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("Secret of Mine" transcription begins
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Although I have played the violin since age five, it
wasn't until I was 23 that I first heard "western swing" and "hot
jazz," two kinds of music that changed my life. Today, those styles
best define what my band the Hot Club of Cowtown plays. As a classically
trained violinist, the fiddle tunes and jazz-fueled dance music of
Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were the last thing on my mind.
I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and as a child played
in all the orchestras that I could—school, district, state, the
Kansas City Youth Symphony—as well as playing chamber music and
sometimes performing on the street with friends just for fun. When
I went off to Barnard College in New York City in 1988, I continued
taking violin and viola lessons at the Manhattan School of Music with
Lucie Robert and Karen Ritscher. I spent summers at Meadowmount, Musicorda,
and other chamber-music programs.
In 1992, after a summer at the American Conservatory
at Fontainebleau in France, I went straight to North India, to a town
called Brindavan, to study a style of North Indian classical music
called dhrupad. That was the first time I started improvising, but
I really didn't know what I was doing. My teacher was eccentric and
very old-school: If I wanted to learn a rag that was only supposed
to be played in the morning I had to get to his house before dawn
so we could work on it. Learning this style of music meant learning
how to improvise in a proscribed way. Often only certain notes in
a specific order were allowed. Restraint was necessary to gradually
build the music in volume and tempo. The idea of slowly insinuating
the melody, hinting at it, and drawing it out subtly was all-important.
I have since found that all of these ideas work well in swing improvisation.
East Meets
West
After India I worked occasional summers as a horse wrangler
in Clark, Colorado, playing fiddle in the ranch owner's band at night.
We played in a barn and did a lot of traditional cowboy songs like
"Don't Fence Me In," "I'm an Old Cowhand," and "Red River Valley."
Most of the songs were in G, C, or D major and I would just play long,
legato lines behind the singer. I didn't know much about improvisation—I
just played notes that I thought sounded good.
It wasn't until I went back to New York and took lessons
with violinist and arranger Marty Laster that I started to get an
idea of what swing music improvising is. We would play very simple
western swing songs like "Take Me Back to Tulsa" or "Bubbles in My
Beer" and look at their chord structures. At first I couldn't even
hear where the I chord went to the V chord, but we would chart out
the chord structure (usually just four or five chords in the whole
song) and Marty would have me write out solos using improvising techniques.
These included playing a major seventh note over a chord, or using
a lot of sixths (one of the brightening and elegant hallmark sounds
of early swing), playing double-stops, or even taking time and sliding
up to hold one note somewhere high on the fingerboard (as opposed
to playing a lot of eighth-note runs or rapid, ornate flourishes)
and doing it with absolute authority.
A book I discovered around 1994 entitled Western
Swing Fiddle by Stacy Phillips (Oak Publications, reissued in
1997) was like my bible because it had a lot of melody and solo transcriptions
of western swing recordings. Eventually I bought a few of those records
and practiced playing along. That, for me, has proven to be the single
best way to learn and be inspired. (For information on some of my
favorite recordings, see "Hot Fiddle Favorites.")
In 1994, I met Whit Smith, now the guitar player in
my band, and we began playing and learning western swing songs and
fiddle tunes. We listened to recordings by such hot fiddlers as Stuff
Smith, Joe Venuti, the Hot Club of France (with Stephane Grappelli
and Django Reinhardt), Johnny Gimble of the Bob Wills band, Hugh and
Karl Farr, and many others. As soon as I heard these recordings I
knew that this style of music was the missing link. It was fiery and
virtuosic and classy, had a danceable, driving rhythm, and was not
at all hokey or campy. Stuff Smith, Venuti, Grappelli, and Bob Wills'
fiddle players from the early 1940s all shared a kind of old-world
sound that was a combination of romantic and raw, and always elegant.
What I like best about hot jazz, and about many of the
western swing fiddle players from the 1920s through the '40s, is the
unabashed emotion and spunk in their playing. It's not about being
cool; it's about being hot. Joe Holley, one of my all-time favorites,
played with Bob Wills in the 1940s. I love how he plays chirping,
lilting, really manic lines behind the vocalist. And his solos just
go all out. Check out "Chinatown My Chinatown" from The
Tiffany Transcriptions. Stuff Smith, who was already playing and
recording in the 1930s, also just goes bananas when he solos. A great
example of his brilliant style is his live radio recording of the
"Bugle Call Rag" from 1944, recorded on The Mad Genius of the Violin.
His trademark is his use of parallel fifths, octaves, and driving
rhythmic licks, very much like a horn player. I think if I played
the horn I would start listening to a lot of Smith to hear how it
ought to be done!
Secret
of Mine
To give you a taste of my band's sound, I've transcribed
the fiddle intro, the fiddle solo, and the fiddle-guitar duet, including
the walking bass line beneath it, from our recorded version of a song
I wrote called "Secret of Mine." (The written music begins on the
next page.) I wanted to come up with a progression that all three
of us in the band could solo over, at a fairly bright tempo, with
chord changes that I knew we would like. I picked a common form in
early pop tunes, the 32-bar form, but I added a turnaround at the
end to give it some extra snap. The intro was definitely inspired
by Venuti, whose use of harmonics is always beautiful and fresh. The
parallel fifths are also Venuti-esque, though many of my favorite
players like Gimble and Smith also throw them in to great effect.
The twin line between the guitar and fiddle was inspired
by the Hot Club of France's recording of "Swanee," on which Reinhardt
and Grappelli harmonize a very staccato version of the melody while
the bassist (Louis Vola) plays (or walks) four notes to a bar beneath
them. The bass walks lightly, playing a note on every beat (instead
of slapping or playing on only the first and third beats of each bar).
It's supposed to sound kind of like a whisper, like the bass is tiptoeing
around.
For the melody, I took the rhythm from the classic hot-jazz
standard song "Shine," which has been recorded by everyone from Louis
Armstrong to Grappelli, and I wrote words with the same number of
syllables. I wanted a melody that was kind of spare, without too many
words. The turnaround at the end is very much like the endings on
many Tin Pan Alley standards, including "After You've Gone," "Lover
Come Back to Me," and so on.
For more information and transcriptions of other songs
by the Hot Club of Cowtown, visit www.hotclubofcowtown.com.
HOT FIDDLE
FAVORITES
Here are a few of my favorite recordings,
featuring jazz and swing fiddlers and guitarists:
