Okay, look, I’m 47. There’s no way to let something go without this joke.
(Security footage of me reading a lead sheet.)
I don’t always like to think of music as maths, necessarily, but I do like the old Pythagorean idea that music is number in time . Western mediaevals believed that music adds color to the experience of time, which is beautiful. And since time is a big part of what makes jazz what it is, I’m going to show you one of the most ridiculous things I do when I am learning a new song.
I don’t really know a lot about Victor Young , in truth, all that I know about him is that he wrote Stella. I have no idea how representative Stella is of his work, but I can tell you that this is a really strange song. Martin Taylor picked a tough one for this exercise, as it’s not only an uncommon set of harmonies, but the melody is strange, too.
Here’s what I mean by strange.
There’s the Real Book chart. Here’s a PDF of it.
Real Book Stella By Starlight
44.6KB ∙ PDF file
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And if you can do it, here’s a MuseScore file for you that has chord charts for you to fill in and symbols. Because SubStack permits only a few file types, I have to link to an outside service. Here’s what this looks like, though.
Don’t worry too much about the Ted Greene chord chart for now. But doesn’t this look so much better than what’s in The Real Book? And, for that matter, doesn’t it look better than Ted Greene’s handwriting?
Now, you don’t need to do this step with everything, and in time, it will become automatic as you read, but it’s good to know what it is so that you can do it when you need to do it. I do this kind of thing in lots of different steps.
I count it out. When things are crazy, I rely on understanding. the numbers, which means, I understand the structure.
Let’s start with rhythm. Look at the chart.
This song holds melody notes across changing harmonies
This songs holds melody notes across measure lines
The song holds melody notes for uncommon lengths of beats
Each of these things is a common technique, but finding all three together is what makes the melody of Stella odd.
How did I come across list element three? I counted the length durations of each note so that I could understand what I was playing. Let me show you how I marked this up in pencil.
Now, you can find your own notation for this, but what I did was look at the notes and show where they fall in the pulse of the measures, [1 2 3 4 | 1 ] means that a note goes across Beats 1,2,3,4 in one measure and then beat 1 of the next measure.
This will absolutely help you while you are trying to figure it out. What I suggest is that you isolate one thing. For me, the rhythm of this song is hard, so I am working on singing the melody in correct time , first, before I try to get the notes right, and then I will try to play the rhythm in correct time, before I try to get the notes right. Use a metronome. They’re cheap.
Good luck!
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📎 Files and downloads are available in the original Substack post.