8 - My own compositions
I have come to notice that some of the tips and trics I describe about using repetition, and putting certain note in a surprisingly different light is exactly what I've also been doing in my writing for years.
Yabadabadoo time is tune I wrote around 2010, a funky tune with a simple 16 bar form. It has a modulation halfway just like Clifford Brown's "Joy Spring" has, with the second 8 bars being identical, just a half step up. The trick that Gershwin uses in "But not for me" by repeating the phrase, but with a different chord, is similar to what happens here. In the first bar of A the melody is identical to in bar 3 of A, but the chord changes, but the harmony changes at a different and less obvious moment, on beat 3 of the bar. Allso the moment the harmony changes to C7 in the second half of the 6th bar is not what you might expect, adding to the surprise, in an otherwise very recognizable kind of tune. It's just slight nuances in the harmonic rhythm that make the tune appear to be quite normal and cliché even, but on carefull listening much less predictable than one might think.
Blown Away is a tune I wrote around 2005, and it was inspired by three things: First of all I had Elvin Jones' time feel in mind when he was playing medium tempo waltzes with the John Coltrane Quartet. Then the three tonalities in Giant Steps, a major third apart, and also the harmony to the opening two bars of "Some day my Prince will come".
So what happens is that the first 4 bars of the A section
is repeated, but after an excursion to a key a major third down, just like in Giant steps, and that same key shift is repeated once again. You can hear the half note Bb in bar 2 (the b13 of D7) change color as it were in bar 3, when it is surrounded by the Db7 sus chord, which becomes Db7 to bring it to the new key of Gb.
In bar 11 and in bar 17 there is another interesting nuance in the harmony, you see a Bbmajor 7 with a #5 but on an odd bar, on the first beat. Where you would expect a feeling of coming home, it turns out to be a "move me" note.
The intr and the tag at the end Are not in the key of the tune (Bb), but in Gb, the deceptive cadence. Lots of endings of jazz tunes use this bVI chord or the bII instead of the I chord, to harmonise either the tonic (finalis) or the 5 of the scale like here, the F.
"Stil wordt het in mij" is a tune I co-wrote with my wife Petra, and we sent it in stead of a birth card when our daughter was born. It's about our new born, hence the harmonic quote from Thad Jones' "A child is born"
In bar 9 there is a deceptive cadence going to the nice bright key of E, And a tritone away from the Bbmajor we had just reached. It doesn't feel as if we modulated a half step lower, though we have. Note the difference between bar 4 and bar twente (the tritone sub). Now the tune stats out clearly in F, but in bar 23 the IV chord Bb has suddenly become the tonic, and the tune continues
with very normal harmonies in that key. At the end you have to modulate back to the dominant key if repeated for solos.
