“Sir Duke” is one of Stevie Wonder’s most iconic songs.
It’s an ode to the jazz great, Duke Ellington and in 1977 it was a number one hit.
Sir Duke is an R&B song through and through, but if you dig into the music theory that
defines it you’ll hear just how much jazz actually inspired it.
To understand the inner workings of this song, I had to find someone who can break it down
piece by piece. Hi. My name is Job Collier. I'm Stevie Wonder's
greatest fan and I’m here to explain the magic of Stevie Wonder’s iconic tune, “Sir Duke."
So let’s take a look at the song’s structure.
There’s a verse, pre-chorus or bridge, chorus, and a special instrumental section after the
chorus which I’m very excited to get into.
Before we do all that, let’s talk about the drums in the intro.
One of the intriguing things about this particular song is Stevie's use of jazz inspired language
and his melding of that with pop inspired language
The intro for example is based on this swing feel and the drums go…
Listen to Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” and you’ll hear that same swung
hi-hat pattern - a staple of big band jazz.
The verse however is a more familiar back beat.
This backbeat, with the snare on the 2 and 4 was a Motown staple, the record label that
Stevie Wonder was signed to at just 11 years old.
And it’s this backbeat that leads us right
into the first verse.
Music is a world within itself. With a language we all understand.
Sir Duke, I suppose, is an extrapolation of a very simple pop structure.
So for example these might be four chords that a pop song might be based around.
Chord one, B major in this case.
Chord six, A flat minor.
Chord four, E major and chord five F#Major.
This specific progression is known as the doo-wop chord progression because it was so
ubiquitous in pop music during 1950s and early 1960s.
In the movie Grease there’s actually a song dedicated to it.
What’s that playing on the radio?
Why do I start swaying to and fro?
Stevie Wonder, he's seeking to experiment with jazz techniques and jazz harmonic movements
within this structure and so what’s he’s interested in primarily is this idea of chromaticism.
Chromaticism, in simple terms, is when you play notes that are right next to each other
in a row.
That's the chromatic scale
rather than the major scale which sounds like this.
So what Stevie does in this song, which is really cool, super interesting,
and at the time quite unique, was, you've got chord one.
You’ve got chord six - so far so good sounds like a familiar pop song.
And then you’ve got the surprising twist a G7 chord.
Which is sort of like a flat six dominant chord.
And that's what leads you to chord five.
And so he's replaced this chord four with this strange flat six dominant chord.
And if you look at the bass movement - A flat, G, F sharp - that is chromatic and that's what
interested Stevie and that's what inspires me
and has inspired many other people about this particular song.
Though it's traditional in structure, there are these weird moments when things feel jazzy.
There’s just one little instance of chromaticism in the verse, but in the bridge - where Stevie
sings off a list of his Jazz heroes — including Duke Ellington — his experiments with chromaticism
really shine through.
There's really only one chord in this entire section.
Now this chord just hops down 3 and hops up 3.
This is a crystalline example of chromatic movement, a chord moves up and down in half steps
or semitones.
If I were to play the same section diatonically, which means that all the notes are taken from
the major scale, it would sound a bit like this.
Now that is not quite as spicy, and certainly not as chromatic as this version.
This chromatic bridge leads us right into the chorus of the song, and it’s here that
we should probably talk about harmony.
Something that has always thrilled me as a lover of harmony is this idea that you can
take a note that feels familiar in one key or under one chord and that note can stay
the same.
But underneath it, the chord can change into something quite bizarre and unfamiliar but
it can feel coherent.
For example, here’s the melody of the chorus sung by Stevie Wonder.
So all of those notes belong to B major and Stevie could very easily just have B major
under the whole chorus.
Now that is very good but it's not quite Sir Duke.
Stevie made the harmony more interesting by calling out two specific notes from the melody:
A sharp and G sharp.
Stevie does this very clever thing where he takes these two notes, A sharp and G sharp.
Now, these two notes do belong to B major.
They also belong to F minor.
And that's such a warm, surprising sound.
Here's the melody of the chorus with that F minor added in.
What he's done is take this very basic melody,
and contextualize it harmonically
in a way that keeps us interested, yet feels familiar to us.
Wedged right between the chorus and verse is Sir Duke’s most overt ode to jazz, the
“shout chorus.”
This is usually the moment towards the end of a song where the horn section plays joyfully
in unison.
Now, to understand what that sounds like, here’s the shout chorus in Duke Ellington’s “Cotton Tail."
The cool thing about Sir Duke’s Shout Chorus is that it’s not just an ode to jazz, it’s
an ode to how universal music can be.
Cultures around the world have developed their own unique musical scales that all sound vastly
different from each other.
But there’s one scale that is found in nearly every musical tradition across the globe - the
Pentatonic scale.
It’s just five notes, and it’s what “Sir Duke” is built upon.
So if we begin to make melodies using the pentatonic scale, it’s extremely difficult
to go wrong.
Because any note in the scale sounds great.
It's kind of like a miracle scale.
Now Stevie Wonder approaches the pentatonic scale in what has become one of the most iconic
uses of the scale of all time in this beautiful shout chorus to “Sir Duke” which goes
something like this.
So every note from that melody comes from the B pentatonic scale.
This is the B pentatonic scale.
B. C sharp. D sharp. F sharp. And G sharp.
Of course Stevie Wonder had to adjust it just a little bit.
There is one interesting juicy note that is added to achieve a sense of jazzines, a sense
of blues, and a sense of chromaticism, and that is the very sneaky D natural here.
So the D kind of bridges the gap between the D sharp and the C sharp.
Now, those jazzers amongst you may recognize this scale as what's known as the Blues scale.
And the blues scale occurs when you add this kind of spicy note into a pentatonic scale.
And what you end up with is something that feels very reassuring in its simplicity and
yet has the element of spice that introduces the sort of chromaticism that makes jazz, jazz.
Without it it would sound rather anodyne.
But when we add this in,
it's that jazziness has entered the fray and that's what makes it very memorable
to me and also very harmonically interesting.
Sir Duke might be Stevie Wonder’s most overt ode to jazz and the musicians that shaped
his musical education, but listen closely and you’ll hear those influences across
his entire discography.
Stevie Wonder is one of the greatest musicians walking the face of the earth, nobody could
possibly argue with that sentiment.
I think the reason why is that he's capable of disguising some extremely complex music
information within structures that feel familiar that feel likable, that feel danceable, and
singable.
But if you if you zoom into what's going on harmonically, melodically, and rhythmically
there's some pretty heavy stuff going on and that is something that thrills me to no end.