h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am trying to organize my thoughts about this journal. I can't allow it to take over my life, but I would like to be somewhat consistent in keeping it.

My own rules of the road:

1. I will expect a lot of editing of entries, so that I can add what might be useful information to anyone else facing the same challenges.

2. Whenever I feel the need for language stronger than, say, chamomile tea, I will just think WWDAD and use Belgium. It may be used as a noun or a verb.

3. Square brackets indicate places I know need work. I will come back to these, honest.

4. I will make more rules as I go along.

Preamble:

First, an explanation and an apology. Jazz is an almost embarrassing word. It is used to describe many kinds of music, and, frankly, its use feels a little pretentious. I'm using the word to describe mostly improvisational music, although there is some absolutely beautiful writing that is part of it. I may talk about this in another entry. I will not be discussing free-jazz here, because it's not what I'm working on. So, this is about improvisation over preexisting song forms, some of which can be original.

Time in Jazz:

There is another very nice entry about the use of harmony in jazz. I will learn how to link. It is useful because it discusses some of the musical vocabulary available. It discusses some of the scales we used and how they fit with certain chords. I'm going to replace the word "chords" with "changes", because that's how most musicians think about them. The distinction is useful because the word changes implies harmonic motion, rather than something static. Great improvisation moves seamlessly "over the bar line," meaning that the line that you play should reflect both where you're going and where you've been. So the changes are really propel the music, giving a moving harmonic landscape. [[While Entry (link) I think of that like the Matrix. Some rules can be bent. A nice discussion of rule bending can be found in the book "Proust was a Neuro-scientist" (needs author). [Again, something to return to.]]] My discussion and quest has to do with how the vocabulary sits in time. While I will talk a bit about various time signatures, these are not the crux of what makes this music so compelling. The time I'm trying to discuss is how we choose to play within any time signature. If you listen carefully, great musicians don't play right on the beat. Rather, they play behind it, or, less often, a little ahead. When they do this they are neither rushing (increasing the tempo), nor dragging. They are purposely phase shifted. I suffer from a nearly persistent tendency actually to rush. This is not unusual, but compelling playing is all about controlling this.

All for now. Don't worry, I will be editing.