So, over the years, I have learnt to write songs especially in Portuguese and Spanish, Bengali and Chinese – without necessarily being able to speak these languages! I’ve been lucky enough to find sympathetic lyricists in these languages – often writing also about subjects which are part of their own experience – who, with the singers, have also helped me shape appropriate, idiomatic melodic lines as well as the content of the songs.

However, in solving one problem you create another – how are audiences whose main language is usually English to understand these songs? One strategy I’ve developed is a kind of simultaneous translation – at its simplest, alternating the odd English phrase with Bengali text for example (as I did in The Mother, The River in On Liberation Street, written for Lucy Rahman); but more imaginatively and musically, by adding a second voice singing in English – aural subtitles, as it were!

I paired Depois o Bosque… with the instrumental number A Country Conscript (see Post 8 below) for What the River Sings, Grand Union’s contribution – in collaboration with the Water City Festival Orchestra – to the BBC’s 2012 Cultural Festival event Music Nation in March 2012. Both pieces actually come from The Rhythm of Tides (Por Mares do Imaginário) which toured in 1996-97, still one of our best CDs, whose lyrics and inspiration come from the work of Portuguese poet Manuel Alegre. (More about him and the show as a whole appear in the note below.)

In the version recorded here there are two singers – Victoria Couper (or Maria João Silveira on the original CD) singing in Portuguese and Richard Scott in English. The title might loosely be translated ‘when trees were turned into ships’, and that is the central image of the original poem – the deforesting of the land to build ships to explore and establish a world-wide empire, and the corresponding denuding of the country of its men to fight and control this empire. (Alegre was writing at the time of Portugal’s ruinous colonial wars in Africa in the sixties, which had similarly destructive results on the country.) However, the translations are never literal, but a separate poetic commentary on the original lyrics.

At first, the two singers sing independently. The woman begins like this, singing very freely:

Then the music moves into a slow beguine-like tempo, and the male voice enters with a melody that follows the same melodic contours and lyrics that express the same ideas:

The harmony for the woman’s song is predominantly minor (with an emphasis on Bb minor chords), the man’s predominantly major and augmented chords (centred on D major). The descending chord sequence of his part of the song (Ex 2) is mirrored in the second section of the Portuguese setting, but in a minor tonality:

At this point, the flugelhorn (the incomparable Shanti Paul Jayasinha) picks up the melody that originally bridged the Portuguese ‘intro’ to the English verse, and then goes on to play a solo across the descending chords of the English verse:

The woman now sings another version of her previous melody and words in example 3, but this time the two voices actually duet, with the English singer interlocking with the Portuguese in rough translation:

Finally, there is a coda, introduced by the flugelhorn theme – this time joined by the female singer, with words added – which ties everything together, including the movement of the tonality from D major to B flat minor (the notes of these triads in fact form the basis of the flugelhorn melody):

Manuel Alegre and The Rhythm of Tides

In the early 1990s, I first had the idea of creating a show about the rise and fall of empire, but thought it would be more dramatic, and more varied and colourful, if seen through the eyes of the Portuguese. Dating from the first voyages of famous ‘navigators’ like Vasco da Gama and Bartolomeu Dias, the Portuguese was the first European empire to be established, and the last to collapse – not until the early 1970s, in the last throes of the fascist dictatorship founded by António Salazar fifty years before. During the course of the project, I had the privilege of meeting many Portguese artists, intellectuals and politicians – among them the celebrated poet Manuel Alegre.

In the 10 or 15 years leading up to the 1974 Revolution, many dissidents and opponents of the régime – and especially critics of its catastrophic attempts to hold on to its colonies at all costs – were exiled abroad; like many others, Manuel Alegre lived in Paris for a long time. After the Revolution, they returned as heroes and helped build the new democracy in Portugal – often quite literally, since until recently many musicians, writers and artists served as ‘deputados’, members of the Portuguese parliament; and Manuel Alegre himself has twice been a presidential candidate – though sadly never elected.

Above all, Manuel Alegre is a great poet, and has also written a couple of powerful novels. His seminal work O Canto e as Armas takes its title, with deliberate irony, from the first line of Vergil’s Aeneid: ‘arma virumque cano’ – ‘I sing of arms and the man…’ (Aeneas) who was regarded as the founding father of the Roman Empire. Such ambiguity is key to Alegre’s writing, and in this case on the surface he appears to be extolling Portugal’s imperial ambitions – interpreted as such, and welcomed, by the fascist régime; while his admirers and supporters will see only the withering sarcasm directed at the yearning of Salazar and his cronies for a return to a golden age. (Look up boy-king Sebastian for further research…)

Artists critical of totalitarian régimes have always used code like this to communicate their critical views. Another of Alegre’s devices is to write what appear to be love-songs, couched as romantic ballads about the freedom of a sailor’s life at sea, but in reality paeans to political freedom, and (paradoxically under a fascist dictatorship) expressing genuine love of his country and concern for the welfare of its people. Meu Amor é Marinheiro, which I also set in the Rhythm of Tides, is a prime example.

Depois o Bosque se fez Barco, as you will have realised, is another manifestation of this ‘code’. Harking back to the early voyages of discovery and the maritime history which resonates so deeply with Portuguese people even today, he delivers a stinging rebuke to rulers who continued – from Africa to East Timor in the post-war period – to neglect domestic affairs and send so many young men to their deaths (or condemn them to a life of misery and alienation) in a pointless and indefensible cause.

With his permission, I set three of Manuel Alegre’s poems for The Rhythm of Tides (Por Mares do Imaginário in its Portuguese title). The full-length version of Depois o Bosque… can be found on the CD, featuring two great Portuguese singers Paulo de Carvalho (one of whose hits was used on the radio to launch the Revolution!) and Maria João Silveira; and the poetically complex As Colunas de Madrugada, about the Angolan war. Maria João, her voice drenched in the richness of her Angolan parentage, can also be heard on Meu Amor é Marinheiro.

8: Tihais and Big Band Riffs

A Country Conscript

This analysis is based on A Country Conscript, from The Rhythm of Tides (Por Mares do Imaginário) which I wrote in 1996, featuring Portuguese and Portuguese African artists. The show is based on events in the rise and fall of the Portuguese empire; this particular episode dramatises an incident during the war of independence inAngola. It begins with a dialogue between a conscripted soldier traumatised by the war, who tries to commit suicide, and the compassionate medical orderly who attends him. Their dialogue is then taken up by two jazz soloists – Claude Deppa on trumpet and Chris Biscoe on alto saxophone; the backing riffs for the trumpet solos are built on fragments of the soldier’s anguished song, while the melody and harmony of the alto saxophone part develop the more angular but fluid melody of the orderly.

This may seem a world away from Indian classical music, so let’s just step back a bit…

What is a tihai?

A very characteristic device in South Asian music, the tihai is a three-times repeated phrase used to punctuate or end solo improvisations and conclude pieces; it has to end on the first beat of a time-cycle, or the beginning of a bar in Western terms, and generally appears to contradict – or provide a cross-rhythm to – the basic pulse. Here are three very simple examples; in the variants, rests simply replace notes:

The important thing to note is that where you start determines where you finish up! These examples illustrate patterns constructed out of evenly-spaced notes in 4/4 time across a four-bar phrase; for a South Asian musician the possibilities are infinite. The tihai phrase can be any length (including the judiciously judged gap between repetitions) – mine are only 3, 4 or 5 notes long; and the tal or time-cycle they are played over can be any length too – not just the conventional 8- or 16-beats, but 7, 10, 12, even 10½!

As long as they come from the raga that forms the basis of the piece, the notes that make up the phrase may be freely chosen and the rhythm varied, but every phrase must be repeated identically. My examples suggest a melodic contour, and starting (and hence finishing) points within which the figure can be varied. Finally, bear in mind that all this is improvised! – though of course the musicians spend hours practising what kind of phrase might fit where and in what musical context.

A further variation is the triple tihai, generally used to conclude a performance, where the three-times repeated phrase is itself repeated three times in its entirety.

Using tihais as riffs

Working with musicians like Baluji and Yousuf (see earlier posts) I realised this ingenious device could be used to great effect, particularly in writing backing riffs behind jazz soloists; and in composition there is the huge advantage of being able to work everything out in advance! Here I show how all these features can be explored in an otherwise conventional big band score – the first piece in this series, incidentally, to be built on a standard straight-ahead jazz swing feel. So, back to A Country Conscript…

The piece is built on 32-bar sections (albeit doubled at the beginning and halved towards the end). The trumpet solos are in fast swing over a single chord (essentially a minor 11^th) which changes for each section, with tihais used as backing riffs; they alternate with alto sax sections which begin in slow ballad time, then double on successive entries (until they match the trumpet tempo) and are always in D minor, over astringent chromatic harmony. (The textures behind the alto solos gradually thicken up – they are derived from the opening melody, but are not analysed any further here.) The timings that follow relate to the mp3 file of A Country Conscript.

00’ 00” – the first trumpet section in Eb minor, changing to F# minor (00’ 24”) and back to Eb minor (00’ 39”). The backing figures (derived from the soldier’s melodic material mentioned above) have three-times repetitions across the beat, but are not strictly tihais.

01’ 00” – the alto plays the full ballad melody (derived from the medic’s material) in quarter-time, with piano chords (in D minor, as in all recurrences of this material).

02’ 00” – back to fast 4/4 for the trumpet, now in A minor. The first of the strict tihais comes in here (02’ 02”). It fills four bars, finishing on the first beat of the next four bars and is itself played twice more, rising in pitch and filling out in harmony each time (sketched in the last two bars of the example):

Three things to note here which apply to all the trumpet solo sections:

1. I have adapted the tihai formula by allowing repetitions to be harmonised and/or rise in pitch, while remaining rhythmically identical;
2. the harmony is always diatonic within the root key of the section, ie minor scale with a raised 6^th (‘Dorian mode’), based largely on open 4^ths and 5^ths;
3. the rhythm of the tihai phrase is often diminished, and forms a triple tihai, as it launches the next alto section.

The end of this section (02’ 22”) illustrates both these features:

The alto comes back in in half-time (02’ 30”), then the trumpet returns, again in fast 4/4, now in F# minor (03’ 35”) against this riff:

Again this is played three times, rising each time (in unison), and then in diminution three times (with thickening harmony); then this diminished phrase is turned into a triple tihai, harmonised and rising (04’ 00”):

The alto now has two choruses in fast time, first with rhythm section only (04’ 05”), then with brass/sax backings (05’ 05”). The trumpet returns back in Eb minor – only 16 bars this time – and the section finishes with another variant of a triple tihai (05’ 42”):

The alto solo this time is backed by fragments of its own original ‘ballad’ melody (05’ 50”) before the trumpet solo returns for another 16 bars. Triplets dominate the backing figures from this point onwards, and the first of these is a complex (and hard to play!) triple tihai across 12 bars (06’ 25”). For clarity, I have omitted the harmony, which ‘thickens’ as before. Note how the extra crotchet rest between each set of three phrases gradually forces the last note of each tihai towards the first beat of the next section:

After another alto incursion (06’ 35”) based on the first 16 bars of the ‘ballad’ material, an 8-bar trumpet section finishes with this tihai (06’ 55”)…

…and the final tihai (07’ 10”), linking both trumpet and alto soloists harmonically and rhythmically, deliberately suggests West African drum patterns:

Why West African? Strictly speaking, A Country Conscript (and this analysis) finishes at 07’ 20”, but the drama needed some kind of resolution. What follows is The Song of Reconciliation, featuring Mozambican guitarist Mingo Rangel, kora-player Sadjo Djolô from Guiné-Bissau and his nephew Uïé on djembe, and all the wind and brass figures are derived from West African kora patterns and chants – but that is a story for another time…

Notes

‘A country conscript’ ambiguously refers to the fact the individual soldier was conscripted, but also that the country itself (ie Portugal) was forced to defend a colonial past (these were the last days of the dictatorship) to which it felt no commitment and for which it had no stomach.

The CD The Rhythm of Tides (Por Mares do Imaginário) was compiled from a BBC Radio 3 broadcast and recording from the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank in October 1996. It features all the Grand Union Orchestra’s core players – including Baluji Shrivastav (sitar, tabla) and Miao Xiao Yung (pipa, ruan) – together with seven Lisbon-based performers. It is available from the Grand Union shop; details and extracts appear on the Music Page of the GUO website.

I also arranged this score for standard big band, for a project with the Guildhall School of Music Big Band. This too is available from Grand Union, and like most of my music for the GUO is playable by more experienced student ensembles with an adventurous spirit.

7: The voice of Anatolia

Yemen – abridged version

One of the very special moments in 11.11.11 at the Hackney Empire last November – itself one of the most successful and unusual shows Grand Union has ever produced – was the performance of Yemen by singer/baglama player Günes Cerit from the Grand Union Youth Orchestra and ‘Second Generation’ group.

The song was absolutely appropriate to the theme of the evening, celebrating the spirit of Armistice Day. It’s a stirring indictment of conscription, in this case of Turkish men being sent to fight a bloody war in which they had no direct concern – in Yemen, which gives it a further spine-tingling resonance in this year of the Arab Spring.

However, the song was not new to us – it was one of the pieces I arranged for a project with the well-known Anatolian singer Sabahat Akkiraz about 15 years ago and which was subsequently recorded; the story of this collaboration is told below, and this analysis is built around a shortened version of that recording. (The full version, about half as long again, appears on the Grand Union CD Around the World in 80 Minutes, together with other pieces from this collaboration.)

The tonal centre of the piece is B, based on a B minor scale with a sharpened 6^th (‘Dorian mode’), but with the half-flattened 2^nd degree of the scale, somewhere between C sharp and C natural, which is very characteristic of Turkish music; and it has a typical 5-beat rhythm. The excerpt starts with a statement of the ‘verse’ by the baglama (saz), played twice:

This is accompanied by a military-sounding snare drum tattoo, which features more prominently in the fuller versions of this piece, breaking the rigid pattern up a little:

Another characteristic of Anatolian melodies is the repetition of sequentially-descending phrases. In this song the structure is unusual, in that the voice only enters with the highest phrase – a kind of ‘chorus’ – after the saz has played the ‘verse’ part of the melody twice:

The pedal B comes in here (with the rhythm section) for the first time, but then – for dramatic and musical reasons, and to underline this structure – I shift the bass to E (suggesting a kind of E minor 9^th harmony) for the ‘verse’ melody (which is again repeated). This time around, the instruments (flugelhorn and flute) take over the ‘chorus’, but against a half-time feel, 5/4 rather than 5/8:

…and in later performances, including the Hackney Empire 11.11.11 show, I added a women’s chorus here, singing an English translation of the Turkish lyrics:

As you can see in Example 4, the rhythm now has an unusual kind of 5-beat Latin feel  (not unlike the ‘Killer Joe’ keyboard rhythm in example 6/1 below!) – already suggested in some of the baglama rhythms, in fact – which can be notated like this:

This becomes the backing for the flugelhorn solo, which for contrast and variety dips down to B flat minor before coming back to B minor. Then the instruments play the original ‘verse’ melody in 5/8 against this 5/4 feel – again over an E rather than a B root – before the voice comes in as before with the ‘chorus’ section in the original 5/8 time over a B. The snare drum is reintroduced, and under the original ‘verse’ theme it takes the song out, with a free flute obbligato and gradual fade.

 

The back-story

Our first big participatory show in north/east Londonwas If Music Could… in 1992, and it involved performers and groups from many different local communities –Caribbean and African, Chinese, Indian and Bangladeshi, Somali and of course Turkish and Kurdish. Our main contact with the Turkish community was through a group of exiled intellectuals, academics and artists based in a cultural centre on the Islington/Hackney borders, who met regularly to sing and play traditional Turkish music.

The most accomplished musician was Cemal Akkiraz, who had come to London many years before, persona non grata in his native Turkey. He also established the Anatolian Music Centre in north London, taught saz and ran ensembles at different levels of ability. Many of his students and groups – the saz, or more correctly ‘baglama’, comes in different sizes, like Western European string instruments – took part in If Music Could… and subsequent big Grand Union participatory shows like Dancing in the Flames (Union Chapel, Hackney Empire 1995) and Where the Rivers Meet (Sadler’s Wells Theatre 2000).

Cemal is a great saz player, and member of a family of some of Turkey’s best-known musicians. His sister is Sabahat Akkiraz, who tours all over the world, renowned as perhaps the leading exponent of Anatolian music and a best-selling recording artist. Knowing the work of Grand Union through Cemal, she suggested we work together to create, perform and record versions of her material outside the strict conventions of traditional Anatolian music. The first fruits of this collaboration were heard at the Union Chapel in the London Jazz Festival of 1997, recorded and performed a year later under the title Echoes from Anatolia, and Sabahat herself took part in Where the Rivers Meet.

Working with Sabahat’s repertoire posed significant challenges, as my notes on Yemen above suggest. Metres and phrase lengths irregular by Western standards were relatively easy to negotiate; besides Yemen, there are two other examples on the Around the World… CD – Halay, which takes on a kind of West African rhythm; and Yagmar Yagar, set to a reggae-type bass line. (There is also an improvising tradition in Anatolian music, and Halay notably pits Sabahat’s voice against that of South African drummer Brian Abrahams.)

Harmony, however – entirely absent from the tradition – is a different matter, especially deciding how to handle the ‘out-of-tune’ 2^nd, but that must wait for another day…

6: More on scales and improvisation

The ideas explored here come straight out of a workshop with the Grand Union Youth Orchestra I was doing recently with two other Grand Union Orchestra core musicians – Australian Louise Elliott (tenor saxophone and flute), who is expert on Latin-American music as well as being a great jazz player; and Yousuf Ali Khan (tabla and voice), whose internationally-acclaimed expertise extends from Bengali folk song to North Indian classical music.

When I came in, Louise was running over Benny Golson’s Killer Joe – with a salsa feel rather than mid-tempo swing, as it’s more straightforward for young players, a bit less intimidating when it comes to improvisation. Here are the bones of the piece in this form:

For the purposes of improvisation practice (including the invention of backing figures and riffs), you can ignore the middle eight and cycle just the first two bars, two 7^th chords a tone apart, and play from the component notes of these chords. However, there is another approach…

After the break, Yousuf introduced one of his rag-based compositions, Rag Charukeshi:

To get into these pieces, we go over the scale a few times that the Rag is based on; in this case it starts as a major scale, but has a flattened 6^th and 7^th (there’s also a useful Indian way of practising scales in groups of mixed ability, which is demonstrated here too):

Louise then pointed out that the way she gained fluency as a young musician was to devise patterns that grouped notes together ascending or descending; this is the example she gave (top line), but of course the variations are limitless:

Yousuf then pointed out that this corresponds exactly with the way South Asian musicians gain fluency in certain rags – a technique known as ‘vakra’ – and the patterns can be applied to any raga, where there are infinitely more varieties than the European major or minor scales and modes; the bottom line is an example he gave, but of course again the variations are limitless.

At this point, I realised that the tonality of Killer Joe and Rag Charukeshi were related, and that the same scale could actually be fitted to both chords:

Using this technique, it is possible to improvise melodically over the two-bar sequence without having to think ‘vertically’ of each change from C7 to Bb7 – a tremendous liberation for less experienced players! – and in fact it’s a great way to explore the effect of ‘extensions’ (the 9ths, 11ths, 13ths etc) that are implied in the basic harmony.

Then by a reverse process, Killer Joe-type harmonies suggested themselves for Yousuf’s theme, and finally of course it adopted a kind of Latin rhythm:

This is not necessarily how Yousuf would like his composition performed, of course, and it’s quite likely we shall not do it again! However, it’s a great example of how several radically different approaches to music-making – particularly when they come from different musical cultures – can spark off each other to great creative effect.

Postscript

Yousuf suggested some very ingenious possible tihais for his composition, which explore the same basic idea, but get progressively longer:

You can see the principle – a three-times related phrase which goes across the four-square basic pulse, but miraculously resolves on the first beat of the bar!

These devices pepper South Asian music, especially the improvisations of classical Indian musicians, and serve as very effective structural signposts. I shall explore this technique further future blogs; in the meantime, as a taster, try Collateral Damage from If Paradise (track 21 on the Music page of the Grand Union Orchestra website) – but listen not to the jazz soloists but the ‘big band’ backing figures.

5: 11.11.11 – a sample Blues

Some ideas in response to the challenge to create an 11-bar blues theme for the Grand Union Orchestra’s show 11.11.11 at the Hackney Empire Theatre on November 11th 2011.

I’ve always been fascinated by the 12-bar blues form, and how far you can go changing elements within it while still preserving its essential character. If you are immersed in the spirit of the blues, some of its features are likely to crop up – often unconsciously – in any of your compositions, and this is certainly the case with a lot of my music for the Grand Union Orchestra (see previous posts below!).

In this case we had the opportunity to create a show which was an unrepeatable one-off: November 11^th 2011 is Armistice Day, and it also happened to be the first night of the London Jazz Festival. How these ideas are related is described on our website in information about the show, performed by the Grand Union Orchestra and many different guest musicians and groups, mostly from East London. To give these performers opportunities to participate creatively – since improvisation is a key theme! – we came up with the idea of devising a collectively-composed piece for the event.

The basic idea – to explore as many aspects as possible of the number 11.

The challenge - to write an 11-bar blues theme to be combined with 10 others into a coherent piece, following these criteria:

• it must be 11 (rather than 12) bars long;
• it must be in 11/8 time;
• the tempo should be no slower than 111 quavers per minute;
• you should supply a chord sequence if possible;
• you may use 11^th chords, but this is not essential;
• you may add a bass line if you wish;
• you may write in any key;
• any other exploration of the number 11 is welcome.

What follows is just an example of what can be done: they are simply my ideas – which can be completely ignored! – and many other approaches are possible.

Click here to listen to the extract.

Here are eleven ideas about the blues, referring to the piece above, which may be helpful:

1: Dropping a whole bar to produce an 11-bar sequence is not unusual – if you listen to the early 20^th century country blues singers like Big Bill Broonzy you will hear any number of irregular variations of this sort; the strict 12-bar blues was formulated later.

2: I love the 12/8 blues above all, with its infectious triplet metre, so the obvious parallel is to think in 11/8. In this piece, the dropped quaver at the end of each bar is likely to be almost imperceptible to many listeners: they may be aware of a slight ‘limp’ in the music, but the practice of tying over the 12^th quaver to the first beat of the next bar is a syncopation that is so common in blues, gospel and big band writing that that is what they will imagine is happening!

3: A strong conventional feature is the AAB form – a phrase in the first four bars which is repeated (with a small variations) in the second four, and a third phrase that extends and rounds it off. (In sung blues, the lyrics articulate this form even more clearly.)

4: There is sometimes an answering or linking phrase in the 3^rd and 4^th (and hence 7^th and 8^th) bars, so I have sketched one in here; this too may be modified when repeated.

5: Underlying this form is the harmonic convention of moving to the subdominant (chord IV) in bars 5 and 6 (and sometimes also in bar 2). Other chords can substitute for chord IV however – here I have used the chord on the flattened 3^rd (a note that itself is a feature of what is sometimes called the ‘blues scale’) – without losing the blues ‘identity’. Furthermore, the subdominant chord IV may be more complex – generally a 7^th or 9^th – so here I’ve used 9^th and 13^th chords quite freely.

6: For the ‘clinching’ phrase (bars 9/10) the harmony naturally tends towards the dominant (chord V), but often followed (echoing bars 2 and 5/6) by chord IV. These closing bars are sometimes prepared for in bar 7 by a harmony outside the ‘primary’ sequence, often VI⁷ progressing to II⁷/V⁷, or a chromatic descent of minor 7^ths to chord ii⁷/V⁷ (see note below for clarification); again, I have preserved the principle here, but with different actual chords.

7: The movement and voicing of these chords (middle line), which would be effective on strings or saxes for example, is designed to further underline this form.

8: The so-called ‘blues scale’ is simply a convenient academic rationalisation of some of the melodic elements that characterise the traditional sung blues – a flattened 7^th, natural and flattened 5^th and alternate natural and flattened 3^rd – which also fit against all the simple basic chords (I, IV, V, even VI and II) of the conventional 12-bar sequence.

9: Changing these harmonies, however, leads to other melodic possibilities without weakening the sense of it still being a blues. So here I’ve used the flattened 2^nd, for example; but the shape of the phrases is completely orthodox – albeit perhaps big band rather than vocal phrasing.

10: Finally, it’s often very useful to write a bass line, which serves to delineate the harmonic movement and the rhythm or feel of the piece – although in performance I would expect the bass-player to interpret this line quite freely. Here it’s very simple – either outlining the contour of the chords of the tonic, or firmly emphasising the roots of the chords which deviate chromatically from the tonic key.

11: As an example of a different approach altogether, this version uses similar melodic phrases, but harmonised entirely with 11th chords:

Note: a reminder of how to interpret those generic chord symbols (in C):

Now the challenge is up to you! Click here for full details.