other recordings:
AZE, C# drone
Kazım Koyuncu, G drone
Beşir Bayraktar, G drone
İsmail Türüt, A drone
This is a folksong from a tradition not entirely separate from European, but divergent enough. There are a lot of commonalities, but ultimately the way the structures are and are thought about are different. It’s not unlike how jazz and classical people have most musical things in common, but still the way jazz folk and classical folk talk and think about their music differs. This is all to say that I found this song here. And it looks to me like it’s in D minor with a minor dominant on the fifth degree, because the melody always ends on D and a D minor chord.
Then you listen to the recording above and it’s a pretty different story, isn’t it? First of all, there’s only a drone on A and no chords. The Dm chord sounds a little off. Not horribly so, but not quite right.
It is worth looking at and listening to an acoustic performance by Mr. Bayraktar:
Here you can see very nicely that the guitarist is playing Gm (where we have Am) and instead of playing Cm, he’s playing 002200 = EAEABE = capo 3 GCGCDG. Not a “functional” chord in the European Common Practice sense. In rock, it could be called a Csus2 or a Gsus4. This way we neatly avoid that note that is a sixth above the drone.
Rapper’s Delight (1979)
Sugar Hill Gang
Early Hip-Hop/Rap, USA
key: E dorian
Euroclassical function names: tonic subdominantTagg: tonic counterpoiseRiemann: t Sscale degrees: i IVchord names: Em A
Em A
|:/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / / |/ / / /:| loop
mode: E dorian — E F# G A B C# D E
melody: Drmfsl
form: chorus-verse-chorus-verse-chorus
chorus — AA’A’A’ verse — BB’BB’ BBCB
meter: duple
suggested time signature: 4|4
Is this a two-chord song? Well, just listening to the bassline, yes. The bass lays down E very clearly and walks on up to A. But then there’s the funky guitar part. And from a guitar point of view, there are four different fingerings to use, which would be thought of as four separate chords. From a classical music perspective — which isn’t the end-all-be-all and may not be entirely appropriate, but is not entirely inappropriate (oh, the conundrum!) — we have a lot of notes that serve more of a “color” function than a harmonic movement function. And that makes sense, because, let’s face it: two chords do not make for much harmonic movement anyway! We have two places to be and let’s bring some color in while we are at it.
Another way to think about it (again, still from a classical perspective) is that we are prolonging the voice leading. Every chord has multiple notes and they all want to move in the easiest way to the next chord — except for the bass, which is allowed to be the leapiest (yup, that’s the most leapy), although we love it when our bass walks places, like it does in this song. Here are the notes of the basic chords we have in root position:
B E
G C#
E A
What we like to hear is something more like this:
E E
B C#
G A
E A
The lowest note leaps and everyone else moves a step or holds. Now, we add a color note:
D E
B C#
G A
E A
< p>The D in the E minor chord is there for color or flavor or whatever your favorite cross-sensory analogy is. (Isn’t it funny how we so rarely talk about sounds as sounds, but via other senses? Color, shape, line, texture… But I suppose we talk about loud colors, too, so there’s just a lot of crossover. I digress…) Next, we are going to slow down the movement from one chord to the next, by not moving all the voices at once. First, we are going to move the G up to A:
D D E
B B C#
G A A
E E A
This happens right as the bass starts walking, so it’s actually an interesting situation: it’s like the chord tries to move, but gets a little stuck because wait-a-minute-what’s-going-on-in-the-bass?! Once the bass lands on A, the root of the chord changes, but one of the other voices is stuck.
D D D E
B B A C#
G A A A
E E A A
Now this is a bit simplified. You may be asking, what happened to the E in the A chord? And chances are if you are playing this on guitar or ukulele there is an E in there. It’s just that the fifth of the chord is not essential to hearing its function; we really only need the root and the third. So I'm leaving it out to show the primary voice leading movement. Well, fine, but where’s the third? Well, it should be what the D moved down to, but it’s stuck, and the B could have gone there, but it didn’t. Then yet another interesting thing happens. So far I’ve written down a simple A chord as the goal, but that’s not what we actually get. Here’s the voicing as it comes out on my D-tuned uke, plus the bass:
D D D C#
B B A A
G A A F#
E E E E
E E A A
In jazz and popular parlance, that last chord is an A6, meaning we have an A major triad with the sixth note above A (within the scale of E dorian), which is F#. You may also notice that it’s the same pitch set as F#m7. This is important. In A6, the F# is a note for color and does not affect the function of the chord. In F#m7, the F# is the root of the chord and, therefore, determines the function. As someone who has studied classical music extensively, I do kind of hear this as an F# minor chord in first inversion (that is, with the 3rd in the bass)! And therefore, I do kind of hear this as a change in function. However, from a jazz and popular perspective, an A6 chord is not the same as an F#m7, even though they have the same pitches in them. Now, I’ve also been hearing this song since 1979 — I grew up listening to as much AM radio as I did classical music in cartoons. So I can also hear this very much as staying in the other harmonic pole, to speak in Taggian terms.
Above, I simplified the bass, but it’s also a bit more complex in the chorus (the verse contrasts this with something a lot closer to just two notes) — and why we love that bass line. It adds a little more information to how we analyze and think about our harmonies. First, during the first chord we lay down E:
E E E
Then, during the second chord we walk up the scale:
E F# G A B C# D
During the third chord, we lay down A:
A A A
And lastly, we emphasize the flavor notes:
A F# G F# A (still simplified, but here’s a transcription.)
Oh, look at that. There’s a seventh in there along with the sixth. Hmmm. But here’s the thing: play along to the song with just Em and A and it will sound fine. Not particularly funky, but definitely not off. So is it two chords or not? Again, Taggian thinking helps us out a bit. We definitely have two harmonic poles around E and A. Tagg also writes extensively about one-chord songs that aren’t really just one chord, because, although the bass might stay the same, the voices above it keep moving around and implying different harmonies. I think here we have a combination of both. Using anticipation (moving one voice to the next chord tone before the rest of the voices get there) and suspension (holding a voice over from the previous chord while the other voices move on), two static poles become far more dynamic and interesting. So on a chord chart you might read (as you do here): Em7 Em7sus4 A7sus4 A13 (like A6, but also with the minor seventh), but you can also hear that they are just very fancy versions of two basic chords. On the other hand, by putting these intermediary voice-leading steps on the beat and making them last an entire measure, they become new harmonic places-to-be in their own right. Is it two chords? Yes! Is it four chords? Yes!
Better Must Come (1971)
Delroy Wilson
key: A major blues
Euroclassical function names: tonic dominantTagg: tonic counterpoiseRiemann: T Sscale degrees: I IVchord names: A D
slow two—
A D
|:/ / |/ / :|
or fast four —
A D
|:/ / / / |/ / / / :| loop
mode: A blues — A B C D D# E G A
melody: S L d r me m f se
form: intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-interlude-verse-chorus
meter: duple
suggested time signature: 2|2, 4|4
other recordings:
Don Carlos, G
Socially-conscious, positive reggae tunes are my new fave. In terms of chord progressions, we are on familiar ground by now, a tonic-counterpoise loop with the subdominant in the counterpoise role. Melodically, there are the lowered third and seventh scale degrees that are the hallmark of blues style. I did not break down the form of the melody into phrase parts, as Mr. Delroy Wilson varies the melodic ideas throughout the song.
mode: A dorian — A B C D E F# G A
melody: Sldrm
form: intro-break–verse–break–vamp 1–break–verse–breakdown–vamp 2–break–breakdown–vamp 2a–break
meter: duple
suggested time signature: 4|4
other recordings:
Celia Cruz, G dorian
Santana, A dorian
Arturo Sandoval, A dorian (but with lots of reharmonization!)
There are two iconic recordings of this one: the original and the Santana version, the latter of which is actually fairly respectful and almost conservative with regards to the original. What I’m calling a vamp is a polyrhythmic layering of different sections of the big band playing riffs over the tonic-subdominant shuttle that is the meat of the song. The piccolo improvises on top of this, but it’s not quite the main attraction. This is still dance music, after all, not bebop.
Two interludes break the song up and provide some variety, and they couldn’t be more different from one another. The “break” (this is still my terminology, because what else am I going to use?) has these jaunty, uneven hits from the two chords; whereas the “breakdown” builds the counterpoise chord from the bottom up over the length of a phrase, suspending the harmonic action completely for a moment.
mode: F major — F G A Bb C D E F
melody: Ldrmsltd’r’
form: intro-verse-interlude-verse
verse — AA'A''BB
meter: duple
suggested time signature: 4|4
other recordings:
Neil Young, Bb
Here is another wistful song with major seventh chords. I will have to find an example that isn’t wistful! Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but I find that cut-and-dry associations of sounds and moods get you in trouble pretty quickly (i.e., the old canard “major = happy/minor = sad,” which we can debunk right away with pretty much all of Johnny Cash’s oeuvre but let’s start with “Folsom Prison Blues” and on the other side, my go-to example is the Hollies’ “Bus Stop.”). I’d like to point out here that the major seventh in a major seventh chord has no particular melodic job — it doesn’t push or pull us up or down like the dominant seventh does. Its job is really one of color and mood. It is most common in jazz, but also late 19th century classical (listen to our old friends Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Erik Satie, for example), and as mentioned before Simon and Garfunkel.
The introduction to this song does an excellent job of establishing F as the resting tone and we need that, because once the lyrics kick in the subdominant comes first. If we started there, we run the risk of perceiving Bb as the tonic and F as the dominant. The melody doesn’t really dwell on the resting tone until the very last line of the song. Hanging out on F for four measures does the trick. Then the intro moves into a tonic-subdominant shuttle, a foreshadowing, if you will, of what is to come, and then another brief stop on F, just to make sure. The rest of the song is a subdominant-tonic shuttle and it almost is a bit surprising when it happens. A magical song.
mode: E aeolian — E F# G A B C D E; or E dorian — E F# G A B C# D E; or E blues — E F# G A A# B D E
melody: drmsl’
form: 12-bar blues
meter: duple
suggested time signature: 4|4
other recordings:
Gary Burton, E minor
< p>Don’t let the beautiful big band orchestration scare you, it’s still just a two-chord song. The tango feel is a little more prominent in the Gary Burton version, at first, then it ventures into a chill hip-hop vibe.
Interestingly, it’s a twelve-bar blues form, but only with tonic and subdominant (basic 12-bar blues, for those not in-the-know, usually also has a dominant chord in the ninth measure, but there are many, many, many variations in chord progressions when it comes to 12-bar blues). The first phrase is just Em and the second and third phrases are a subdominant-tonic shuttle.
The melody, as in Big Mistake, is la-based pentatonic minor, and uses even fewer pitches, five in total. It’s a fantastic tune to use with beginners to jazz (really — two chords and a five note melody — can you make a great tune more basic?), but it clearly appeals to the professionals, too. Hat tip to Darcy James Argue for the suggestion.
interlude over first four phrases of verse
first two verses
mode: E aeolian — E F# G A B C D E
melody: MSldrms
form: verse — AA’A’’A’’’BA’’’’BA’’’’
meter: duple
suggested time signature: 2|4
The guiro part on this song is magic! Usually guiro parts are faster and more in the background and this one is super-simple and really forward in the mix. You can really savor how the timbre changes as the instrument is scraped. It’s as though you can hear the sound of someone’s neck as they slowly shake their head in admonition… You made a big mistake.
As far as I can tell, the Bassies only recorded a handful of singles that were released or included on compilations with other artists and that was it. Ah, how the industry has changed. They’d probably fare better now on Bandcamp!
The gamut of the melody is a la-based minor pentatonic and the melody is made up of two basic shapes, the first of which (A) is run backwards (A’), then transposed (A’’) and then that’s run backwards (A’’’). Then the second half of the verse has a new idea (B) coupled with a slight variation on A’’ (A’’’’ — this is perhaps a bit picayune; we could probably get away with calling it A’’). It doesn’t take much to make a catchy song. In the same way we have only two chords, we have two melodic shapes.
Roadrunner (1972)
Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers
Rock/Proto-Punk, USA
key: A major/mixolydian
Euroclassical function names: tonic subdominantTagg: tonic counterpoiseRiemann: T Sscale degrees: I IVchord names: A D
A D
|:/ / / / |/ / / / :| loop (except for two tiny bits, see below)
mode: A mixolydian — A B C# D E F# G A
melody: RMsltr
form: hmmm…
meter: duple
suggested time signature: 4|4
other recordings:
The Greg Kihn Band, A
The Jazz Butcher, A Joan Jett, B
Another 99 percenter: there are two V chords (E) in here, one at the end of the “third verse” (if we can call it that… the line “I’m in love with rock and roll and I’ll be out all night”), and the other at the very end, right after he says “Bye bye.” So, not 100% purely two chords, but not a dealbreaker.
The form here is, well, almost formless. There’s some small instrumental interludes separating out the lyrics, but there’s nothing you could really call a verse or a chorus. It’s just an ecstatic rant about driving around Boston. There’s something about Richman’s work that simultaneously embraces the basic conventions of rock’n’roll and ignores/smashes them.
