The Ellington Century (31 page)

HOMMAGE À RAVEL

Play “Satin Doll” as a slow waltz and it will suddenly sound like a
valse sentimentale
of Ravel. Though his name rarely appears in jazz theory books, you can hear the influence of Ravel clearly in the music of Billy Strayhorn (“Chelsea Bridge”) and Bill Evans (“Waltz for Debby”). Ravel prophetically employed a jazzlike harmony based on seventh chords in some of his earliest works, like the song “Sainte” and the “Pavane pour une infante défunte.” By 1903, with the orchestral song cycle
Shéhérezade
, Ravel had mapped out all the harmonies that Burt Bacharach and Stephen Sondheim would use seventy years later; Sondheim's 1986 musical
Into the Woods
sounds Ravelian from beginning to end. I even hear Ravel (via Miles Davis and Gil Evans) in Steve Reich's
Music for 18 Musicians.
You would have to go back to Corelli to find a harmonic style with a comparable impact.

Ravel reached his full harmonic maturity in
Valses nobles et sentimentales
, published in 1911. A century after that scandal these eight
waltzes remain a living thesaurus of harmonic devices that stay just within the boundaries of functional harmony and yet employ a wide variety of dissonances. You can hear Ravel's relevance for jazz most clearly in the fifth waltz of the set, written in an exquisitely spiced E major. The eight-bar phrase beginning at measure 17 sounds like the bridge of a popular song, and with good reason. The harmonic progression is a ii-V-I in F# major that is then repeated, transposed up a step, in A This is exactly the same progression found in the bridge of “Satin Doll” and many other jazz standards.

Ravel's way of creating dissonances appears in a nutshell in bars 17 and 18. The music is written in a three-voice texture. If you just play the outer voices you'll see that they are not particularly dissonant in relation to each other. In the first bar only two of the six melody notes are dissonant, and both fall on unaccented parts of the beat. In bar 18 Ravel repeats the melody exactly but changes the bass to imply a harmony a perfect fifth lower. This device (often used by Debussy as well) turns consonant notes into dissonances, placing the dissonances on accented beats. Adding the inner voice you will see that it creates dissonances at nearly every point where the upper voice was consonant. This means that there is some kind of dissonance present on eleven out of the twelve eighth notes of these two bars. Yet the only egregiously illegitimate-sounding dissonance in both bars falls on the last eighth note where the right hand has a C## and E# against a D# in bar 17 and a C# in 18. In general Ravel is as scrupulous in resolving dissonances as were Bach and Chopin, though at times he was far more devious than his predecessors.

A different technique equally pertinent to jazz appears in the first eight bars. The melody decorates the pitch G# while the bass moves downward. The G# sounds dissonant against the A in the bass, more dissonant when the bass move down to F#, and more dissonant still when the bass moves down to a D
. The bass seems to outline a D major triad that fits with the C and D in the inner voices but clashes with the G# and E# in the melody. At the end of the third bar, though, everything changes. The C and D slide up a half step, the bass moves down to B, and the harmony suddenly comes into focus as the dominant of E major. The deceptively dissonant G# turns out to have been the consonant element in a series of what theorists term appoggiatura harmonies, illusional chords created out of nonharmonic tones, dissonances substituting for consonances. In the next four bars the melody repeats but the harmony changes, again in a jazzlike way. For the second bar,
which could have been harmonized with the dominant B7, Ravel used instead an altered E# dominant chord, in other words, the tritone substitute. No wonder jazz pianists pay attention.

Ravel's music converses with jazz because he thought like a jazz musician, from the bass up. We know this from the evidence of his sketches and also a few short examples of self-analysis.
⁴
Though his harmonies shocked his contemporaries, Ravel arrived at them through a method he had learned at the conservatory. He habitually used the baroque shorthand of the figured bass, sketching the structural outer lines before adding inner voices. In other words, he started with a lead sheet. His music nevertheless sounds unbaroque because he often used types of parallel motion banned in older harmony but common in Debussy's music and because he did not always resolve a dissonance in an obvious way if he felt that it already implied its resolution. A dissonance could, in effect, substitute for a consonance.

Here are some highlights of harmonic devices in the waltzes:

I (G major). The opening measure flings harmonic provocations at the audience: a chord of six pitches (all the white keys except E) followed by an even more dissonant chord of five pitches, the apparently nonsensical piling of a d# minor 7 over a D
. The next bar resolves these chords slightly with a consonant five-tone chord, which is followed, however, by the sharpest sound yet, an apparently unidentifiable combination of the pitches A#, C#, D#, and E. When you live with the progression for a little while, however, its shock value recedes to reveal a linear logic. The dissonant notes of each chord, once you figure out which they are, resolve by step, just as they would in Bach harmony, but the steps have been displaced up an octave so that, for instance, the C
which seems out of place in the first chord, moves up a half step plus an octave to C# in the second chord and then comes to rest on D, back down a major seventh, at the beginning of bar 2. The opening phrase reaches its peak in three statements of a modern dominant, a stack of thirds from the root to the thirteenth, omitting only the third of the chord; jazz musician call this a “sus” chord. The harmony for the rest of this waltz mixes these newly spiced consonances with even more challenging combinations of notes that at first sound discordant. The most notorious progression occurs in the eight-bar passage leading back to the recapitulation. Here the bass line goes clear around the circle of fifths (and through all twelve tones of the chromatic scale). The bass powers high-voltage chords of clashing major and minor thirds, or major and minor
sevenths. You can find just about every chord needed for jazz piano in this one phrase.

II (G minor). This slow waltz begins with a forecast of Billy Strayhorn's “Chelsea Bridge” and then goes into a
gymnopédie-
style homage to Erik Satie by using the Dorian mode instead of the usual minor. Although the main phrase sounds consonant compared to the din of the first waltz, it too predicts jazz practice by using a g minor 7 as the tonic and a d minor 11 as a combined tonic/subdominant. A closing phrase seems to wrap the Satie tribute in a warm embrace and pulls the waltz into the major mode. After a brief midsection (all the waltzes are in ternary ABA form), Ravel recasts the
gymnopédie
by immobilizing the bass line and compressing the major third (C-E) of the second harmony so that it sounds like a major second (C#-E
). With this whole-tone harmony Debussy joins the party.

III (e minor-G major). The sound of the major second, introduced in the last third of the previous waltz, now defines the sonority of a whole movement. In his
Jazz Harmony at the Piano
, John Mehegan refers to Ravel-inspired voicings based on seconds rather than sevenths, and this waltz is one possible source. Its piquant quality is further enhanced by the use of Aeolian mode or natural minor, which gives a slightly bitonal feeling to the opening sixteen bars; the right hand sounds like it is in G major, but the left hand sits on the pitch E.

IV (A
, vaguely). This waltz teeters on the edge of atonality by contrasting nonfunctional harmonic progression based on thirds with more traditional moves based on fifths. Its cadences in A
, C, and E feel like arbitrary resting points, each one a plausible tonic. It begins with what a jazz pianist might term a dominant thirteen with both a flat and augmented ninth, in other words, a blues dominant with both major and minor thirds.

V (E major). Already discussed, but note how Ravel here picks up the sliding triads from the closing phrase of Waltz II. These neighbor progressions set up a network of thematic connections but also anticipate the polytonality of Waltz VII.