Grateful to have Dan Greenblatt as our presenter for the final Jazz Colony of 2019.
https://www.dangreenblattmusic.com/
Trans = across (go beyond)
Script = write down
Transplant analogy
https://www.youtube.com/
Text transcript of this talk ... transcribed by Michael Galeotti
Dan Greenblatt – The Power of Transcription
8-13-2019
Mr. Bergevin:
[00:00] I'm excited to have you guys enjoy our presenter tonight, August 13th. How about a big warm welcome for the man, Dan Greenblatt. [Claps and Cheering]
Mr. Greenblatt:
[00:20] This year Mr. Bergevin has given me a topic and I am always a good team player, and the topic is the power of transcription. This is a good idea because I had weeks to think about it, which means I probably overthought it significantly. The first thing I want to start off with is to make sure that we understand the meaning of the word transcription. It's got two roots. It's got a prefix, “trans”. “Trans” generally means across or beyond. Like when you take a transcontinental flight, it goes across the continent. If you are a transcendentalist, you go beyond the ordinary and so forth and transcend.
[01:00] Then scribe means to write down. The literal idea of transcribed is as if you're taking music from the realm or the medium of the oral, something that just exists as heard, and you're taking it across from that medium and putting it down in another medium. The written medium. That's literally what transcribe means. But when I thought about it, I thought there's something missing here.
[01:30] I'm going to give you an analogy to try to get at what's missing. Think about a transplant. Imagine in your minds a pair of twin sisters, identical twin sisters. They're very good friends and they grew up together. One of them contracts for some reason kidney disease and goes into renal failure. Their kidneys, both of their kidneys, stopped working. The other one has completely healthy kidney function. You know what happens in a situation like this?
[02:00] They try and find a family member who's got a spare kidney because you can function just fine with one kidney, although we have two. They go to the other sister and they say, “hey are you willing to give up your kidney?”, and she says, “absolutely. I'm cool with that.” She does the right thing and she volunteers to have her kidney removed and put in her sister's body. Now, this is called a transplant. The “trans” part means that the kidney got from one body to the other body and the “plant” means that it got sewn in the right place.
[02:30] But what it leaves out is the extraction of the kidney from the healthy system, which is not a gimme. It's major surgery. She has to go under anesthetic, full-body anesthetic, and lie down on an operating table to get cut open and get her kidney removed expertly and all of the things sewn up and so forth. And then they take the kidney out, across, to the other body, who's also under anesthesia and sew it into place.
[03:00] When we say transplant, we’re sort of ignoring the first part which is the extraction of the thing that needs to be transplanted. See what I'm saying? When you say transplant, you think about the trans in the plant, but you sort of forget about what's involved in getting the thing in the first place. Getting it in the first place is no mean feat. It isn’t like you just go, “oh yeah, I’ll just go reach in there and grab a kidney.” It isn't that simple.
[03:30] It’s a big deal. It's dangerous and it requires expertise. What I'm going to contend is that this same basic idea is true for transcription. That the trans part is bringing it across from the aural, the medium of sound, to the script part, where you write it down. But you've got to extract it first and that's a no mean feat because the music presents itself to you as just a whole lot of sound.
[04:00] You have to figure out exactly what it is you're listening for and then you have to figure out what it is and then you have to capture it somehow. You have to grasp the piece of music you're trying to transcribe. Okay? So far so good? We've got this grasping process or extraction process that starts with a grasping. The grasping requires expertise and practice in the same way that the grasping of that kidney requires a trained surgeon.
[04:30] You've got to be something of a musical surgeon to even figure out what to grasp and get a hold of. Let's suppose we've identified what we want to grasp. We want to grasp the melody of this song. We are kind of surgical experts to an extent because we all have played music for at least a number of years, some of us for five decades. Over that time, we've gotten pretty good at identifying melody.
[05:00] You pretty much know if I play something and said, “where was the melody? Raise your hands,” pretty much everybody's hand is gonna go up at the same time. [To person in audience] except for yours probably, you'll nitpick it for some slight difference or something, but that's why we love you. We are, to some extent, musical surgeons that have the ability to grasp things, but how do we know we have grasped it correctly? If it's a physical thing like a kidney, you can look at it and go, “yeah. Kidney. This is totally a kidney and only a kidney. I’ve got exactly what I was looking for.”
[05:36] There no gall bladder in there and you didn’t grab an extra artery anywhere. It’s just the kidney. You can see it. But with music, you can’t see it. It's out there in the aural realm, so you can only hear it. How do you know for sure that you have correctly grasped what you were trying to grasp? The answer is because you can imitate it. That's how you know.
[06:00] You hear a melody and then you sing it back. Then you listen to it again and then you sing it back. Then you listen to it again and then you play it back on whatever your instrument is, and you go, “got it.” It's the imitation process that confirms the grasping. So far so good? I need some nods. I need help here. So far so good?
[06:20] I've come up with a new word and the word is a portmanteau, which means it's two different words stuck together. Kind of like, say, Dank Moblatt[laughter]. The portmanteau is graspmutate. It involves grasping it and imitating it so that you've got it and you've confirmed that you've got it. It's something that we do as musicians because we can't literally see what it is that we’re trying to grasp. When I say graspmutate now, you know what I mean. I’m going to use it a million times now.
[07:00] [Few sentences I don’t understand the meaning of] What I would contend, this comes from knowing a lot of musicians over a lot of years, is that there are many musicians who never actually write down the things that they graspmutate. They don’t don't need to. They have big musical memories and, once they’ve figured out what it is and figured out how to play it on their instrument, they don't need to write it down. Have they transcribed? Well, literally speaking they haven’t because they've never scribed.
[07:40] But they really have transcribed because what they've done is they've taken the music out of the aural and brought it across into their world, to the point where they can play it. That to me counts as transcribing and I would caution you, especially the younger musicians here who don't have terrific writing skills yet, not to worry too much about your lack of scribe skills. That will come.
[08:05] The main thing is to do the graspmutating where you figure out what it is you're going to try and get, you concentrate your energies and you figure out what it is, and then you can sing it, and then you can play it. That, for me, is good enough. That'll get you somewhere. Now you know what I mean by transcribing. I want to say, there are really good reasons to write it down because the problem is remembering it but I'm thinking [artist’s name] who never writes anything down. He'll do that thing where he'll play something that he transcribed into his head 25 years ago and play it perfectly. There are no written records for him.
[09:00] There are some people who really have capacious minds and really good musical imaginations. They store up a lot of stuff in there and they don't need to write it down. But I'll tell you what, it really helps to learn how to write it down because, once you've written it down, you have a record of it. Some of the things I've transcribed I was like, “wow. I've done a lot of work over the last 50 years” and I've got a lot of things that I could go back and play that I've done the work of graspmutating and I’d probably find a lot more stuff to play from. You don't have to write it down, at least not at first, but that doesn't mean I'm saying writing it down is a bad idea. I’m saying it’s not essential. It doesn't define the process.
[09:43] The question is, why is this graspmutating of music so important? I would submit that this is jazz colony. It’s supposed to be about improvisation it's supposed to be essentially a big old improvisation workshop. Everybody in this room is engaged in trying to learn how to gain more skill as an improviser. In order to improvise, you have to have something in particular to play at a particular time. If somebody goes [starts to count-off a tune] blues in b-flat, you've got to say play something that fits into a blues in b-flat, whatever that structure is, at that tempo when somebody calls on you to take your solo. It has to be something in particularly.
[10:30] You can't just start playing notes. I mean, you can, but it’s not going to sound very good and people aren’t going to call you back. The idea is that it has to fit in there. Imagine that they cut open the two bodies and you go, “actually I don't know what a kidney is so I'll just grab any old thing I can find, slice it out, and sort of throw it in there.” That's not going to be a successful operation. You've got a graspmutate something in particular and you have to get it into your head. You might also want to make a record of it, but you want to get it into your head.
[11:03] Then you want to keep it there so that when the music starts you can use it. Where do you get these particular things that you're going to play? It has to come from somewhere. It doesn't just visit you spontaneously out of thin air onto your instrument. There's a process there. The process is transcription. That's what the process is. Improvisation is simply transcribing what's on your mind. That's all it is, and you can't possibly have anything on your mind if you don't transcribe the things that are out there in the air. It's just a logical impossibility.
[11:42] Some people have active and florid musical imaginations and they think of things to play that nobody else has ever played. Great, but you still have to transcribe it. The fact that its original doesn't mean that it can't be transcribed. It just means it's never been played before. One way or the other when we're improvising, we are transcribing what we are hearing in our aural imagination. One of the things that's remarkable about human beings is just how sophisticated our aural imaginations are. Everybody has a pretty good one and there's a lot of stuff in there. What you need to do is decide that, since you’re trying to be an improviser, you want to try and get as much stuff in there that's going to be useful to you as an improviser.
[12:35] The activity that you need to perform [is transcription]. It isn't an optional, “it would be a nice thing if you transcribed” [kind of activity]. It's logically necessary. [He goes to the board to write down notes.] I always say that my goals is to not only teach you something about music, but to greatly increase your SAT scores [laughter from audience]. It’s [sine qua non] a latin term. The thing those SAT people will do is they'll give you something to read and there’ll be a latin term in it and then they’ll ask a comprehension question that will depend on you knowing this familiar latin term. Sine qua non, does anybody know enough Latin to know what that means or is familiar with it? Good, so if I didn’t teach you anything else then I’ve taught you sine qua non.
[13:30] It means, “without which not.” It is something that is essential for something else. I would say that transcription is a sine qua non for improvisation. Without transcription, there is no improvisation whether you write it down or not. You've got to get used to the idea of what you play as an improviser comes from somewhere into your head, either through your ear or just straight through your imagination.
[14:00] You have to figure out what that is well enough to be able to play. I'm not saying, “gee. It would be nice if you did more transcribing.” I’m saying if you don’t do transcribing and you don’t do it a lot you are toast as an improviser. I could predict that. If I looked at the number of hours you spent and then I looked at the likelihood of you becoming and improviser, they would be very closely related.
[14:30] The people who have spent a lifetime getting good at improvising here, I think would agree with me. You do all of this transcribing all the time. You always have. It isn’t like you do it every day, but you’re doing it all the time. You're always listening to something and saying, “what was that?” How can I use it? Sometimes you get pretty good at it so that you sort of transcribe it without even thinking about it. You [hear it] a lot in the Blakey bands from the fifties and sixties.
[15:00] Whoever took the first solo in the last phrase they play, whoever sticking the next solo just plays that same phrase and starts there. Just a total, on-the-fly spontaneous transcription. It's a great way of getting continuity. I tried to do this with the A-band this year with “Groovin’ Hard.” I tried to suggest that everybody, instead of [each person] taking their separate solos, let's try and make it a relay race. People are pretty good at it. The more you do, the better you get.
[15:33] Transcription is necessary and unavoidable, so the idea is to start getting good at. It is the most important activity other than just playing your instrument. It's especially important for you people. I think it's most of the young musicians here, not the guitar players usually, but everybody else [has almost solely played written music up to this point. You’ve gotten used to the idea that the information [is in front of you].
[16:05] All the horn players, you know you sit in band class, you sitting jazz band class, you sit in orchestra class, and somebody puts piece of music in front of you, you read the music, and you get the notion that if I want to play something I have to look at something. Improvisers don’t have to look at anything. So that means the improviser has to get a much more florid imagination. You have to develop it. I thought about it.
[16:33] If you're a standard issue student going into junior year and you play in jazz band, [concert band, and orchestra], how many hours do you think you've spent in school sitting in front of a piece of music and having the visual tell you what to play? Something like a thousand when you add up all those hours, maybe more and maybe a little less depending. In order to get to be as good at improvising as you are at reading, you're going to need to find a thousand hours of transcribing time. You’re not going to do that in the next week, but you want to get it on your agenda.
[17:12] How do we do it? This is a little handout. The first thing that I say here is first get yourself a good notebook to keep your transcriptions in. Either that or a system of folders, real or virtual, but you want to be a little bit organized. That perfectly describes me, a little bit organized. This is something that I bought for seven dollars and that tells you that it's been a while. It's a big fat notebook. You can see there’s all kinds of stuff in here and it’s transcriptions. It says “transcriptions” on it. It’s my transcription notebook. It doesn't have all of my transcriptions. Sometimes I do it on pieces of paper, which I then organize into folders.
[18:14] [Gives a few examples from the notebook on how he’s organized it.] I've got lots and lots of folders with the names of the people that I've been transcribing, and I've got notebooks. I've got at least some degree of organization so that if I want to go back to finish something or to review something I have a prayer of finding it again. If you just transcribe on a piece of paper and don't put the piece of paper anywhere, then you’re not going to have it when you need it. You have to have some kind of organization.
[18:50] What I really like about the notebook is it's much easier to keep track of one notebook. How many pages in the notebook, 96 10 stave pages two sides? If I had 96 individual pieces of ten stave paper, I would have that many chances of losing something. But the notebook is easy to keep track of so I strongly recommend you get yourself a transcription notebook. Don't put other stuff in there, just your transcriptions. The next thing I say is what recording are you transcribing? That's the first thing that you want to have in your transcription.
[19:30] This says, “McCoy Tyner: The Promise,” [it’s the one with Coltrane, live at Birdland]. Coltrane plays it on soprano saxophone and McCoy plays this incredibly lyrical solo that I always wanted to write down. So I started writing it down. Did I write it all down? Well, not really. That’s why these pages are blank. I was aspiring to keep going and it got really hard. But I learned a lot by writing it down. That's the first thing.
[20:02] You want to lay out your music paper intelligently. It's really nice to think of three or four bars per line, so there’s room to write everything and you don’t wind up crowding it all together. That's the other thing. With the big notebook, you realize I’ve got lots of paper I'm going to use it. Otherwise, if you have [just] one piece of paper you're trying to cram it all in. Okay. Figure out what it is you're recording, what recording it is, and make sure that you make a note of it so you don't discover that you don't know.
[20:31] Then, there's a series of things that you need to know in order to transcribe. The first thing you need to know is, what's the meter? Is it three-four, four-four, six-eight, five-four? You need to know that. You're not going to be able to transcribe if you don't know how many beats per measure and what counts as a beat. Then, another thing you're going to need to know is, what's the tempo? Right up here it says quarter-note equals 156, treble clef, and then the next thing is the key.
[21:00] I've got a four-four thing going at roughly 156 beats a minute. Then, what's the form of the piece? How long is the basic structure? Is it a thirty-two bar AABA song? Is it an ABAC kind of song, like “Green Dolphin Street,” which has got a repeated A section but branches off to two different endings? Is it an AABA song with an extra four bars in it, like “All the Things You Are,” with the turn back extra thing in there? [21:30] What is the form they're improvising on? You've got to know that. Sometimes you need to notice, “oh, that's an intro so that's not part of the form.” Then, what's the key? You'll need to hear where the tonic is and whether the tune is major or minor. Now we're getting into your surgery abilities. You need to be able to recognize the kidney and the gall bladder to get the kidney out and not the gall bladder.
[22:03] Part of that is knowing what key you're in and then when you get to the next step, which is “what is the melody?”, you'll have a much better chance of graspmutating the melody because once you know what key it’s in it's entirely likely that the vast majority of the notes are going to be in the key, although not always. I remember discovering that “My Romance” is entirely diatonic. Once you figure out what key it’s in, all you need is those seven notes. Every single note in the whole song is one of those seven notes. Anyway, so that's a really useful thing to do.
[22:46] So, what is the melody? This will be much easier once you've figured out the meter, form, and key center. I strongly recommend that you don't start by transcribing the melody, [instead] start by getting the structure, the time signature, the tempo and the key. Then you'll be a much better shape trying to get ahold of the melody. Then, I say all melodies are made up of notes and rhythms so, if you can't get them both at the same time, start with the rhythms.
[23:15] The rhythm is the signature of the song more so than the melody so if I go, [sings the rhythm of “Confirmation” without pitches] So, you want to get the rhythm. The rhythm is going to be really useful for you as an improviser because if the rhythm is strong enough to remember, strong enough to be signature, one that is really a memorable and meaningful musical utterance, that is something you can use as an improviser, anywhere. You just pluck different notes into it, but the rhythm is still going to be strong.
[24:15] Even if you never get to the notes of the melody, if you get the rhythms, you’ve gone a long way. Now, transcribe the first four and a half things here. [Music].
[25:15] What is the meter of the piece? 4/4. Roughly speaking, what’s the tempo? 176 roughly speaking. You don't need to get it down exactly. I have a pretty good idea of roughly where it is. What is the form of the piece? A twelve-bar blues. Some of you recognize that really quickly and that’s a great sign. Is it major or minor? Major. So we’re already down to number four.
Part 2
[00:00] If you have your instrument, try to figure out what key it’s in. [Music]. What key are we in? Bb. The first note is Bb, it’s a blues. It sounded like the tonic. What I would then do is try to write out the rhythm of that. [Sings the rhythm of the song]. Write that out with stems and so forth and then figure out the notes. I could go on with this. The next step is, once you get the melody, to go for the bass. Try to figure out the bass. Sometimes that’s hard with these old recordings it’s not loud enough, but the bass will lead you to the chord. Then getting the chords. That’s an advanced thing being able to graspmutate chords off the recordings. I would recommend working with others, asking questions to your private teachers, asking questions of your classroom teacher, and so forth.
[01:12] And then start dealing with solos. If you’ve already done a bunch of melodies, great, then go on to the solos. There you have it. It’s the most powerful thing. I’ve totally convinced you of that because it’s logical track. [Music]
