Ep. 185: Modal Jazz

i v m it feels like everyone's searching for the secret to living longer these days better health sharper minds stronger bodies this is the john t and the dog podcast i'm dr marcus rani and i'm joined by someone who understands performance and resilience better than most international cricketer john t rose in this show we explore the science of longevity from how our bodies age to the everyday habits that help us stay strong sharp and resilient as the years go by catch full episodes on the ibm podcast youtube channel and on all audio streaming platforms hello and welcome to simplified today we are in the presence of nareem and his son gotham along with ck to explain something extremely complex uh yes so uh you know the reason i wanted to have this is an episode to the sort of very skeptical uh suspicious uh reception to my core why are you going to talk about music yeah that's because uh i you know it's so first i tell you what the episode is about it is about something called modal jazz okay and modal jazz is a jazz that makes use of musical modes so there are things for musical modes that musicians will know about and they modulate between them instead of relying on one tonal center so most music has one tonal center one core melody and it has um you know it basically revolves around that all the parts everything revolves around that and uh that is how music has been played for most of uh you know recent history and uh though people were experimenting with different modes in the same uh same piece of music this this concept was crystallized as a theory by a composer named george russell and he wrote a book in 1953 called medium chromatic concept of tonal organization if i can try to simplify this for people who don't understand jazz are you saying like normal music is like a standard podcast where there's one anchor and he drives the entire narrative and this is more like simplified where there are like multiple people okay good go on i cannot believe i cannot believe you have compared some aspect of jazz with a simplified yeah i mean it's it's model jazz which is m-o-d-a-l and not m-o-d-e-l so it's a model podcast it's a model podcast so i i what really grabbed my attention what really put me up is uh you know um there's this great one of the all-time greats of jazz named myas davis okay so myas davis used to play something called bebop and uh bebop is a style of jazz which consists of parts basically to provide the background for solo so some parts will be playing and then a theme starts and then the solo is played and the parts keep repeating throughout the whole song my uh my 50s uh improvising over the part had become a very dominant part of jazz and it became so dominant that the side men at recording days were sometimes just given nothing more than a list of parts all they had to do was play the song and uh myas davis hung dead boy right so myas davis was really accomplished like a really good musician and he didn't like the repetitiveness of the jazz that was being played at that time so he decided to uh you know he decided to invent his own well he didn't invent it because it was written up by other people but he decided to experiment with this uh in which there was no single tone no single tone in center the tone in center would keep shifting meaning the melody would keep shifting the sound would keep uh drifting and to make matters worse there was no fixed uh rhythm either the rhythm also would keep changing and overall the music became an order of magnitude more complex and i thought that you know if something had happened people would you know they wouldn't like it it would sound strange it would sound different it sounds like a music equivalent of like 3d chess yeah well it happens it happens even in games right so you have variants of uh games which don't never take off because people like their games in a certain predictable way but for music apparently that uh is not true because when myas davis came out with his first album it was almost an all-time i don't know it's all-time but it's one of the highest selling jazz albums of the time at least probably of all time and people just yeah so uh so yeah gautam says it is the highest selling jazz album of all time and i wanted to know what it is that makes mobile jazz so interesting so gautam told me that it's about different modes yeah so you guys probably thinking what what are modes uh modes are nothing but actually you know just think of it as moods it's experimenting with uh different arrangements of the same notes to make it sound a different mood i'll show you guys in a little bit but uh what my say is i'm other people like this guy john johnson who wrote the book livian chromatic uh something so he he spoke about how to use these feelings and sort of accentuate the meaning of the song and uh jazz earlier was groovy and it was all about the rhythm and fast pace chord changes and everybody loved it it's good to dance with but uh the the introduction of modal jazz just made music more of you know like a conversation and you could sit and listen to it at any time you could listen to it on a nice rainy day when you're upset when you're happy because you know it's it's a it was a lovely different uh paste of rhythm and then there wasn't a specific rhythm to it it would just change and the players would all just go together it is beautiful but uh more coming back to modes they represent some sort of emotion you know if you look at it in that way uh i thought i'd play you something and show you what what it sounds like so most of our um music that we hear rock mostly they're all around this thing called the major scale or the minor scale which is uh happy or sad it's very uh you know it's very binary i'll show you what i mean here's a bunch of chords that i just moved from in my love here i'm going to play the happy version of rock music so this is what it sounds like so this is very happy right and then you go switch out something a little sad and go something like this so this is very uh you know bipolar and there's nothing more that you can contribute to this all you can do is change the chord the arrangement of notes and it'll sound a little different and people have been overusing this for years and i don't see the depth of uh you know just playing around the notes as much so modes sort of add that depth to uh music and jazz music when they started playing with these modes they introduced these different modes to have sort of different feeling in different parts of the song and if you know something like this so uh a happier sound uh okay so i'll just go back a little bit i'm sorry there are about seven modes uh the two modes that i'll take you are aeolian and ionian aeolian is a happy one ionian is a sad one and then there are a few happy modes sad modes and then it's not ambiguous so uh let's start with something about lydia this is one of the happier modes and it sounds something like this and uh it's i mean it's a very happy sounding uh mode and there's another one which is also very happy like uh there's this one called mixed origin it's quite similar it sounds something like this ouch there's something that uh it was around the ionian mode that i played earlier and it's called the dorian mode and these this uh this mode is used a lot in pink floyd songs i've seen pink floyd experiment with a lot of this uh it'll sound something like this so this is a little gloomy or a little dull and uh that's sorry yeah so uh what these are the different modes you have one uh which is the phrygian mode phrygian mode it sounds like the Spanish sounding so can you uh can you illustrate now these are the different modes and what model guys means is that the uh performer mixes like goes through a different mode a different point of time so how does that happen oh i guess i'm i'm not that well versed with uh i i kind of understand what this music is but i'm not an expert okay so you want to change but that's what that's what someone like yeah that's what you do and what i wanted to explain was there are these different modes right and you can use these modes like modes and rearrange them and have patterns of feelings and all these feelings put together in a song are very conversational and they they take you to the song like it's a story and they explain more than it has more depth than another song so what what appears to you as a music listener uh why does modal jazz appeal to you so much over uh what you used to like earlier as a rock music yeah i used to listen to a lot of rock and uh it i said do but rock it was around just the one center and it's nice to listen to once in a while but when the moment i heard jazz it took me to it added this layer of depth which was changing the tonal center which was changing the root and uh it it was kind of 2d versus 3d for me and you know i can see how it it does get a little complex and sometimes you know you just want to listen to music that's very simple but uh i i like the challenge it's very thought-provoking sometimes you just listen to motor jazz and it's very emotional uh it it was this layer of depth that i found this thing and around which jazz did provide yeah this actually kind of reminds me of how uh this is another conversation that we were having about uh tones in language and especially like mandarin having different tones of how the language flows and an essential part of the language itself uh this almost feels like there are tones inside the music that this uh particular form is exploiting yeah so that different tones give you different moods and different meanings yeah and one thing that i wanted uh want you to do that is to suggest a few uh sort of listening you know like a little listening guide a few links to songs that illustrate what modal jazz is about instrumental or vocal either probably instrumental yeah so the epitome of modal jazz is my service album called my it's called kind of blue it's an album from 1959 and this is the one which was the audience yes so he signed a new contract with columbia at that time and he wanted to experiment with the music and he signed a contract he didn't really know how this music was going to take off but it did turn out to be the biggest i mean it had the most sales of any jazz album ever but sold four million copies and it's almost impossible to find one of these records anywhere around you know it's a collector's piece now so this is my kind of blue and some specific songs within that uh there's a song called flamenco sketches and another one called freddy freeloader so these are very good songs to start listening to modal jazz it's beautiful it's you can see the tone changes evidently and it's very nice i'll put the i'll put the links the description yeah yeah so yeah this was uh mostly an experimental episode uh because just wanted to experiment with a different kind of otherwise we keep yakking ourselves because someone else to react about something else for a change and i sincerely hope you guys enjoyed this and it is extremely complicated and both have explained this to me at a certain time already and i still haven't wrapped my head around what modal jazz is so you are excused if you find this to be way over your head but uh listen to the links and uh trust me many of you will really enjoy uh this kind of music so uh yeah so please do immerse yourself in uh modal jazz and uh let us know what you think of our uh uh experimental episode of sorts so in the meantime uh uh take it away yeah stay stay cool stay immortal and say something fantastic all right see you guys bye-bye bye-bye you you you