How Much Rhythm Do I Got?An analysis of the chord progressions of jazz standards

Andrew Horwitz

The term “contrafact” has come to describe jazz songs that are built using the chord progressions of other standards. (The New Grove) This process found greater popularity during the bebop area, where chord progressions were mutated frequently in late-night clubs: two notable examples include Back Home Again in Indiana (1917) being repurposed for Miles Davis and Charlie Parker's Donna Lee (1947), and Charlie Parker adding many ii-V-I turnarounds to the standard 12-bar blues progression in Blues for Alice (1951). Claims have been made about the “most common” chord progressions, usually including the 12-bar blues and the changes to “I Got Rhythm,” but little analysis has been done to confirm these claims. This project will be an analysis of the information provided in the database discussed by Pachet et al. (2013), to which I have been granted limited access to relevant API calls.

Past work on this subject is limited. Mauch et al. (2007) analyzed 244 songs from the Real Book (one of the definitive collections of jazz standards) and the collection of 180 original Beatles songs from studio albums. The researchers focus on progressions of 4 bars at a time and found some sequences with enough correlation to be considered “idiomatic,” and also provide some information on the frequency of the most common chord progressions for both corpora. I hope to go more in-depth and provide wider and deeper analysis on this data, both on a section level and a 4-bar chord progression level. Burgoyne et al. (2011) analyze a set of Billboard Top 100 songs, but their analysis is limited in both depth and breadth as the paper focused on the creation of the dataset more than the analysis. A paper by de Haas and Burgoyne (2012) focuses on writing an automatic parser of these songs but focuses more on timing; Van Balen et al. (2013) focus on spectral analysis of the choruses to these songs.

I will approach my analysis from three relatively original directions: the first, which is already almost complete, will be an analysis similar to that which Mauch et al. undertook, exceptthat I will also look at entire sections of songs for overlap and seeing how frequently certain large scale progressions reoccur. My next focus will be short-scale progressions, counting every three or four chords, to see how often certain tunes contain certain idiomatic sub-progressions; Mauch et al. limited their definition of “idiomatic” at a maximum of four chords, but also explicitly claimed that a “ii->V->I” progression was idiomatic in jazz. I am not yet certain what my minimum will be, but my eventual goal is to gather raw frequency data both transposed (treating each 3/4-bar phrase as independent of the key) and untransposed (considering each phrase as part of its section's key). This will be my next focus after a majority of my other work for the semester is complete, and should take a few days and be completed by the end of March.

My final means of analysis, given enough time, will be to look into how frequently and atwhat point in chord progressions certain chord alterations and extensions are used; while a majority of these are left to the performers' discretion, the original Real Book versions (and thus the database of Pachet et al. ) include a significant amount. This will be done on an as-

accomplishable basis; I am not sure how deep the above two research directions will go nor how much time I will use on them. I may also look into analyzing what progressions/alterations are used more frequently in which time periods/jazz styles, though this will likely be done through printouts from the database and manual analysis – some of the information in the database I was given access to is incomplete or incorrect; looking through my own copy of the Real Book or searching online for recording information may be easier and more reliable, albeit slower. While,for now, my research sample is limited to the original Real Book due to server constraints, I intend to at least try to run a simple test on the full dataset if the database's owners allow it.

My motivation for this work is that, as an aspiring jazz composer, I do not yet know what is, to use Mauch's term, “idiomatic.” I understand and know some of the basics; I can write a 12-bar blues or can write a contrafact over the “I Got Rhythm” changes, but I would like to know more of the other frequently-used chord progressions for inspiration. I also am interested in contrafacts in general as an arranger – hearing different melodies over familiar chord progressions is sometimes an inspiration for further new arrangements. I hope that whatever I may end up finding may also inspire future generations of jazz composers.

References

Absolu, B., T. Li, and M. Ogihara. 2010. Analysis of chord progression data. In Advances in Music Information Retrieval, 165–84. Berlin: Springer.

van Balen, J. M. H., J. A. Burgoyne, F. Wiering, and R. C. Veltkamp. 2013. An analysis of chorusfeatures in popular song. In Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Curitiba, Brazil, 107–12.

Burgoyne, J. A., J. Wild, and I. Fujinaga. 2011. An expert ground truth set for audio chord recognition and music analysis. In Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Miami, FL, 633–8.

de Haas, W. B., and J. A. Burgoyne. 2012. Parsing the Billboard chord transcriptions. University of Utrecht, Technical Report, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Mauch, M., S. Dixon, and C. Harte. 2007. Discovering chord idioms through Beatles and Real Book songs. In Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Vienna, Austria, 255–8.

The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed. s. v. “Contrafact,” http://www.oxfordmusiconline . com/ subscriber/article/grove/music/J543100 (accessed 17 March 2014).

Pachet, F., J. Suzda, and D. Martín. 2013. A comprehensive online database of machine-readable leadsheets for jazz standards. In Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Curitiba, Brazil, 275–80.