Just
before we started this session Charlie was talking to me about some of
these traditional rhythms. I had lots of questions for him ...
Q: When is a rhumba not a rhumba? A: When it's a bolero (Charlie described the groove he was playing on Armando's Rhumba as a bolero).
Q: What happens when you play a bolero rhythm speeded up? A: It turns into a merengue.
I
pulled the following snippets off wikipedia - I shall expect you all to
write an essay (no more than 10,000 words) on this topic!
Rumba is a family of percussive rhythms, song and ballroom dance that originated in Cuba as a combination of various musical traditions. The name derives from the Cuban Spanish word rumbo which means "party" or "spree". The term spread in the 1930s and 1940s to the faster popular music of Cuba (the "Peanut Vendor" was a classic), where it was used as a catch-all term, rather like salsa today. Also, the term is used in the international Latin-American dance syllabus, but in reference to a slower dance based on the bolero-son. Ballroom rumba, or rhumba, is essentially son as opposed to the older folkloric rumba.Bolero is a genre of slow-tempo Latin music and its associated dance. There are Spanish and Cuban forms which are both significant and which have separate origins.Merengue is a type of music and dance originating in the Dominican Republic which has become one of the most popular genres throughout Latin America and major cities in the United States.[2] The etymology of its name is much disputed. It may derive from the French dessert meringue, but it is also likely to be related to similar West African words related to dance and music.
I had better leave this subject area for now before it all turns into an Eton Mess ...
Rhythm:
Listening
to some of the many recordings of this piece, they all have a strong '2
feel' (even the slower versions). I think the piece works pretty well
at a more modest tempo.
The
groove Charlie played (bolero as discussed above) sounded great to me
and I thought together with Stuart and Terry we had an extremely
cohesive rhythm section.
The melody exploits a mixture of even quavers and crotchet triplets. The rhythm in bars 3 and 4 is particularly challenging.
Harmony:
The harmony in this piece is all highly functional (and possibly quite 'classical'?)
Lots of V7 Imin cadences. As we discussed, the V7 chords typically work well with a flat9 ( V7b9 ).
Bars 9 - 14 offer pairs of chords rising in tones (in concert C7 Fm | D7 Gm | E7 Am ).
By using the third on each of the dominant chords a chromatically rising bass line is created (in concert C7/E Fm | D7/F# Gm | E7/G# Am ).
Bars 15-16 takes us to the relative major (concert Eb ) but the chord has the fifth in the bass (in classical terminology this is called a 2nd inversion).
Bars 17-18 remain on the same bass note as 15-16 (concert Bb ) so we have a pedal point for 4 bars.
This chord has various names (in concert Abm/Bb or Bb7b9sus4 ). It is functioning here as chord V in the relative major (which is logical in view of the following information).
Bar
18 last two chords - my lead sheet was based largely on the printed
Real Book version and I should have noticed their notated chords were
wrong (or at least at odds with both the Dropbox recordings). Top marks
to Stuart for correctly identifying these chords, in concert Bb13b9 Eb , or the tritone option E7#9 Eb .
For a more detailed look at these two chords see my separate sheet "final cadence examples".
Improvising:
This sequence offers lots of opportunities for creating guide tone lines (often chromatic, going up or down).
The opening 8 bars may also lend themselves to blues scale (in concert C blues) - I forgot to mention this in our session.
We practised the chords in bars 9-14 (also discussed above) by playing simple arpeggios up and down the chords (NB on dominants 3rd 5th b7th b9th and then on minors 5th b3rd root )
I usually try to avoid undue discussion about scale choices on tunes like this. However, I will mention that all the V7b9 chords
in this piece (bars 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13 ) could take mixolydian b9b13
(harmonic minor starting on fifth - see my notes from Week 20 for more
on this).
The chord in bar 17 would usually take phrygian (from the bass note: in concert Bb Cb Db Eb F Gb Ab Bb ). More on this subject another time - remind me!
Cheers Mark x
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