Donna Lee, how was it composed?

[The_Orlonater]

I can play the piece of music pretty well, but I don't understand what was used to write this classic piece?

Donna Lee Fingering

Here are the scores. I'd like a little help from a more experienced crowd.

[Basshole]

Check this link out, 'bout halfway down the page. Might help you a bit.

http://www.ricksuchow.com/press-group-122.html

I don't know if it'll help you figure out "how" it was composed, but it may give you some perspective on it, if you only know it from Jaco's record, and have never heard the changes.

[HaVIC5]

Man, that edit of Jaco playing Donna Lee versus Miles and Parker is really cool.

[kerryg]

Like many bebop tunes, "Donna Lee" (written by saxophonist Charlie Parker) was actually based on the chord progression of an earlier song. In this case, it's based on the chord changes to a jazz standard called "Back Home Again In Indiana". More on that song here:

http://www.jazzstandards.com/compositions-0/indiana.htm

Donna Lee is largely composed of II-V-I progressions (and their substitutions). Bar 5/6/7/8 = /Bbm7 /Eb7 /Ab /Ebm7 Ab7 /Db

It uses what some call the "bebop scale", a major scale with an added "b7" - 1-2-3-4-5-6-b7-7. It also uses chromaticism, or movement by semitones, to link phrases - or to delay the melody "settling" into the key by a beat or two, giving a sensation of restlessness.

Hope that helps; is that the kind of info you're after?

[bottomend!]

Man o man! I clicked on the lick to check out the Donna Lee thing but did anyone else listen to the guy who runs the website? great player!

[DocBop]

Charlie Parker and the other Beboppers took chord progressions from popular tunes to write tunes and they started adding chord substitutions and so on to make them harder to improvise over. Back in the Bebop era there was a lot of jams in clubs where musicians went try and get the known. These were run as Cut Sessions. You got on stage and the leader of the band would call a tune and start counting it off. You better know the tune or more important have great ears, because even if you knew the basic tune, they are going to be changing it. If you don't "cut it" it make take six months before they let you on stage again. It was tough, but you grew as a musician.

So tunes like Donna Lee were written mainly as a framework to improvise over.

[Bruce Lindfield]

Originally Posted by kerryg

Like many bebop tunes, "Donna Lee" (written by saxophonist Charlie Parker) was actually based on the chord progression of an earlier song. In this case, it's based on the chord changes to a jazz standard called "Back Home Again In Indiana". More on that song here:

http://www.jazzstandards.com/compositions-0/indiana.htm

Donna Lee is largely composed of II-V-I progressions (and their substitutions). Bar 5/6/7/8 = /Bbm7 /Eb7 /Ab /Ebm7 Ab7 /Db

It uses what some call the "bebop scale", a major scale with an added "b7" - 1-2-3-4-5-6-b7-7. It also uses chromaticism, or movement by semitones, to link phrases - or to delay the melody "settling" into the key by a beat or two, giving a sensation of restlessness.

Hope that helps; is that the kind of info you're after?

All of this is correct - although if we're talking about how/why it was written - it was quite common for Jazz players from Bebop onwards to write their own head or melody to existing chord changes, as it meant there was no danger of having to pay royalties when it was performed.

So - Jazz players spent all their time improvising over chord sequences, so it was fairly easy to put some of those ideas that they used in their solos to make up a tune.

Donna Lee sounds to me like parts of a Charlie Parker solo transcribed - there is some argument over whether it was written by Parker or Miles Davis - they were in the same band at the time. But it does sound like some Bird "licks" - whoever they were transcribed by...?

[HaVIC5]

Well, its a Bird head through and through. Miles was notorious for taking credit, or at least attempting to take credit, for tunes that weren't his - it's just that at this time he wasn't big enough to get away with it.

[kerryg]

Yeah, you got the distinct impression that Bill Evans wasn't completely pleased to have Miles claim "Blue In Green" as his own composition when apparently all Miles did was suggest the first two chords to Bill and Bill wrote the rest.

[kerryg]

Originally Posted by Bruce Lindfield

... it was quite common for Jazz players from Bebop onwards to write their own head or melody to existing chord changes, as it meant there was no danger of having to pay royalties when it was performed...

- although there are different "spins" on why this was (and for the plausibility test it helps to bear in mind that bebop musicians are almost by definition not usually amongst the most business-savvy players every to grace a bandstand - hey, I'm an old bebopper, I'm speaking from personal experience).

Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow, Louis Armstrong's musical director and pot-dealer and no great lover of bebop, puts a somewhat more malignant interpretation on this practice in his autobiography "Really The Blues". Mezz's writing captures a hint of the tension and often outright hostility that existed between the older generation of swing players and the hungry new generation of bebop players (at that time also called "ripbop" or "rebop" interchangeably).

Mezz claimed that the reason it was done was that most jazz musicians loved to "burn" on the chord progressions of standards, but bebop players wrote difficult heads on them just as much to exclude the older generation of swing jazz musicians, who they called "moldy figs", from jams.

Basically one of the older cats would want to play "Indiana" and the young horns would say "nah, we're playing this new tune called "Donna Lee" - and although he could eat the chord changes for breakfast the old cat would grumble and put his horn back in the case and sit back down rather than stumble his way through sight-reading the head in public.

[Bruce Lindfield]

What you are talking about then strays into the "race issue" - whereby big bands and orchestras had been "reserved" for white players in some areas and the only way the black guys could get to play was in small groups at smaller venues - so when you talk about tension and hositility, it's maybe something that has to be borne in mind?

I know this is something that Stanley Crouch bangs on about and he is not seen as the most reliable of commentators on the history of Jazz - but surely there is some truth in all this - for example we know that Miles and the other players "froze out" Bill Evans at the KoB sessions - according to all witnesses...?