 |
 |
----- Original Message ----- From: "Russ Hamm" <[log in to unmask]> > Eric - > > Perhaps you or someone else could help elucidate a mysterious passage from > Bob Dylan's "Chronicles: Part 1" where he writes about a revolutionary > system taught to him by Lonnie Johnson, the great blues and jazz guitarist. > > Dylan writes (p. 157) that his guitarmanship was electrified in the 1980s > when he learned how to play "based on an odd- instead of even-number > system" that he learned from jazzman Lonnie Johnson: a "highly controlled > system of playing and relates to the notes of a scale, how they combine > numerically, how they form melodies out of triplets..." > > "Popular music is usually based on the number 2 [...] If you're using an > odd numerical system, things that strengthen a performance begin to happen > [...] In a diatonic scale there are eight notes, in a pentatonic scale > there are five. If you're using the first scale, and you hit 2, 5 and 7 to > the phrase and then repeat it, a melody forms. Or you can use the 2 three > times. Or you can use 4 once and 7 twice [...] The possibilities are > endless [...] I'm not a numerologist. I don't know why the number 3 is more > metaphysically powerful than the number 2, but it is. Passion and > enthusiasm, which sometimes can be enough to sway a crowd, aren't even > necessary. You can manufacture faith out of nothing and there are an > infinite number of patterns and lines that connect from key to key..." > > Is this a baffling to you as it seems to me? > > Russ Hamm > Well, I'm not Eric...and I'm not well studied in music theory...but I think I see what he MIGHT have been referring to... In a standard diatonic scale there are seven notes. These (and their chords) are often referred to with numbers...in the key of C, "the four" is the G chord (C is 1, and F is the fourth note counting up from C)...and "the five" is five notes up, or the G chord (actually G7). I suspect the paragraph above refers to solos... so 2, 5 and 7 would be D, A and B (quite possibly Bb, since the half-tone interval between B and C would be jarring?). Beyond that I retire in favour of someone more musically knowledgeable... Steven C. Barr