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Hi charles i highly reccomend you listen to steven universe music especially love like you. I also highly recommend platina jazz, they make jazz and big band covers of anime songs so you can either react to another version of something you already know or to new things :)
Contrafactum is fx. assuming history went other ways than it did, like Trump winning the 2020 election; THAT is contrafact(um) in my book. However, Wikipedia understands Charles Cornell's use of the word: Not to be confused with Contrafactum. "Borrowed chord progression" redirects here. Not to be confused with Borrowed chord. A contrafact is a musical work based on a prior work. The term comes from classical music and has only since the 1940s been applied to jazz [...]
Bro imagine being one of those studio musicians getting that call. "Yo.... we need you to come record a movie score.... with MILES DAVIS.... IN ONE NIGHT... TOMORROW" I would have shit my pants.
Honestly if you watch for example Rick beatos interview of Ron carter, who played many a time with Miles, you'll see back then it was routine. I am not in the slightest discrediting that, it just blew my mind it was the standard back then if you were a jazz musician at that level. They all were legendary.
Yo I would've LOVED it. The better the bandleader, the easier it is to play. When you have someone like Miles, you just know they gotta get the best of you and whoever is in the room, and if they call *you*, then they know better than you than you're the cat for the job...!!!
GENERIQUE WAS IMPROVISED IN ONE NIGHT?! I discovered the song a few weeks ago and i loved it. I had no idea it was improvised in such short notice. Miles was truly a genius.
There are multiple takes of Générique (actually there are multiple takes of pretty much every track) in the expanded edition of the soundtrack, you may like to check it out
Whenever I listen to Générique on this soundtrack, I have an urge to do hard-boiled noir narration to all the mundane things I am doing: "The engine didn't so much turn over as fall over and began to purr like sickly cat. But there was no time to take it to the vet, I had a job to do: those Excel tables weren't going to pivot themselves."
I was in the room when Bobby McFerrin improvised the score to our short film, "Knickknack". It included 7 1/2 tracks, with only one short punch-in overdub. At 9:30 AM he sent me into a panic by saying, "I'm not sure what I'm going to do here". By 12:30 we went to lunch -- and it was a wrap.
@@joschka-bw2rc i mean, he could make a video talking about the sims soundtrack or harmonizing random stuff and i will still be really into it... oh wait...
I’ve heard this improv before!! There’s an old RU-vid video where someone took his improv from this film and played it over LCD Soundsystem’s New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down. It’s absolutely gorgeous and I highly recommend checking it out
If you haven't already, watch the film. It's a masterpiece even though it was Louis Malle's first feature length motion picture. Imagine getting Miles Davis on your directorial debut lol
LOL ... I'm a metric guy but that's a good one. Now I wish there were a tribute artist called "Kilometers Davis". :) Also, Miles Davis was okay with puns on his name, eg. two of his records are "Milestones" and "Miles Ahead".
During the 50s and the 60s there was, expecially in Europe, a ton of film composers with a strong jazz influence. Check some famous italians or french films of that period. It isn't so weird, in fact, jazz was very popular at that time. Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, Trovajoli, Umiliani, Piccioni... in their film compositions you can easily find jazz. This is one of the reasons for which I love that cinema era.
@Anne Day absolutely. I'd say that the gold jazz era begins to end during the late 60s. The gold era when -how you say- jazz was the pop music. Maybe rock replaced it (primarily).
Yes, the backing players are all pros and yes, this is amazing improvisation all around! Notably, in The Birth of The Cool one of the players states that they knew who Miles was and they were super familiar with is music because... it's Miles!
so what I hear you saying is that improvisational music is built on tropes and references, just like narrative writing. That's delightful, and it's helped me put my finger on why I'm scared of musical improvisation. I just never learned the tropes, or gained the experience to use them as subtly and effectively as I can in writing or knitting. Is this what your improv class teaches?
Générique has been my introduction song on my Miles playlist for many years. The vibe he conjures shows he was a huge part of the art new wave that was being created in the 50's. Birth of the Cool.
This is my favorite Miles album, and the way it came about makes it even cooler. As far as the crime show/jazz soundtrack goes, the Peter Gunn tv show with Henry Mancini's soundtrack also came out in 1958.
@@brianspenst1374 It really is. Also, if you haven’t already, check out Shelley Mane’s versions of the music from the show. Improvised brilliance on Mancini’s fantastic framework.
Coincidently I am binging all of Miles albums chronologically. Every one is just so brilliant. His playing was just untouchable. He was truly a genius.
10:16 let me 'introduce' you to the band '1st of october', where Rob Scallon and Andrew Huang write and record an entire album in a day, every 1st of October ^_^
I'm so glad someone like you is finally talking about this album, i got into miles about a year ago. And this is in my opinion his most underrated album. Everyone talks about kind of blue (which they should, they have reason) But no-one talks about Ascenseur Pour L'échafaud
9:25 it's a conversation. They have the initial topic and then they go. Everyone contributes something but Miles is guiding and moderating it. Music is a language and they are just fluent, eloquent "speakers" and attentive active listeners.
That's exactly how I think of it. All of us are improvising day-in-day-out just when we talk. Most of the things we say are improvised on the spot, we don't plan ahead our sentences. (At least, usually we don't.) To be able to improvise music you just need to build up enough musical vocabulary and grammar and then you can start. And just as a toddler can improvise speech at a simple level you can improvise music at a simple level. No need to become a genius first.
Improvisation is a language. You learn it by practicing.. but you never know what exactly will be the next word or sentence. And after some time.. you know how to communicate with others in that language .. fluently
@Anne Day But if you know your instrument well you know where to play in the space., or the arrangement, so they don't step on each other. But yes, improvisation is like learning to speak fluently and almost without thinking, or even similar to what I'm doing right now, creating a comment on the spot while touch typing. I don't have to think about where my fingers are going to hit the right letters, they just do it while I'm creating this sentence. Professional typists would make great jazz musicians.🤣
This is my absolute favorite Miles Davis album. The spontaneous, raw emotions Miles had to dig in to convey the mood of the movie speaks volumes on his talent. Still in awe by this accomplishment.
This is exactly what its like when I see Jacob Collier just basically write, compose and re-harm an entire song like in like 30 minutes. Practice is IMPORTANT. When you know how to play EVERYTHING, then you don't need time to compose things anymore, you just Frankenstein songs on the fly and leave people in Awe.
"You can take the chord changes from some of your favourite songs, and you can just write new melodies to them" Absolutely this - I am 100% guilty of this, because sometimes the chord sequence sounds so amazing and I just love hearing it
How is that even possible? Generique is such an incredible and emotionally resonant piece of music, even for Miles Davis, that the fact that it was improvised in a night just blows my mind on an infinite loop.
Elevator to the Gallows is one of my favorite film noir. Miles Davis’s score is amazing - you get the energy of the film from the way he builds up the tension. If you only knew the film from the synopsis, you get that sense that they’re gonna get caught and it’s just a matter of time. The score draws you in to watch the film to see how it goes down. I consider Miles Davis to be the Prince of jazz - always creating, never doing the same thing twice. I said that offhand while watching the documentary - birth of the cool - and I found out that he actually did perform with Prince in the latter part of his career and they liked each other because they had a similar creative approach!
It's a wonderful movie, very moody and with strong Hitchcock vibes. The scenes with the woman sadly walking through the streets with Miles' soundtrack are incredible! The music supports perfectly.
It would be super cool to have a video where how you talk about these improv principles like when you're playing with a group of people who has to just figure it out along the way with nothing but a simple chord progression to go off of, then be able to turn around to a real band during the video and actually demonstrate that on the fly without any practice or scripting.
I want to play guitar like Miles plays trumpet. I once read where he described his compositional style as this: "I don't write songs - I write moods." That really describes his approach to this soundtrack. He really does just set up a mood, an atmosphere. He does play these very quick bursts of notes, but for the most part, his lines are minimal, simple notes in and around the scale.
Crime movies of this era and genre are known as "Film Noir". Mile's scoring of this film, is fairly well known among both Jazz and Noir fans. In Ken Burns' PBS documentary on Jazz, a segment is devoted to Mile's involvement in the music for the film.
Jazz shows the potential of music to become a conversation. If you know the words and the principles of a conversation, you can create a conversation anytime, anywhere. It is the same with sounds.
relevant: the UK jazz band Ill Considered their first album was improvised, mixed, and mastered in 24 hrs and they've followed a similar process for ongoing 9+ albums, some studio and some live
I'm fresh out a college jazz history class, and you're videos have been popping up ever since! Really digging your content, and glad I can keep up with some of the terms and jargon. Trying to keep myself immersed in jazz music as I dive back into learning the piano.
In "Burning" is a south-corean movie is a scene with Générique in it, which is one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever seen. Didn't knew, that it actually from another movie. I guess, that means something in "Burning", but I don't know what it is.
It's probably a callback to the Haruki Murakami short story, "Barn Burning" from which the film was partially adapted. In the story, the girl puts on a Miles Davis record (which is not named) at one point in what would be analogous to the portion of the story in the film where the Davis piece appears. It seems to serve as a (self-conscious) marker for cosmopolitan urbanity, but it seems open to interpretation. You can easily find the story if you google around.
Started this video, got hooked by the little pitch of the movie, went and watched it, and now I'm back. It was so awesome to watch it and then hear your break down of the music! Incredible to learn that the music (which fits the movie so well) was whipped up in a single night. The movie itself was great too!
I love that you back down on how to pronounce Malle, as a French Canadian you avoided me the giggle :P but in all seriousness, I find it more humble than ruining it big time :) Props to you! Nevertheless, amazing video as always
I came here for this. Fantastic scene, incredible movie, and a very effective soundtrack (aside from the Davis track, which is used diegetically in the film). People, go see it!
I've known about Louis Malle for a while, but I never knew this! I've been meaning to check out his work so maybe I'll just start with this film, I already know the music is great!
I knew about these recordings after watching the Miles Davis documentary on Netflix. I was amazed at the concept of him improvising an entire film score but what they failed to mention was that it was done in 7 hours. That just makes the feat that much more impressive. In the documentary, they said that Miles's ability and success in creating this film score, was an essential part to his conceptualisation to "Kind Of Blue".
I believe I saw the movie a few years ago on TCM while flipping through the channels. I was drawn in by the atmosphere (both the music and cinematography). I didn’t have a jazz background, but I was blown away. Afterwards, they had folks on talking about how Miles made the soundtrack and I was even more astonished. Seeing this video was great to revisit that memory and learn some things now that I’m getting better acquainted with jazz.
In the vein of the hilarious roots of my jazz understanding-mr. roger’s neighborhood and the sims-when i hear that first miles Davis passage, I think of the LCD Soundsystem miles Davis mashup of RU-vid fame. :’)
The talk of improv always amuses me because I originally learned blues guitar from a blind man, no joke, so everything was always by ear and mostly a lot of jamming. He'd explain a concept, and then we'd just kind of improv jam it out. These days I mostly play bass for a church, but I basically have been jazz improvising the set live every week for 7+ years now. Often we show up day of and the music director has changed the setlist the morning of, or the singers didn't know what key we needed to be in and things get moved around a lot. No problem! Improv has always kind of been the default for me. Later on I learned a lot more music theory, which is also useful of course.
I'm super familiar with Sweet Georgia Brown cuz I dance to it ALL the time, lindy hop (which I would love if you tried, nearly every major city has a "swing scene" just make sure it's lindyhop and not country) but I could not hear that at all even with you playing on top. Your ear is amazing is my point.
Miles practiced so much and had such ability that it's almost not crazy to think he'd pull something like this off. Many people have done albums in one night but to have that music actually have staying power, is a true testament to his years of dedication to practice and the craft, aswell as his talent. Also completely unrelated but you sound like Jake Baldino from Gameranx and I never noticed till today.
What a coincidence, I was jamming Birth of Cool last night randomly. I swear, I've said this before, I think you're making content specifically for me! Thanks!
Check out "Les Stances a Sophie" by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. It's a film soundtrack/album that was commissioned a week before the band's french visas expired. They had a week to compose, learn, and record this album. It's a magical album as well, and has fantastic performances from the whole band.
I'm pretty sure it's time to get Andrew Huang and Rob Scallon in a video since these madmen unite every year to compose an album in one day I'm sure they'll have some great insights on what happens in the head of a musician when they just have to absolutely exploit the first idea that comes to mind, and coordinate with each other, and coordinate with a studio engineer
Is it a coincidence that I had my college finals exams this week and in my jazz history class, we covered this and had exam questions on this? Even more so that my jazz history exam was today?
Just signed up for your Intro to Piano course. Excited to get started on it. Just got into the discord as well, so I'll have plenty to check out later after work. I've been playing guitar and drums for years, and always wanted to get into piano, but never did much other than noodling around on the keys. More than anything, I'm excited to finally get a good grasp on music theory, because I've been playing by ear my whole life, never knowing if I am "technically" correct or not. I can "read" sheet music to an extent, but I'm really, REALLY slow at it. If I can get to a point of being able to sight read, I'll be pleased as punch! Thanks for all of your videos and knowledge that you share with us!
The fact that he did all this in 7 hours, and it just works so well too goddamn, jazz is just something else man That being said, now I'm curious, how good is the movie? Footnotes: • Revised comment from being early to something more on-topic to the video • Added footnotes • Edited comment
I gave this movie to my dad who's a film buff and jazz fan as a gift. i think if youre into movies and can appreciate it youd really like it but a 1958 crime "thriller" doesnt have the same thrill as it does today. its worth a watch if youre a jazz/movie fan
I bought this album after hearing one of the songs in one of those Matthew Mcconaughey Lincoln commercials. It's an amazing album and I listen to it all the time.
Hi Charles, are you familiar with the back-story of the James Bond theme and its predecessor, "Good Sign, Bad Sign", a song about a man with an unlucky sneeze written as a westernized Indian raga-ish novelty song that got recycled into one of the most iconic film themes in history. At least, that's what I have been told by British panel show QI.
You know when the noir feels hit you and you suddenly start to talk in a low and gravelly narrator voice? "It was a cold and moonless night. A shadowy figure is gliding between the lightcones witch are caressing the concrete with silky reflections in tar-black puddles. Suddenly a scream pierces the eerie silence "CHArle...!". Another pool of blood containing grey waxy skin will be found tomorrow. The Piano Killer has Struck again..."
Chuck Mangione is another jazz musician who wrote the score to a movie: Children of Sanchez, based on the novel of the same title. The movie was forgettable. The score was amazing beyond belief. So... I'm looking forward to hearing about Miles Davis.
