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Even modern jazz can take a page out of the French Impressionist book.

A Big Impression

By Andy Laverne | August, 2007

Dave Brubeck is not only a master composer and pianist, but also a superb arranger and orchestrator as well. His stunningly beautiful rendition of “Indian Summer” is a great example of these skills — and he came up with it spontaneously in the studio, right on the piano, without even the benefit of sheet music. His intro is a study unto itself, and it’s so good it could even be developed into a whole separate piece. Transcribed on page 48 in measures 1–16, the intro exhibits classic Brubeck devices such as polytonality, motivic development, and harmonic invention — some of which Dave may have absorbed from his composition teacher, Darius Milhaud.

The first four bars boil down to this: An F pedal with some groovy triad motion above it. One way to look at it is as though it’s one altered dominant chord, as the left-hard part provides the pedal F and the major third, A. The notes of the triads cover just about all the extensions present in an altered harmony: b9, #9, b5, b13. Another way to interpret it is as polytonal chord movement. Parallel second inversion triads provide a sound that I believe had its start in French Impressionist compositions, a style that was influential on the development of American jazz. Such parallelism lends itself well to the arranging technique of “constant structure/variable function,” which is a good way to harmonize a melody.

In bar 5, Dave combines the left-hand motif from bar 1 with more of the second-inversion triads; the melodic motion is derived from bars 5 – 7 of the original melody this time. In bar 8, he takes the melodic motif from bar 2 and adapts it to a succession of dominant and major seventh harmonies that build tension up to the dominant chord preceding the statement of the tune.

Ex. 1. Here’s the melody and original chords for the first half of “Indian Summer”; compare this with the transcription on page 48 and with the analysis in the Intermediate section and the text above.