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John Aber Ab ercr crom ombie bie’’s Modal Guitar Solo On ‘Timeless’ ecorded in 1974 for the ECM label, guitarist John Abercrombie’s debut album as a leader featured him in an organ trio setting with keyboardist Jan Hammer and drummer Jack DeJohnette. The title track, “Timeless,” consists of patterns of stacked fths within a structure that is 14 beats long, divided into two measures of four and one measure of six. For the most part, Abercrombie takes a modal approach to his solo, with a minimum of chromatic notes. Mainly centering around E aeolian (the mode of the melody), we do nd a couple of instances of E dorian to wards the end of his solo (measures 27, 33 and 48). All of these occur on the Gadd9 chord, where the presence of a C# creates a bright lydian sound. But there is also a lot of E minor pentatonic happening, which at times gives his solo a more “rock ’n’ roll” attitude, especially with the bends in measures 42–44. The rst instance of a purely pentatonic idea starts at the pickup to mea sure 11 and continues through the end of the phrase at measure 15. There also occurs an idea Abercrombie will reuse in this solo, that of note groupings inconsistent with the underlying sub division, creating a polyrhythm. Starting with the pickups to measure 11, Abercrombie plays an ascending and descending E minor pentatonic scale in 16th notes, but it takes 14 notes before the pattern repeats. Since 16th notes are grouped in fours, the pattern repeats every three-anda-half beats. Abercrombie plays this idea three full times, and the last time, the one that actually starts on the downbeat at measure 14, he de cides to take it in a different direction on the de scent, playing 32nd-note pentatonic ideas with more slurring. In a simpler form, this occurs in measures 30 and 31. We have a four-note lick with the nal note held for three 16ths, totaling two-and-a-half beats. Abercrombie starts this lick on the second beat of what should have been a 6/4 measure, measur e, but the entire trio drops an eighth note, as if they all heard the line resolve to what has become the rst beat of measure 31. However, Abercrombie continues his idea with some variation three more times before resolving to the downbeat of measure 32. The same type of idea happens almost half -
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way through measure 21, where in beat 3 Abercrombie plays a ve-note idea in 32nds (D, B, G, F#, G). He plays this a total of seven com plete times, over the barline into measure 22, where he then drops the last G note and changes the rhythm to resolve out of the polyrhythm. It’s interesting to note that in each of these cas es Abercrombie doesn’t resolve resolve his polyrhythmic ideas to a strong beat, as a Hindustani tehi would, but instead chooses to morph back into the backing rhythm. This last example also incorporates another scalar concept we nd throughout his improvisation: minor pentatonic with the second add ed. Though not fully a dorian or aeolian sound, it is still more than a pentatonic avor. In fact, starting at measure 2, we hear only this sound through measure 11, where the strict pentatonic starts (with the exception of the G# that occurs in measure 8, but this was smeared through so as to be barely noticeable, and it’s not even clear if it was intended). When Abercrombie leaves the pentatonic sound at measure 15, it is to re turn to this pentatonic-plus-second texture; he comes back to straight pentatonic at measure 18. Abercrombie’s entire solo consists mainly of these two sounds, with Cs and C#s occurring rarely (bars 23, 24, 26, 27, 33, 46 and 48). That’s less that 15 percent of his solo where he actually denes the mode. DB JIMI DURSO IS A GUITARIST AND BASSIST IN THE NEW YORK AREA.. HE AREA HE CAN CAN BE REA REACHE CHED D AT JIMIDU JIMIDURSO RSO.COM .COM.
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