Hey YouTube! mDecks Music here welcome back to our series on Decoding Jazz. Today we're gonna take
a look at "Olio" by Sonny Rollins, take a listen...
So what Rollins started with when he wrote "Olio"
was actually an already pre-existing template or blueprint. It didn't just come out of thin
air and that template, that recipe was the rhythm changes form we've spoken about briefly in other
videos. That is a 32 bar piece of music with an A-A / B-A form, and that's what "Olio" is based on and
that's what we're gonna first dive into using Mapping Tonal Harmony Pro. It's just a basic rhythm
changes, very very similar to basically "I Got Rhythm" by Gershwin. It's pretty much measure for
measure what we're gonna start with in Mapping Tonal Harmony Pro. All right so let's plug in
our rhythm changes -- at least for the A section -- for now. So what we're gonna do is go over here create
a new file -- let's just call it "rhythm changes" -- "(R-H-Y-T-H-M I always get tripped up spelling rhythm
changes, changes rhythm)." Alright so then the form layout is right here and what we want is right
down here -- 32 bars A-A / B-A bingo -- we'll just leave the tempo and the style alone for now. And boom,
there's our template. So let's change the key to Bb. Bb is a really common key for rhythm
changes, you see it all the time so that's the first thing I'll do. Here we are in Bb and
one thing I want us to do while while plugging in these chords, is see them functionally that'll kind
of hammer home the point of this recipe that we're leaning so heavily on and we don't need
anything more than a secondary dominant view of our maps, so there we go. So what we basically have
here is a I-Vi-ii-V that kind of gets recycled again and again so let's do that
I-Vi-ii-V. And for our purposes here we're doing the chords every two beats and I have
that program then right here using this selector. I can do any any amount of beats I want so let's
do that again for the next two bar phrase, I-Vi-ii-V. So here's where it gets a little
interesting, we're gonna plug in this one chord again and use the V-IV, so sort of
tonicizing the IV chord here, and then we're going to use a minor version of that IV chord
here, switch over to a cadential cadence to end the phrase. And for right now I'm gonna do the
same thing to the second ending that I just did to the first ending, but we're gonna change it
later. This will give us a good jumping-off point to start with so you can see why the change makes
sense. So there's our A section! Alright so we're just gonna knock out the rest of the form here.
You can see I've already kind of cut and pasted what we did at the A section of top to the bottom,
it's the same exact thing. And all that happens in the B section, if you watched our video on "Scrapple
from the Apple" you already know what I'm about to say, is an extended dominant sequence and this is
really cool to kind of work this backwards -- sort to speak -- so here I put the V of the chord I'm
targeting in the B section -- which is Bb -- so I put my F7 there and I put its V cord behind
it, making sure the whole time that these chord scales are Mixo. If you want to understand why,
then definitely check out that "Scalpel from the Apple" video where we break down the B section.
This is just basically to give it some parallelness in the sound, so that's Mixo. and then I
put it's V chord, which is over here -- the V-ii -- but I want to make sure that we
have mixolydian chord scale there (let me make sure we're highlighting) there we go and then I
put that chord's V chord before that. Once again making sure that the chord scale is mixolydian.
Boom, so there's our B section, just a nice good ol' extended dominant sequence. And there's our
rhythm changes form entirely! So now let's jump in and break it down and see what we can do to
make it lean more towards what Rollins might have done with "Olio." Alright so now that we've
got our template down, what we're going to start to do now is put ourselves in the mindset that's
going to sort of evolve this into where Rollins has "Olio." And one of the things that you will hear
almost all the time -- maybe not always, but this is a really common sort of cliche thing to do -- is create
a line cliche right here that sets up the first ending, using some chord inversion. So you'll hear...
that in the base by using inversions on these chords that we plugged in earlier. Like for
example: this Bb7, if we do it in third inversion, that'll send us from Bb on the
previous chord to Ab and then we'll keep using inversions on these ensuing chords to create that
line cliche as well as we're going to tweak the first ending to get ourselves a nice turnaround
back to the beginning of the A section. So let's start with the line cliche by taking this
Bb7 and making it an inversion. Alright so now we've got third inversion selected and then
I replug-in the chord, there we go Bb7 / Ab. This Eb we're gonna put in first
inversion. Let's go first inversion the triangle we're gonna do the same thing to the Ebm7
that moves it down again and there there we have our line and that dovetails nicely into what
happens in the first ending with that cadential I 6/4 anyways, but we're gonna change that as
we mentioned. So now to tweak this first ending, to make the one chord at the beginning of the phrase
upon the repeat sound more like a resolution, this is what we're gonna do. We're gonna target that one
simply by putting its V chord here. We're going to work our way backwards here once again,
so we'll put the V of the Bb -- that happens after you take the repeat -- right there and then
we'll put its ii chord before that here and then we'll put that ii chord's V chord before that
and then the ii/ii before that. So through the use of secondary dominance and interpolation
techniques we've talked about time and time again, we've got a really cool turn around now...