BASS SCALES AND ARPEGGIOS, 4-string

I've noticed I get a lot of visitors here looking for info about bass scales. Here's some pages from "The Big Ol' (USEFUL) Book of Scales and Arpeggios," which covers all the major, minor and pentatonic scales, and all the arpeggios you're likely to ever need. Practicing scales in some kind of productive way is a huge stumbling block with students (and pros!), and so this is also addressed. There are also plenty of hints about putting it all to use in the real world. About 40 pages, available at my website, www.countjockula.com.

The first part, shown above, deals with the first five frets, and is laid out sort of like "The Segovia Scales." After this we get into moveable scale patterns and start charging up the neck.

Like I said, all the arpeggios you're likely to need.

There's a thorough examination of pentatonic scales, which start growing little curlicues, until....

 This is from the end of the book, where all the scales and arpeggios get put together and run from one end of the neck to the other. It's my standard pre-gig hand-and-brain warmup. Then as long as my heart and soul show up as well, I think I'm ready to make some music.

Philip Glass and John Cage

Said young Philip Glass to his men,

"That sounded good, play it again.

And again and again

And again and again

And again and again and again."

Inspired by something I read about John Cage saying he considered audience noise to be part of the composition: 

One evening in Paris Cage sat

Down to dinner at Boulez's flat.

But ere they could start,

Pierre launched a fart.

Sniffed Johnny, "I coulda wrote that!"

Playing Bach's Bm violin Partita (courante and double) on bass guitar pt.2

My arrangement of this piece for electric bass is available through my website, www.countjockula.com

   
  A Bach piece usually comes to us without much (from the composer at least) in the way of  direction, an omission which is unfortunately taken all too literally in many performances. Most likely a bit of interpretive latitude was permitted, though it is just as easy to find romantic, even overwrought playing of the same pieces. The question of how much freedom we may take while respecting Bach's intent - or our perception of it - is one we musicians have been grappeling with ever since his era passed into history.

   If an audience is genuinely moved by hearing someone play a Bach piece, it is a "good" performance. A performer's interpretation, and the audience's acceptance of it, will be determined by, among other things, the time and place of its creation. Thus, what we might hear as "overwrought" playing might have been perfectly acceptible for turn-of-the 20th century audiences, while a heavy-metal guitar shredder, playing a fast, high-volume, effects-drenched, but otherwise robotic version of, say, the Chromatic Fantasy may well inspire a crowd of headbangers in a present day arena. Let us however take the position that there is a "best" place from which to start, and that this is a vantage point as close as possible to that of J. S. Bach himself.  How close can we hope to come to what he had in mind?

   We know about what Henryk Szeryng calls the "latent polyphony" of the Bm courante: that in this seemingly monophonic line there is actually a structure of at least three-parts. (Szeryng, 17) Here is how Szeryng prizes apart the voices of the first six bars:

While he rightly states that "our inner ear" will extend the influence of a given note over a longer span than that of its actual written value, his literal rendering of a "latent polyphony" is somewhat of a contrapuntal and rhythmic mishmash:

           

It is less of a stretch to see it as horizontalized choral writing, which even conforms to various voice-leading rules, though this gets us no closer to an idea of how to perform it. An alternative approach is to return to Szeryng's "contrapuntal and rhythmic mishmash" and see if we can impose some kind of order, based upon the unambiguous direction Bach gives at the beginning of the piece: the word courante.

   It is likely that Bach, when writing a courante, assumed that anybody playing it would likely know what that meant, that this one word would activate for the performer a host of associations in much the same way someone today beginning a piece in triple meter with the notation "jazz waltz" would consider that sufficient. Therefore, an investigation into the nature of that dance (though we know his "dance movements" were not written for dancers) should give us a context, however murky, from which to proceed.

  By the time Bach wrote the Bm Partita, the courante had been in existence in one form or another for at least a century and a half, so it's difficult to know what the term specifically meant to him. Dolmetsch states "The courant, or coranto, as its name implies was very rapid about 1600. It had become much slower about 1700." (45)  Johann Joachim Quantz, who during a time of changing styles remained a member "of Bach's school" (Dolmetsch, 62), in his treatise versuch einer Anwiesung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen (1752) declared the ideal courant tempo to be quarter note = 80. We also know that it was originally a pantomimic dance in which three couples played out a scenario of seduction, rejection, and eventually, after some pleading on the part of the gents, acceptance (Sachs, 361ff). Perhaps this seductive, even tender emotional quality, and rather stately tempo could be allowed to inform a contemporary performance of the Bm courante.

   

   There is a rhythmic motif associated with courantes as well:

If we assume that this could have at least been a subconscious part of Bach's sense of the courante and apply it to the piece at hand, we may see a different way that the notes of a given measure relate to one another. Now the implied "voices" take on a new function as rhythmic indicators.

It may be tempting to compare the courant pattern to the clave of Afro-Cuban music. However, the alternation of measures - the two "sides" of the clave pattern - in the latter is absolutely rigidly adhered to, while Bach's relative freedom in alternating or repeating the two "sides" also relates notes within a measure, one measure to others, builds phrases, regulates tension within phrases, and syncopates the call-and-response rhyming of the two sides of the pattern. The following is my admittedly subjective idea of a "rhythmic map" of the entire piece.

PHRASING

You must not separate ideas which belong to each other, and, on the contrary, you must divide them when the musical sense is finished, whether there be a pause or not.

 -  J.J. Quantz (quoted in Dolmetsch, 24)

The first six bars display three regular occurances of the rhythmic pattern, but Bach also finds various ways of prolonging a pattern. The fourth pattern extends over four bars (m7 - 10), with a two-bar hemiola inserted between the two measures. Bars 11 - 14 and 15 - 17 may be seen as only two patterns, with the second side being played three and two times respectively. Hemiola crops up again in the last two bars of the first section as a closing gesture (which is often employed in triple meter pieces).

A clue as to how this might be translated to actual performance comes, again, from Quantz (quoted in Dolmetsch, 25):

The player must try to feel in himself not only the principal passion but all the others as they come. And as in most pieces there is a perpetual change of passions, the player must be able to judge which feeling is in each thought, and to regulate his execution upon that.           

The more harmonically and rhythmically active second section can also be seen as a set of "thoughts," with the harmonic and tonal movement confirming the clues we get from the rhythm.

Measure 48 marks the beginning of one of those "changes of passion:" twelve relatively sunny bars in D-major, whose new mood is reinforced by a more regular repetition of the rhythmic motif. The end of the passage is marked unequivocally by the two-measure hemiola gesture at mm 58-59. While bar 60 serves as a transition back to the B-minor sonority and the prevailing darker emotional color.

RHYTHMIC ALTERATION IN BAROQUE PERFORMANCE

Eighth notes in slower tempos were frequently allowed to "swing" a little (see Dolmetsch, 53ff) and the issues arising from this are surprisingly similar to those encountered in playing and scoring jazz. For instance, the inequality of the notes is not properly expressed by using triplets or dotted eighth-sixteenth pairs; the use of unequal eighth note pairs is situational and extremely subtle. Thus, it made more sense, as it does now, to simply notate eighth notes and trust the musician to properly interpret the rhythm. Indeed, taken alone, the rhythmic motif of the courante might have been played:

Whether unequal eighths are expected in a Baroque courante however, is open to debate. Some of the criteria are met, though sources are somewhat unclear (to this reader) about its application in triple meter.  Experimenting with unequal eighths (the term "swing eighths," while convenient shorthand, calls up an inaccurate association with Swing) in the case of the Bm courante had the surprising effect of seeming to flatten out the rhythmic play discussed above. Therefore it seemed best to stay with even eighths, per current practice.

One other bit of rhythmic play merits our attention: the closing gesture at mm 76 - 78. While it looks like we have a very interesting 4 - 3 - 3 - 2 pattern of eights notes against the ¾ measures, actually "bringing this out" in an overt manner

seems to have the opposite effect (note however Szeryng's bowing).  More rhythmic interest is generated by simply treating these three bars as the closing hemiola they are, and allowing the irregular eighth note pattern to play out against it.

Other aspects of the courante are best investigated along with corresponding occurances in the Double. When we consider the various characteristics of the double we find an amplification of Bach's compositional process for the courante. Not only is the bass line and harmony almost identical to that of the earlier movement, but we also find he preserved chord voicings from one movement to the next, along with corresponding musical and emotional characteristics. Our interpretation of the double may then be linked to that of the courante. 

REFERENCES

Dolmetsch, Arnold: The interpretation of the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1972, University of Washington Press.

Piston, Walter: Counterpoint, 1947, W.W. Norton, New York, NY

Sachs, Curt: World history of the dance, (translated Bessie Schönberg) 1937, W.W. Norton, New York, NY

Szeryng, Henryk (ed): Sonatas and partitas for violin solo (J.S. Bach) 1981, Schott Musik GmbH, Mainz

Playing Bach's Bm violin Partita (courante and double) on bass guitar pt.1

My arrangement of this piece for electric bass is available through my website, www.countjockula.com

"Because it's there" is a great reason, we're told, to climb Mt. Everest (though it's not good enough for me).  It's a lousy reason to play "Flight of the Bumblebee," "Giant Steps" in all twelve keys, or a Bach fugue. Bach's music is sort of an Everest for players who get serious about some out-of-way instrument: ukulele, harmonica, whatever.  Indeed, some Bach transcribed for the (your out-of-the-way instrument here) is a way presenting it (and not incidentally, the performer) to "polite society."  But frequently the actual performances of these arrangements never get past being a cool musical parlor trick (Bach on the tuba!  Bach on the bagpipes!!), and in the end are crummy Bach, boring music.

So with a little hard work one can get to where they can give an accurate rendering of all the notes of a piece, in the right order, with no mistakes, on God-knows-what axe; and Bach's notes certainly are interesting in and of themselves, but they are only a means to an end.  I mean, look at the guy: he knew he was baaad and could carve anybody.  It's popularly said of him that he sired twenty children, but it seems even more significant that he saw ten of them die.  And speaking of "carving," he once pulled a knife on a bassoonist. 

So just playing the notes right is not enough. I'm going to try - probably over a few posts - to hash out some interpretive ideas for playing Bach, using my arrangement of the Courante and Double from the Bm violin partita as a point of focus.

'Spress Yourself

or: "It's not what ya look like when you're doin' what you're doin'

It's what you're DOIN' when you're doin' whatcha look like you're doin."

Music students sometimes get conflicting messages.  On one hand, there's the romantic notion that, through music, we are "expressing ourselves."  Whatever it means, I suppose it's probably generally true.  On the other hand, if you study classical music you get the equally vague admonishment that we are here to serve "the composer's intention."  As a matter of fact, my guitar teacher in college, the Cuban master Juan Mercadal, one time during a lesson held an imaginary knife to his groin and prescribed a particularly gruesome self-inflicted wound as penance should he fail to honor "the composer's intention."  As a composer myself, I have no idea what "my intention" is at any given point.  I suppose I could give some kind of broad philosophy that tends to govern my choices, but really, it's nothing I'd want someone to cut themselves over.  Particularly there.

Incidentally, I was in Havana once talking to a fellow guitar player and, trying for a little street-cred, I mentioned that "mi professor en la universidad" was Juan Mercadal.  "¿Quien?" "Hwann Mehrka-DAHL."  "¿?" "Huwaannnn…" Finally he got it.  "¡Ohhhh! ¡Wamercaw!"  The Cubans are very economical in their use of consonants.

I tend to see interpretation as: a little Bach, a little me… Maybe a lot of Bach, a little me would make more sense. Of course, if you have some way you like to play it that has nothing to do with your understanding of Bach or Baroque performance practice, why not go for it?  If Bach has anything to say about it, he knows where to find you.  Just watch out for that knife.

Da Form 

The form of the whole piece is pretty straightforward and classic: two sections, each one repeated.  The first one starts in the home key of B minor, and ends up in the dominant key, F#.  The second starts there, and gets us back home again to Bm.  This is the central drama of hundreds of years of European music: start at the tonic, go to the dominant, and get yourself back home by curfew (sometime before the last bar).  Now a little after Bach's time, when this two-part journey is overlaid on the three-part sonata-allegro form - exposition, development, recapitulation - you have inexhaustible possibilities for variation.  But we have this relatively simple AA BB form for both movements.  And in Bach's hands, inexhaustible possibilities.

Taking the Repeats

 "Sounds so nice, play it twice"

To me, the repeats here pose an interesting set of questions. Now very often in Bach's world, the repeat was a chance to embellish the material, to "solo" on it.  But this is what the Double is: a big, embellished repeat of the Courante. What I find myself fascinated with is the repeats of the A's and B's within the movements. On one hand, they're absolutely necessary, since a lot of times in music, something played just once results in a "structural dissonance."  That is, after once through an A or B section, even though you've brought things to a close with a nice big fat cadence, the music is still in a state of tension just the way it is when a dissonant interval is sounded, and is brought to "rest" (resolved) when the section is played again. 

This sounds awful to say, but in a lot of the performances I listened to - some by players with whom I would never presume to argue about Bach - I got a disquieting feeling of there being a Sisyphean aspect to the repeats, where we're going all the way back to the beginning and craaaanking the whole thing up again… I may have missed what was going on in these performances, but I think in my own it's important to have a definite idea, a shape, then restate it and maybe even juice it up a little on the repeat. So whatever impression the audience is getting the first time around can be reinforced during the repeat, leaving listeners with a clear sense of the piece (whatever it came to mean to them), and even a soupçon of self-satisfaction for being able to come away from the performance with some coherent sense of the whole. A tangible thing to take home, as it were.

Famous composer limericks, pt. deux

Frau J.S. Bach, Mrs., the second
One night as her new husband beckoned
Thought "Johnny's first wife
Was deprived of her life
'Cause his organ's got no stops, I reckon."

Here's one I could see possibly catching some hell for:

Herr Beethoven had it in mind
To the deaf you should always be kind,
And try not to shout
Or let words tumble out.
I said, TRY NOT TO... oh, never mind.

3-octave pentatonic scales on 6-string bass

A way of looking at pentatonic scales on bass, breaking them up into trichords. A possible way of getting at a more Arabic maqaam/jins approach, or Prez' way of making three notes do the maximum work over the most time. It should be possible to "develop" a given trichord (adding, sharping, or flatting notes for instance) the way one uses ajnas within a maqaam. Also just a good position-shifting exercise.

Low-B players (that would be, like, everyone but me) can just add 1 to any 6th-string fret number on the TAB staff.

Ice Cream with Ben E. King

One night early in '85 I was onstage with a top-40 band in Lancaster CA, out in the middle of the desert in a nautical-themed motel lounge. One of the staples of cover bands then was the "Ice Cream Changes Medley."  "Ice Cream Changes" are what musicians call a sequence of four chords that show up in almost every tin pan alley tune, and comprise a large chunk of the early rock 'n roll repertoire.  In C, for instance you would be looking at: C - Am - Dm (or F) - G, or variations of it. The leader calls "Ice Cream!" and you find a key, get in a dreamy 12/8 feel and:

Darlin yoooooo-wooo-wooooooo.  Send me….

("hey I got one," says the guitar player)

Cherry.  Che-erry pie….Gi-i-mme. Gimme so-ome…

(the saxman steps to the mic and…)

Devil or Ay-hnngel, I can't make. Up my mi-ind…

(and back to the lead singer)

Count every wave, on the stormy sea….

…and so on, for as long as paying customers are dancing and we can come up with tunes. There's usually a bridge section to contend with, but they usually fall into a couple of set patterns which can pretty much be divined with a word or two from across the stage.  So in response to raised eyebrows someone'd yell "rhythm!" or "go to the four!" With an Ice Cream Changes tune, that's usually enough to you started. What I do with guitar players who need a chord is point to a fret on my bass up or down the E-string. 

So anyway, this one night, there's a tap on my arm - I was easy to reach at my position on the very left of the stand - and this guy says "I'm Ben E. King, can I sit in?"  To which I naturally respond "getcher butt up here!" and he's great. Now I'm not sure if back then I'd have known  whether or not he was who he said he was, but he had an undeniably stentorian doowop voice, knew the bag, and could do all the stage moves.  Three nights later, I'm at a restaurant somewhere in Orange county, with a different band but in my usual spot on the left side of the bandstand and this guy taps me on the arm, "Hey I'm Ben E. King…"  Different guy, same response, "getcher butt on up here."  Same thing: great singer, smooth performer.  Thinking back on it, and the fact that this was Southern California after all, I doubt either one actually was the Ben E. King.

And a few years later, back in Richmond, I found out why.  I was at that time in a band with 10 of my best buddies, good good band, and we were hired to do a big corporate bash at a downtown hotel. The clients had gone so far as to hire The Drifters and Bowzer (of Sha-Na-Na and TV fame), and members of our rhythm section were supposed to fill in for whatever chairs the name guys needed covered, then play a dance set with our full band.  The Drifters, such as they were (no chick, no one even claiming to be Ben E. King) had their own drummer and guitarist, and pretty much just chord charts, so it was a pretty easy show.  Of course the lead singer was more of an Otis Redding clone than a Ben E. King, but there was a great old-school bass singer, and then a couple of younger guys filling it out; I sort of figured we were backing the Central Atlantic Drifters Troupe or something. With which I have no problem - these Drifter guys were pros. But I guess there's a bunch of guys who, at one time or another in their professional lives, "were" Ben E. King.

I ended up playing The Drifters, The Bowz, and my band's long set with no break. And of course for a bass player, that also pretty much means playing almost every second of every tune, and by the end I thought my arms were gonna fall off.

Great lyrics (not mine)

The literature of the great Calypsonians, from what I've been able to find, is woefully underrepresented on the internet and libraries.  For the lyrics below I don't make any particular effort to transcribe the sound of the language, except in specific instances of Trinbagonian English words or syntax, for example "distill water" or "Du."   

"Concertina" (The Roaring Lion) 

I beg yuh Miss Millie

For goodness sake take it easy

And please have some patience

And don't torture me with your long endurance.

(chorus) Oh no Miss Millie

For heaven's sake take it easy

Du don't advance any further

And kill me dead with your concertina

Last week you give me fever

All night long was the same maneuver

You had me piston in fire

Trying to fiddle your concertina

Oh no...

Your engine always in action

Day and night you want lubrication

Not me any longer

Your battery need too much distill water

Oh no...

Night and day you('re) complainin

Every minute your valve want grindin

If not your carriage your throttle

I'm too afraid of your old crank handle

Oh no Miss Millie

For heaven's sake take it easy

Du don't advance any further

And kill me dead with your concertina

A Truly Backhanded Compliment

My acupuncturist back in the Twin Cities, N, after sticking you full of needles will customarily (also being a musician) put on some music and leave the room for a bit to let the magic work. She told me she had my guitar CD in the rotation, and that one of her regular patients, a woman with dementia, gave it an emphatic  thumbs-down. "I don't like this music." she said, "It makes my toes hurt."

Turns out her toes got sore where she'd been snapping them in time. 

Uh-oh.

I have this seemingly unerring instinct for when an otherwise happily humming-along regular gig is about to end.

I've been part of a trio that played every Thursday at a small bar in Jersey. I'm coming to really like Jersey, especially after all the crap the state usually comes in for. I'm reminded in a way of a totally unexpected comment a singer friend of mine in Minnesota made about bikers (I admit I just didn't expect it coming from an African-American); we were playing a party where everybody rode up in their Harleys, dressed the part, and she said "I like bikers. They're some real people."And it was indeed a nice crowd. Anyway, I'm just constantly reminded of this when I'm in New Jersey: real folks, nice crowds, albeit labor-intensive highways. So at this particular bar, right off the highway, there are pickup trucks parked outside; inside, truckers, people playing pool, watching football, white, non-white, mostly guys but some families, everybody getting along famously. Once I had a long chat there with a blues-guitar loving trucker who spoke with a fascinating, subtly delicious accent, kind of corn-pone in a way I couldn't place. Turns out he grew up in Ireland and has spent the last 30 years in Georgia. And these guys all love our jazz/samba/reggae/Beatles mix.

Anyhow, the other night, it really came together. Being the guitar player in a "guitar trio" has been an evolving thing for me. I put my book together thinking "Put bass parts to my solo stuff, tell the drummer to stay out of the way, and Bob's-yer-uncle." Simple concept, except that it doesn't work. For one thing, the bass player is usurping the gig previously held by my right thumb, for another, in a band setting, even when I'm leading it, I lose a lot of the absolute power I had over things like texture, form and sound. So it's been a bit of a learning-curve, getting to where I can "delegate" musically. But Thursday it was happ'nin! People were loving it and I thought to myself this is it. We got our sound, we can really build from here.... then, I swear to you, my next thought was "uh-oh."

I don't know why it is, but when get I an email that says what a blessing it is that I'm in the band, a text that says it's an honor to play with me, or when 2 or 3 guys from the band tell me after the gig how much they enjoyed what I did, I think "uh-oh." Sometimes a compliment just sounds like the first shoe dropping. Once I had a more-or-less regular stint with a singer in Minneapolis, including a regular Wednesday night at Cafe Havana. I was in the enviable position of playing either bass or guitar for her, depending on which chair she couldn't fill. Get Jocko and go from there, y'know? One Wednesday afternoon, shortly before the gig, the singer called and said she was sick, there wasn't time to find a sub, and could I just lead the trio on guitar to hold the gig down? No problem, and it went great. I'm not prepared to say how "great" I was in particular, but "it" - the evening - was a heck of a lot of fun. The guys in the band said they'd love to do it some more, and one of the bartenders even said I looked like Carl Perkins when I was playing (you know I loved that!). And the singer never called me again. Whoa... when you get fired as a multi-instrument guy, you really get fired!

So there I am in Jersey, in the middle of a tune, thinking a) wow, this is the best we've sounded and b) uh-oh, this is the best we've sounded. And not a half-hour later the door opens and a guy starts schlepping in gear. We talked to him on break, a perfectly nice guy, and he said they got him in to do some dj-ing, starting at 8. Of course, we go from 6 - 9.

Turns out (based apparently on the recommendation of this very young, new bartender) they want to try the dj out for a while, maybe move us to another night? They're trying to draw from a college in the area, and I totally get them wanting to try stuff.  The owner told the bandleader they really do like us (which I believe) and he'd call him in a week or two... for which, upon hearing this, I had but one word.

Uh-oh. Or is that two words?

We musicians learn early about life's transitory nature: all gigs end, except if you're in the Rolling Stones. This one was fun, and I learned some things.