Re: Lilypond and Jazz chords

[Tim McNamara]

On Jul 15, 2009, at 8:42 PM, David Fedoruk wrote:

> I did, as I mentioned earlier, visit my local music store and  
> looked at their selection of fake books.  I found what was the  
> first legally published one in its new format. I was dissa pointed.

That's not very specific.  By chance were you looking at the Hal  
Leonard versions of the Real Books (6th Edition, Book II 2nd edition,  
Book III)?

The original Real Books were hand written by an unidentified person  
allegedly affiliated with the Berklee school of music in Boston; the  
most commonly suggested person was a well-known professional jazz  
bassist who wrote the chords out as he and his colleagues preferred.   
For most jazz musicians, the original Real Books are the de facto  
standard (although they are not completely internally consistent).   
The original books contained a number of errors and a number of  
performance-specific transcriptions of songs.  Even very famous songs  
in the Real Book like "Four" contain errors (which have become  
canonized by being played that way for over 30 years).  The Hal  
Leonard Real Books are more accurate- or less performance-specific  
than the original Real Books.

> I am impressed with "The New Reall  Book" series from Sher because  
> of the way it is documented and the way they have gone about making  
> sure each tune is following a real standard way of playin the changes.

FWIW the original Real Books had a page of common chord voicings in  
note form for reference.  But jazz musicians know what a Ebmin7b5 or  
Ebø means, for example, and there is no need to provide documentation  
of this.  Students may need this, but they should get it elsewhere  
than from a book of tunes.  Mark Levine's textbook on jazz harmony is  
a great resource and one every jazz student should work through.   
Fake books are not textbooks, they are intended for bandstand use by  
professionals.

FWIW the Sher books are IMHO the best and most accurate of the  
various fake books.  They should be the standard and not the Real  
Books.  Sher made a point of checking the chords for accuracy far  
above and beyond the original Real Books (for example, compare  
"Here's That Rainy Day," in which the original Real Book chords bear  
little resemblance to the proper chords of the song).  However, the  
original Real Book (vol. 1) is simply "The Book" as in "is that tune  
in the book?"  Bandleaders will frequently call songs by page number  
rather than title (because the Real Book is rather, umm, flexible as  
to its interpretation of alphabetization).

> The notation that I was mainly concerned with was how to enter a  
> bass note with the chord indication. I must say, I was shocked. I  
> was both right and wrong in my assertions that the bass note was  
> indicated under the chord name.
>
> The bass note was under  the chord name, but with a slash not a  
> straight line as I had stated. So, you can see how I was right and  
> wrong. The slash with the chord name under the chord as they  
> indicate in that publication would conform to what I have known to  
> be correct in the past.

Normally the form for displaying a chord with a specific bass note is  
a diagonal slash:  Gmaj7/A for example.  Polychords (two triads  
stacked) are sometimes written as two chordnames arranged vertically  
with a short horizontal line separating them, but you'll find none of  
those in the Real Books IIRC:

Ebmin
______

Fmin

> I think now, that the chord along with the intended bass note  
> belong together as an element or object in themselves. Alterations  
> of the chord are a second element or object beside the chord name.  
> These do not happen frequently, but when they do, they are  
> important. Mostly they indicate an inversion of the chord named.  
> These seem to occur most frequently at cadence points. An example  
> occurs in the last bars of "All the Things You Are" where there is  
> a progression with a step-wise bass pattern moving from a first  
> inversion of the named chord and ending on the root position. In  
> some cases there are going to be chord indications on each beat.  
> Collisions willl be inevitable. It seems the slash with the bass  
> note close under the chord name made this easier to read.

Slash chords are usually written to specify a voicing to a  
keyboardist or guitarist, often to maintain a specific movement in  
the bass under the harmony:

   |  Dmin7  Dmin7/C  |   Bb7  A7  |  Dmaj7        |

for example.  It's a simple way to write out the motion and is  
instantly readable.

> I gather the slash would have naturally happend when copyists wrote  
> these charts out by hand. Mostly being right handed the slant would  
> naturally occur. What I saw in that publiation was for the most  
> part clear and readable.

Right, it's intended to be instantly readable by a musician playing  
the song for the first time on the bandstand.

> I won't argue for or against any one way at this point, just for  
> clarity and compactness.

Those are the key things.

> Lilypond should not seek to make a new method of entering this type  
> of notation, it shoud simply enable copyists to make their music  
> look the way they or the composer intended and to do it in a way  
> that makes it easy for performing musicians to read. Am I  makeing  
> sense here?

The point of LilyPond, IMHO, is to create elegantly readable sheet  
music.  So your conclusion makes excellent sense to me.  I think that  
entering d2:m7/c should produce a two beat Dmin7/C on the sheet  
music; it's simple and the text entry looks like the final product as  
much as possible.  I'm not sure if there is a way to enter polychords  
in \chordname- I've never looked.