Skip to main content

Deconstructing Stevie Wonder’s Ode to Jazz and His Hero Duke Ellington: A Great Breakdown of “Sir Duke”

I never really liked theory classes very much. To be honest, I was never that good at them. I’ve definitely learned more from using my ears rather than my brain.  

- Musician Jacob Collier

I too, find music theory confounding, but unlike musical polymath Collier, I don’t have much of an ear to fall back on.

Which is possibly why I learned so much from his appearance on Vox's Earworm, above. He lent me his ears.

Ten minutes in, I think I maybe, sort-of understand what chromaticism is.

Rather than pull examples from a number of sources, Collier concentrates on his “musical crush” Stevie Wonder's chart topping 1976 tribute to jazz legend Duke Ellington, "Sir Duke." As Collier told Time Out Israel’s Jennifer Greenberg:

I believe that when you listen to music, it gives you this periphery of great stuff in your ears and then when you sit down to make music of your own, those are your teachers, those are your guiding forces. It’s better to have Stevie Wonder as a reference point than say “this textbook that I read in class” …Stevie is my number one. As a kid, he represented everything that I really loved about music: he had all the chops, he had all the chords, he had all the funky stuff, all the groove, but then had that voice and behind the voice, he had this soul and feelings, and he also had this sense of humor mixed with this humanity.

Collier has the innate know-how to break down those grooves, from the big band feel of the opening drums to the Motown sound backbeat of the verse.

Aided by series producer Estelle Caswell and some graphics that visualize such fundamentally aural concepts as harmony and the pentatonic scale, Collier articulates in purely musical terms what makes this enduring hit so catchy.

Certainly, the exuberant shout chorus doesn’t hurt.

Collier has delved into Wonder’s catalogue before, leaping on the opportunity to harmonize with himself.

That’s him above, at age 17, performing an a cappella "Isn’t She Lovely," his melodica standing in for Wonder's iconic harmonica solo.

And Wonder’s "Don’t You Worry ‘Bout A Thing," below, presented his greatest challenge as an arranger, due to such quirks as “unexpected suspension chords” and the diatonic descending melody. Hold on to your hats at the 2:26 mark when the screen splits into over a dozen sections, in an attempt to contain all the talent on display.

Related Content:

The Concept of Musical Harmony Explained in Five Levels of Difficulty, Starting with a Child & Ending with Herbie Hancock

See Stevie Wonder Play “Superstition” and Banter with Grover on Sesame Street in 1973

Watch an Animated Visualization of the Bass Line for the Motown Classic, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine.  Her husband was gratified to see Jacob Collier shares his affinity for Crocs. No shame. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Deconstructing Stevie Wonder’s Ode to Jazz and His Hero Duke Ellington: A Great Breakdown of “Sir Duke” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2S1BY8o
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more