Great Scores Sheet Music Blog

Trading fours is not something you should walk up to a person on the street and enquire about.

“Hey. Do you want to trade fours?”

Or they might well reply:

“You’re asking for a bunch of fives!”

But on the jazz bandstand this is a very common technique used to introduce a little variety into a piece.

Once members of the band have finished their improvisation, you would normally return back to playing the actual theme of the song. You call this the “head” or “head arrangement”. But on some occasions players may slot in “trading fours” (or indeed trading twos or eighths) before playing the head to finish the performance.

Now trading fours involves the following: the lead player (saxophonist for example) improvises four bars, then a different player (pianist for example) improvises four bars. The lead player does another four bars and the 2nd player another four, etc.. All of this is done over the form of the piece, so you could do several choruses of fours. The shape of this is in the form of a musical conversation, so the two players usually react musically to the phrases in the four bars the other player has just played. Quite often the lead player in the group will “‘trade” fours with the drummer, as this means the texture of the whole piece changes. This would mean that while the lead player is playing his four bars, the whole band would still be accompanying him, but the drummer would usually play his four bars solo (though the pianist and bassist may but in little stabs here and there).

Now you could also trade 8 bars or 2 bars with someone, but 4 bars are most common, as is usually “feels” like the right length. This would obviously again depend on the speed of the piece, so you may want to trade “8′s” on a really fast piece, but “2′s” on a slow ballad.

How would you know when the lead player wants to start trading fours? Well there may be a prior agreement that you want to trade fours on a specific piece. Sometimes however, it is better to be spontaneous. If the lead player, after, say the piano improvisations, will start soloing again rather than returning to the main tune, then this would usually indicate to the rest of the band that it’s time to trade fours. The lead player might then, through a little nod indicate which player he wishes to trade fours with.

Of course there are many silly variations of this one could some up with. Trading fours around the band for example, or trading odd numbers – though this is tricky and has great potential for a train wreck (the performance falls apart) as well as sounding a little contrived and not fitting onto the lengths of a “standard” (32 bars). The scenarios I outlined above however are the most common.

Lincoln Jaeger

Yes indeed. You may ask yourself what this crazy headline is all about.

Well, haven written about how daunting it can be to get into the music of jazz, I thought I might use this blog to talk a little about the strange lingo, the colloquialisms, the vernaculars, call it what you want, basically the inside language that exists in the world of jazz.

Let’s start by de-mystifying the header shall we?

Cats = musicians (though most of you probably already knew this)
Horn = instrument (even if it’s now a horn!)
To Woodshed = to go and practice. This comes from the fact that some musicians have been known to go and practice in the shed in the garden. Most likely because practising can be quite a horrible cacophony for anyone to be subjected to.

So one could imagine a conversation between two jazz cats going something like this:

Cat A (Steve McQueen): “How’s your chops”
Cat B (Miles Davis): “My chops is beat”
Cat A: “Two bad – too much time in the shed?”
Cat B: “Naah, too much blowin on these gigs lately”
Cat A: “Oh yeah, been tryin’ out your new licks?”
Cat B: “Uh-huh, got some bad new hot licks!”
Cat A: “Good gig, was it?
Cat B: “The whole band was in the pocket”
Cat A: “Sweet, the whole bad was in the crease”

{…}

In plain English:

Cat A: “How is your playing” (chops could also refer to the lips of a brass player – they tend to get fatigued easily)
Cat B: “I’m worn out / I can’t play well / My lips/fingers etc are hurting”
Cat A: “Too bad – have you been practising too much?”
Cat B: “No, too much soloing/playing on these gigs lately”
Cat A: “Oh yeah, have you been trying out your snazzy new preconceived musical phrases (=licks)?”
Cat B: “Uh-huh, I’ve got some really good, fantastic new phrases” (bad=good)
Cat A: “Good gig, was it?”
Cat B: “The whole band was really playing like a unit, really grooving”
Cat A: “Sweet, the band was playing really well)”

Luckily our two jazz musicians decided to call it a day there, or we could have gone much longer…

As you can see, a bit of jazz language has actually found its way into main-stream language such as “cats” (musicians) and “bad” (good). Phrases like “The Big Apple” (New York), to “dig” (to like), “cans” (headphones) are said to have come from the world of jazz, though this is of course impossible to prove.

Regardless, there are of course many more expressions, so if you are interested in the meaning of such terms as:

• Comping
• Turnarounds/Turnbacks
• Head
• Trading Twos

… then please go to our Jazz Terms Glossary, where you can find even more jazz terms, including more technical expressions (with all the explanations) and all-round jazz madness!

Dig it.

Lincoln Jaeger

Jazz can be a daunting style of music to get into. I myself have made the mistake of trying to introduce a friend to jazz by picking what I thought was just the right gig, only to find that that particular artist had decided it was time to go “far out” for this one concert and therefore ensuring that said friend would never, ever, ever go to a jazz gig again.

The image doesn’t always help either: middle aged (nothing wrong with that!) guys in berets smoking their Gitanes cigarettes whilst knowingly nodding to the strange exhortations of the band, while you feel like the only person in the venue who does not have a clue what is going on.

It can be intimidating. But then so can guitar shops !

But have you been to a jazz gig recently? Certainly here in London town smoking in any indoor venues has been out for quite a while, so you can now at least breath! Berets don’t seem to be “en vogue” anymore either – so things are clearly looking up.

That just leaves the music. If you want to get into jazz, picking out a random gig is probably not the best way to go about it: you might have selected the latest avant garde cutting edge Bass Clarinet Cross Over Project, or Craig’s Octogenarian Dixieland Swingers – but you won’t really know until you’ve turned up.

So here are three albums that I would recommend as a great starting point for getting into the music called jazz. None of these are going to hurt your eardrums, nor your pocket (the itunes links go to the uk store, amazon links to the .co.uk site):

Kind of Blue – Miles Davis (often referred to as being one of the best music albums ever, not just for jazz). Stand-out tracks:
All Blues
We also have the Miles Davis Tumpet Solo on All Blues
So What
You can get the sound recording at: / Amazon

Getz/Gilberto – Antonio Carlos Jobim, João Gilberto, Stan Getz. This is the album that introduced Bossa Nova to the world and launched the evergreen “Girl from Ipanema”. Stand-out tracks:
The Girl from Ipanema
Desafinado
Corcovado
One Note Samba
You can get the sound recording at: / Amazon

Time Out – Dave Brubeck. Columbia records had to be convinced to release this, yet it had the jazz hit Take Five on it. Stand-out tracks:
Take Five
Blue Rondo A La Turk
You can get the sound recording at: / Amazon

I could extend this list further, but I can say without doubt that these three albums, after much consideration, and having introduced them to many a non-jazz lover, are the three most sure-fire ways to introduce the most sceptical person to jazz.

Now go out and buy, and dig them !

Lincoln Jaeger

We’ve not posted for a while – very remiss of us! However, we have been very busy over the last few months, adding two new languages to our site: Dutch and Swedish as well as adding Swedish Kroner as a currency.

So a big welcome to our new users in Sweden and Holland, even if this blog is in English .

Soon we will also add Danish and Norwegian (as well as the local currencies to go with these new territories), which means we will have added a total of 7 new languages in the space of 13 months.

What else has been happening? Well we have been preparing the new videos that we have promised you in previous blogs, so get ready for more regular videos, blog postings and fascinating downloads that will open up the world of Jazz to you in the new year.

And finally we’ve also been celebrating our 4th birthday in October. The site went live in October 2005 in English and German with just a 1,000 arrangements. Since then we have grown to over 30,000 arrangements and have welcomed users from another 5 new languages to our site.

So to finish, who better to play us a little Happy Birthday tune than Wynton Marsalis and his Septet: