Something Borrowed Something Blue

Advance Music
Principles of Jazz Composition

”...Something Borrowed, Something Blue is a broad survey of the wider principles of harmony, form, adaptation, and developmental technique underlying jazz composition in its various instrumental formats. This book examines compositions ranging from those for solo piano to large ensemble, from common forms such as Blues and 32-bar songforms to extended through composed pieces, to those based on adaptation of European classical formal procedures such as fugue and rondo. Such topics as individuality of voice, cultural and historical influences, the contrafact, formal appropriation, pantonality, reharmonization and the use of counterpoint are among those covered. Composers  represented include a wide range of stylists, from Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and John Coltrane, to Gil Evans, Mary Lou Williams, Herbie Hancock, Oliver Nelson, Hermeto Pascoal and John Lewis, among many others.

The extensive bibliography, discography and end of chapter assignments are designed to provide students and faculty at either the undergraduate or graduate level with a flexible framework for analysis of additional compositions of their choice, as well as a basic set of useful research references and suggested compositional projects. Some questions the book poses are:

What formal elements and musical characteristics are common to the diverse stylistic range of jazz composition? Which of these elements exist in any form of musical composition or artistic expres-sion, and which are unique to composition in the jazz tradition? How do composers apply these techniques in a way that enables them to create an individual voice within the context of the jazz tradition?”

Sample Pages