Can anyone point me to a harmonic analysis of Dolphin Dance by Herbie Hancock? I am seriously scratching my head. Chart attached. Thanks!
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Harmonic analysis of Dolphin Dance
- Thread starter Bass Momma
- Start date
An Analysis of "Dolphin Dance" | From the Woodshed
You picked a real mind bender this time. I had fooled around with this one quite a bit in the past, but we never played it that often so it kind of fell off the radar.
You picked a real mind bender this time. I had fooled around with this one quite a bit in the past, but we never played it that often so it kind of fell off the radar.
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There is no apparent key and it might be better to just look at the tune as moving through several tonal centers. Herbie is a genius and this tune is just another example of that. Given the lack of any key signature, one might assume it is either in C or A minor but it really fits neither key. I think trying to use standard Key/chord analysis on this tune is a fools errand. Just my $.02.
This concert that the Jaco clip is taken from is difficult to watch due to Jaco being extremely sick by this point in his life and being in a very manic swing during this concert. It breaks my heart to see the guy in this condition. May he rest in peace.
This concert that the Jaco clip is taken from is difficult to watch due to Jaco being extremely sick by this point in his life and being in a very manic swing during this concert. It breaks my heart to see the guy in this condition. May he rest in peace.
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It's a pick by our BL/jam leader. Who feels that tackling challenging pieces is a royal road to getting better. Who am I to disagree?
.Must say I really like the song, and don't have trouble walking it, but when it comes to being thrown a solo hahahahahaha!
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Yeah, might be time to take off the training wheels and fall off the bike a few times!
Yep, probably best to just trust your ear and make the best of it..
Overthinking Jazz tunes can be folly in some cases. I remember an associate who worked on very high level Scholarship, contributing to Grove's etc. Doing a very complicated analysis of Thelonious Monk's solo's. In one, he went to great lengths to explain Monk's suddenly stopping in the middle of a phrase and coming in only after three measures of silence. He poured all kinds of ideas about how monk was trying to shape the listener's ears to hear the changes differently etc. ad nauseum. Years later I saw a video of Monk doing that recording, my being unaware it had been filmed. At the moment of that break, Monk looks up form the piano, sees his cigar and decides to take a drag, and then another. He simply saw his cigar and wanted to smoke, finished that and went back to playing. I couldn't stop laughing after seeing that.
It is possible to overthink things sometimes.
I do think too much! I've been listening to a lot of Miles Davis' playing, and trying to absorb his talent for letting a few notes do a lot of work. If you're following someone who's just done a real fireworks solo, just letting a short phrase sit there can be really effective. But in this DD connection, putting out some notes and letting yourself really hear what they're doing. And react to that. That's my theory, anyway!!
This is one of my favorite tunes. Whenever I play with a good piano player I ask to do it with them. I like to just read it and listen to the piano part and not think about it.
When I look over those highly detailed analysis of songs, I'm not trying to absorb every word as gospel. I'm just looking for ideas and intent.
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Agree with everything you said. I think the best approach (for me at least) is learn the head inside out and backwards, then experiment with embellishing rhythmically and melodically over the record. I’m not good enough to distill this down to a couple of keys and scales for soloing but super curious if another user can!
How do you approach this? Genuinely curious and this seems to be your wheelhouse from past conversations.
I mean, it could be both. Monk was great at rests. Maybe he spotted the cigar and the opportunity for a weird silence at the same time.
(Sorry, I'm no use on Dolphin Dance. Good luck to @Bass Momma !)
I love harmonic analysis. And I haven’t seen this tune before so it’s very interesting to take a glance and listen to this very obscure piece!
The sheet music either doesn’t have a key signature because of how ambiguous it is OR the piece is actually centered around C or specifically Cm. I haven’t seen the link in the first replied posted so I don’t know what they had to say, but my stance on it for now is the latter.
My argument is that after the four measure intro, it starts on Cm. Not simply that though. The arrival points and cadences are all related to C, whether they be the dominant, subdominant, or even the Neapolitan chord.
Really interesting piece!
The sheet music either doesn’t have a key signature because of how ambiguous it is OR the piece is actually centered around C or specifically Cm. I haven’t seen the link in the first replied posted so I don’t know what they had to say, but my stance on it for now is the latter.
My argument is that after the four measure intro, it starts on Cm. Not simply that though. The arrival points and cadences are all related to C, whether they be the dominant, subdominant, or even the Neapolitan chord.
Really interesting piece!
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It only works if you’re like Miles or Monk and you’ve got an excellent rhythm section that allows you to just add a bit here and there.
At least that’s my $0.02.
It’s important to note that to a lot of untrained fans jazz music sometimes just sounds like two or three guys taking turns noodling with a beat. Glad to here that we aren’t always wrong!
Honestly it's been so long since I've played it, that I don't remember much about it. But my process in general is to find a version of the tune that I like, be it the original or by someone else. One that I can hear what's actually happening in the changes, rather than something too tricky. In this case, I used Grover Washington Jr's version with Anthony Jackson on bass, because his lines were so clear and straightforward. He pushed the beat a bit too much for my taste, but that doesn't matter in this case. I think it's ok to copy a line, because once you've played it awhile, it turns into something more like your own anyway. But, you want to start out sounding authentic right out of the gate.
For the improvisations, for the first time through the form, I'd just embellish the melody as you already mentioned, since it's a pretty good way to build some ideas. After that, I look for key centers and try to find lines that fit over as many chords as possible, that work and sound good. Of course all this stuff happens in the woodshed. This tune uses a lot of plain ole major scale material (which includes the relative minor), along with melodic minor and a few spots where you can use half/whole diminished scales. Somebody will probably mention arpeggios, but when I talk about manipulating a scale, I'm talking about everything related to it, not just linear lines.
You can make a decent set of lines just using the major scale pitch collection, relative minor, pentatonics and the attending major scale modes over the whole tune, if you're not that familiar with melodic minor or diminished. However, if you're gonna play jazz I think you need to understand the melodic minor pretty much inside and out, once you've gained a fairly unconscious understanding of the major scale. None of this happens overnight, though.
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One take on the last 4:
How to Play the Elusive Last 4 Bars of “Dolphin Dance” - Learn Jazz Standards
How to Play the Elusive Last 4 Bars of “Dolphin Dance” - Learn Jazz Standards
