Rhythm-A-Ning
Published: Fri, 10/01/21
Aside from being unsurprisingly yet enjoyably contrarian, this observation also struck Bret and myself as a piece of rugged good logic. The more we discussed it, the more evident it became: everything you'd need to improvise on any other kind of jazz chord progression – standards, in particular – is hiding in plain sight in the jazz approach to the blues. You've got your mix of blues phrasing and major sounds on the I chord, the diminished sound on the return from IV to I, the altered sound going from VI to ii, ii-V sounds on the turnaround...it's all there.
Learning to play the changes is, for my money, a lifelong proposition, but I've always aspired to reach a point of at least functional ability somewhere along the way. Assimilating enough of the jazz musician's blues vocabulary to distill it into last weekend's Bebop For Beginners workshop felt like a personal milestone of sorts, so while I've still got plenty to learn in that department, at the start of this week I found myself almost reflexively turning my attention to new piece of territory: how jazz guys play rhythm changes.
George and Ira Gershwin wrote "I Got Rhythm" for the 1930 musical Girl Crazy and that song's chord progression, soon dubbed "rhythm changes," became the other great default vehicle for jazz improvisation, the 32-bar yang to the blues' 12-bar yin. Count Basie's feature for tenor saxophonist Lester Young, "Lester Leaps In," became a definitive swing-era iteration, and while there were any number of Charlie Parker contrafacts on "I Got Rhythm," Thelonious Monk's "Rhythm-A-Ning" is arguably the bebop era equivalent to the Lester Young anthem.
It turns out all that work to decode the bebop approach to the blues has indeed been excellent groundwork for this new round of investigations. I've had Dexter Gordon's 1970 version of "Rhythm-A-Ning" in heavy rotation for the past several days, and yesterday afternoon I dropped it into my slow-down software for a closer listen. The first eight-bar section I chose to transcribe turned out to consist almost entirely of the same kind of altered bebop scale licks I've been finding forever in blues turnarounds by Stanley Turrentine, Barry Harris, Grant Green and others, just strung together differently to accommodate the "I Got Rhythm" chord progression. Most satisfying. Like George Peppard's Hannibal Smith, I do love it when a plan comes together.
You can a find handful of rhythm changes tunes I've been listening to on the Playlists page of my web site:
Rhythm-A-Ning
More soon,
David