My first jazz ballad.

A modal jazz reinterpretation of the Fireman Sam theme.

At the start of 2021 I spent some time writing some Clojure code to generate a catalogue of assorted musical chords. You can find the catalogue, with explanatory info and the script to generate it, on GitHub.

In this essay I’ll demonstrate using the catalogue to build a chord progression.

I have never liked the popular Western piano keyboard layout because it prioritises the C Major diatonic over all other keys, by making the notes of the C Major scale the white keys and moving the ‘accidentals’ to black keys. The design of the keyboard makes it awkward to play in any other key without explicit practice, and is a big motivator for the musical advice to “practice in all twelve keys”.

Similar to the Dodeka layout, I have modified a MIDI keyboard (a Launchkey 49 Mk 1) with ‘risers’ on the white keys, to fill in the gaps between the black keys and present a single row of identical keys, all separated by a semitone.

“Blackjack” is a jazz-funk banger from Locksmith’s sole 1980 album “Unlock the Funk”. In my pursuit to create similar music, I’ve tried to analyse the tune using the help of my DAW, and in this essay I will present some of my findings and the techniques I have used.

WARNING: This audio is loud and clips heavily, please turn down your volume before playing!

An experiment generated in the ChucK programming langauge.