Keith Jarrett's the Koln Concert (Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz) by Peter Elsdon

Author:Peter Elsdon
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780199779260
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

EXAMPLE 5.1 Opening of Köln, Part I

It is worth bearing in mind how harmony of this kind came to be established in jazz. Developments in jazz harmony since the 1940s are often thought to be following a path of development characterized by increasing complexity, with the atonality of free jazz as an extreme result. But this avoids seeing that simplification or reduction in harmonic terms is just as significant as increasing complexity, as for instance in the development of modal playing when the underlying harmonic structures of pieces became simpler but allowed musicians (notably John Coltrane) the freedom to superimpose increasingly complex material above. When at the end of the 1960s jazz musicians began to look to various forms of popular music as vehicles for performance, whether it was the Beatles or Bob Dylan, they encountered straightforward diatonic harmony. The nature of this harmony was such that it could not easily bear the kinds of harmonic alterations jazz musicians would typically have used with Broadway songs. The reason in part was because this new music was often composed on guitar and lacked the typical kinds of harmonic building blocks found in the jazz language. This approach to new material among jazz musicians was combined with a distinctive turn toward what jazz scholar David Ake calls the “Rural American Ideal.”8 Ake’s discussion of Bill Frisell, Jarrett, and Pat Metheny identifies an invocation of a modern kind of pastoral mode, constructed through various signifiers such as timbre, cover art, song titles, and unaltered diatonic harmony.

Such a harmonic approach is particularly important to Jarrett in the Cologne performance. Other performances from the 1975 tour are not quite so reliant on this kind of harmony, and the Cologne performance seems to emphasize this aspect of Jarrett’s language particularly strongly. Not only is the formation of the individual harmonies of interest here, but so is the way they function to create progressions. In Example 5.2 we can see the harmonies of the opening condensed into block chords. What is clear immediately is that even though these are diatonic harmonies, they do not function within a conventional tonal system. Consider D as the key center, for instance: the A chord would normally be a dominant seventh and not a minor harmony as here, and the F chord would be bIII, not the conventional III (F# minor). If we take G as the key center, then things look rather more straightforward. The F chord can be interpreted as bVII, implying a Mixolydian tonality. That kind of tonality was far from unusual for harmony of the time, and indeed the Beatles had made quite a virtue of using this particular sound, as Walter Everett demonstrates.9

These differing interpretations of key center may seem beside the point, because they disguise what is really important about the way the harmony works in this passage. Each harmony seems connected to the next, and the voice leading employed helps to reinforce that connection. But this is a very different kind of functional harmonic movement from what we might expect in a Tin Pan Alley song or jazz standard.

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