AAI 104 Blogging Assignment 1

MISTY
Comp: Erroll Garner, Lyric: Johnny Burke.

This video which I would like to share with you is a clip taken during a rehearsal session of a jazz piece call "Misty" by a Brass Quintet which consist of Solo Flugal Horn played by Ze Yu, Trumpet played by Mervin, French Horn played by Jeremy, Trombone played by Guo Sheng and Tuba played by me (JinXing). There are some mistakes and mispitching, however, this is the best sample for me to show you how the piece sound like.

A brief Background of Misty

Erroll Garner (1921 - 1977)

Sarah Vaughan (1940 - 1990)

A Jazz Piece composed by Self Taught Jazz Pianist Erroll Garner in the mid 1950s. It was originally composed as a instrumental piece, later Johnny Burke wrote the lyrics turning this piece in to a vocal piece which was made famous by Jazz Singer Sarah Vaughan who can sing a range from Soprano to Baritone.

Analysis

The form of the whole pieces is in Tenary form which is II: A :II II: B A :II

This piece has a good mixture of accompaniment style, the composer used Arppegio (1, 5, 3), octave displacement and triples. Blue chords and blue notes were used.

The composer of this piece used mainly the circle of fifths progression decorated with blues notes and chords.

Reflection of Analysis

I feel that in jazz music, the overall chords and structure are similar to the classical music, it just that in jazz music, the simple chords are decorated with blues notes like for example, a Bb major chord can be decorated with a flat 9 (b9) to make it have the jazz effect. It also seems to me that Jazz composers like to use chords with leading notes quite often in the progression for their music. As jazz music are meant to be improvised, this score which I analyze is not necessary be the only way to perform this music. The phrasing of verses and chord progression will vary from different performers based on their creativity.

Music Analysis 2

This is a very famous song from Jacky Chang's Musical "Snow, Wolf, Lake" 雪狼湖. It was composed by our local pop composer Dick Lee. This excerpt of the music score is the cantonese version.I will like to share with you my favourite part of this song, which is the very well known chorus. The chorus is very simple and straight forward with a few Passing Tone (PT), however, it seems that Dick Lee uses a lot of Neighbouring Notes (NN). I think that it is very interesting that he make use of multiple Neighbouring Notes to form a Melody. The whole chorus I think ends with Preparation (P), Suspension (S) and Resolution (R).


The progression which I worked out is

: I - vi - IV - V - iii - vi - ii - V - I (continued to P2)(Phrase 1)

: I - vi - IV - vii - III - vi - IV - V - I (Phrase 2)



The Harmonic Function which I worked out is

: T - PD - PD - D - PD - PD - D (Phrase 1)

: T - PD - PD - PD - PD - PD - D - T (Phrase 2)

Music Analysis Exercise 1