8 Using alphabetic designations
The previous activity reveals that musical form often involves nesting or embedding: that is, smaller forms often sit inside larger ones. In a jazz performance, the subsections of an aaba form may sit inside larger patterns of repetition, contrast, and variation.
add something like ‘You might’ve noticed ‘aaba’ was just written in lower case, when until now it was written in upper case‘?For this reason, this set of courses typically uses upper-case letters to designate larger, more global, aspects of form and lower-case letters for smaller, more local, ones. The opening of Powell and Byas’s performance of ‘Just One of Those Things’ might be described as in Table 11, with the upper-case As in the column on the left representing the sequence of choruses and the lower-case letters in the ‘subsection’ column representing the constituent parts of each aaba chorus.
Table 11: Overall structure of Powell, Byas, Michelot and Clarke’s performance of ‘Just One of Those Things’ (introduction, head and first two solo choruses)
Section | Subsection | Track time | Notes |
I | 00:00 | Introduction | |
A | a | 00:06 | Head |
a | 00:19 | ||
b | 00:31 | ||
a | 00:43 | ||
A | a | 00:55 | First solo chorus: Byas, saxophone |
a | 01:08 | ||
b | 01:20 | ||
a | 01:32 | ||
A | a | 01:45 | Second solo chorus: Byas, saxophone |
a | 01:57 | ||
b | 02:10 | ||
a | 02:22 |
Activity 9 Returning to the instrumental version of ‘Just One of Those Things’
Listen two or three times more to the opening at 02:35 of Powell, Byas, Michelot and Clarke’s performance in Audio 7. Try to follow both the larger sections of the form (the three As in the left-hand column of Table 11) and the subsections within these (marked aaba).
Again, you may find that humming the song’s original melody helps you keep track of the form during the improvised choruses.
Another symbol that can be useful when distinguishing sections of the form is the prime (′) mark, which helps to distinguish sections that feature variation rather than contrast.
For instance, the two solo choruses that follow the head in Table 11 above feature improvisation by a soloist rather than the familiar melody of the song. If you wanted to make a point of this variation, you might mark the A at 00:55 as A′ and the A at 01:45 as A″ (that is, with a prime mark and a doubled prime mark, respectively) to distinguish them.
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