A Dream of Crows: the chords

I am in the process of writing a series of articles about the songs on my sixth Jamendo album, In Unexpected Places.  This is about the tenth track, “A Dream of Crows.”

“A Dream of Crows” started out as two song fragments, older even than my “Rhythm Method” Prototypes.  When I was composing my previous album, Martian Winter, I did a series of prototypes called “The Periodic Table of the Groove.”  There was a lot of good material there, and some of the fragments I meant to come back to later.

The story of how these two parts crystallized into one is a good one, so I’ll write about that next time.  The title “A Dream of Crows” suggests something about its origin.  But today, I want to cover the song structure and chords.

Overall Structure

There are two main parts in this song.  All of the prototypes I created for “The Periodic Table of the Groove” were in odd time signatures — these two parts are actually in different odd time signatures.

• Part A, the “verse”, is in 7/4 swing.  (Technically, I’d call this 33233 7-clave 4:3 swing . . . see my article “Rhythms in Seven.”)
• Part B, the “bridge”, is in 5/4 swing.  (Again, I’d call this by its full name, 2332 5-clave 3:2 swing . . . see my article “Rhythms in Five.”)

Part A (7/4)

The main part of the song is actually a Bluesmorph (as defined in a previous article in this series) — it’s structure can be mapped to the standard blues progression (think minor blues, with some extensions and alterations):

Dbm9	%	%	%
B13#9	%	%	%
Dbm9	%	Em7	%
Eb7#5	%	Dbm9	%

Part B (5/4)

The bridge is probably my favorite part of the song — the part which, to me, suggests dreaming.  It uses the following chord progression:

Abm7	%	BΔ	F#Δ
Abm7	%	EΔ	Ebm7
Abm7	%	BΔ	F#Δ
Abm7	%	EΔ	Ebm7
Db13#11	%	Eb13b9	%

About the Diagrams Below

As I’ve done in previous articles, I’ve given some chord voicing diagrams in the sections below.  However, this time, I had to make a huge simplification:

I want the diagrams to focus on the notes and the voicings.  These songs are written in odd time signatures.  If I included all the correct rhythmic information, they would become much more difficult to understand at a glance.  Therefore, I wrote all the voicings below “as if” they were in 4/4, so I could get away with using clean looking whole notes for each bar.

As usual, the diagrams were prepared with GNU Lilypond 2.12.2

Verse

Below, I’ve taken the chords from Part A and shown the approximate voicing I used for each.

Chord voicings used in the "verse" section of "A Dream of Crows." The rhythms have been simplified for clarity. Click the image above to enlarge.

Probably the most interesting voicing is that mad, mad voicing for B7#9.  I break several “rules” here.  Ordinarily the more traditional music theorists balk at chords with a minor 2nd interval in them . . . not to mention two!  And yet the voicing C## – D# – G# – A represents exactly the color tones of the chord: the #9, the major 3rd, the 13th, and the 7th.

This is a great voicing, but as I said before, voicings of this type won’t work on every keyboard instrument.  A concert grand, yes; a cool electric piano, maybe; a parlor upright, possibly; a Hammond organ set up with a lot of 5th overtones . . . nope.

The Bridge

I used two different types of voicings for the bridge chords, shifting from single handed to two handed.

Single Handed

These are simple enough, but set the stage for what follows.

One handed chord voicings for the bridge of "A Dream of Crows." Rhythms have been simplified for clarity. Click the image above to enlarge.

Two Handed

At the end of the bridge, the song has to “turn around” and go back to the verse with some sort of grand flourish.  I held back on the chords in the first part of the bridge, only to plow through the end with rich, five-note voicings:

Two handed chord voicings for the bridge of "A Dream of Crows." Rhythms have been simplified for clarity. Click the image above to enlarge.

[Note: these voicings should read "D13#11" and "Eb13b9", but I've never been able to get Lilypond to understand that the 13th is particularly important to me -- it always sticks it off on the end, as in "Db7#11add13".  So I simplify the input to remove the clutter.]

These type of voicings are called Upper Structure Triads.  (By the way, as always, I highly recommend Mark Levine’s Jazz Piano Book — it gave me a solid base from which to develop my own chord theories.  Upper Structure Triads were one of the best voicings I learned in that book.)

The basic definition for this type of chord is “A tritone on the left, a triad on the right.”  Here is the analysis of each voicing:

• Db13#11 is voiced as an Eb major triad (Bb – Eb – G) over a B – F tritone.  The B (actually, Cb) and the F are the 7th and 3rd of the chord, the guide tones.  The Eb major triad spells out the color tones — Bb = 13th, Eb = 9th, G = #11th.
• Eb13b9 is voiced as a C major triad (C – E – G) over a Db – G tritone.  Again, the tritone notes are the guide tones for the chord, and the C major triad spells out the color tones — C = 13th, E = b9th, G = restatement of the 3rd.