Post 597 : MIDDLE EIGHT JAZZ ANXIETIES

The band-leader announced that we would play I Get The Blues When It Rains.

The clarinet-player leaned across to me and quietly said, 'Just remind me how the Middle Eight goes.'

I hummed the tune and soon had to stop. 'Hey, wait a minute!' I said. 'I Get The Blues When It Rains doesn't have a Middle Eight. It's a 16 plus 16.'

'Ah yes. Got it!' he replied. And away we went, with no problems playing the tune.

But the incident reminded me that Middle Eights can cause problems and anxiety.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, let me tell you most of our standard tunes are written in a 32-bar form. Sometimes (as in I Get The Blues When It Rains) the structure could be described as A1 (16 bars) + A2 (16 bars), in which A1 and A2 are very similar, beginning in identical ways for the first few bars.

But a huge number of the 32-bar tunes are structured in 8-bar segments, of which the first (A1), second (A2) and fourth (A3) are almost identical, while the third (B1) is something quite different. This 'B' section is called the Middle Eight (even though it does not come in the very middle); and it is sometimes called the Bridge or the Release.

(Incidentally I'm reminded of a very old joke. Two jazz musicians walked past a newspaper hoarding on which were the words Indiana Bridge Disaster. 'That's funny,' said one of them. 'I didn't think there was a bridge in Indiana.')

Although there are some stock patterns for Middle Eights (making it easy to improvise), there are also a few tunes that defy conventions. In these cases, you have to learn the Middle Eight the hard way and keep it in your head with regular practice.

All musicians have trouble with Middle Eights occasionally. I have even heard some of the 'big names' being flummoxed at this part of their improvisation.

Examples of tunes needing practice and care with the Middle Eight are I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket, Rosetta, Blue Moon, You Took Advantage of Me, Have You Met Miss Jones?, Polka Dots and Moonbeams, Yearning, Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams, Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?, and C'est Si Bon. Although very few bands play them, Body and Soul and When Smoke Gets in Your Eyes need care, too.

In more complex multi-part tunes, you may find several themes, each of which has a challenging Middle Eight. Think of Deep Henderson, which contains three themes with Middle Eights that have to be thoroughly mastered. The Middle Eight of the final theme is a real thriller (arpeggios descending over unlikely chords). But Shaye Cohn, Barnabus Jones and Jonathan Doyle make it sound easy at 1 minute 53 seconds in this video:

CLICK HERE.


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The book Playing Traditional Jazz by Pops Coffee is available from Amazon:

Post 284: 'C'EST SI BON'

The period between 1940 and 1980 was a Golden Age for popular music. Songs had words that were important and worth listening to, with a narrative and drama; and those words were articulated clearly by great singers, accompanied by a real, accomplished pianist or band or orchestra, playing from an arrangement that would include adventurous harmonies, changes in rhythm and key; and even accelerandos, rallentandos and pauses.

Some of the best tunes came from France. One of them was C’est Si Bon.

It is a catchy, happy, leaping tune. But I particularly admire the extraordinarily adventurous harmonies, as well as the surprises in the melody.

You will remember that it begins:

Already, after the anacrusis, we find the opening accented note (the E flat) is the fourth note of the Bb scale. This is an unusual opening gambit, though not totally uncommon. But look too at the harmonies:

We start on the chord of C minor 7th; and it will take the whole of the first eight bars to establish that we are in fact in the Key of Bb.

We soon begin to feel that – in structure - this is going to be one of those conventional 32-bar tunes, shaped A – A – B – A.

But two more daring developments are in store.

First, the ‘middle eight’ (Section B) begins with an amazing melodic line. Remember we are in the key of Bb; and yet the melody descends the scale of Db! On the face of it, this seems simply not do-able. What on earth can the composer be playing at? And yet – when you have heard it a few times and become accustomed to it – you have to admit the trick works just perfectly.

Here again, the harmonies add to our sense of amazement.

How often would you find a popular tune in Bb that included the chords of B natural, Db7th and Gb? Nowhere else, I guess.

The second half of this ‘middle eight’ returns us eventually to the secure ground of Bb.

We move into what we think will be the final eight, only to discover that the melody goes stratospheric in the 7th and 8th bars, leading into a further ‘final eight’.

So in fact we have a 'final sixteen' and the complete tune comprises 40 bars, not the expected 32.

How daring is that?

C’est Si Bon was composed by Henri Betti in 1947, and its words were written by André Hornez. Betti, who died in 2005 at the age of 87, was – you may not be surprised to hear – a classically-trained pianist who made a good living as a writer of music for films.

As usual, having worked on C'est Si Bon, I wrote it out on mini filofax paper so that I have an aide-mémoire and also so that I could learn it by heart to avoid boredom on a bus journey. I put it in to the key of C, which is how I fancy it as a Bb trumpet player.