study-music
Lego
“Lego bricks” method is a way to memorize and make sense of structures of jazz chord progressions. It’s originated in a work by Conrad Cork “A New Guide to Harmony with LEGO Bricks”. It was then further developed by John Elliott in “Insights in Jazz”. Both books are on sale on John Elliott’s website.
It’s also implemented in Impro-Visor.
Here’s a list of resources as mentioned on Bob Keller’s website:
- The New Guide to Harmony with Lego Bricks (Conrad Cork)
- Insights in Jazz (John Elliott, dropback.co.uk)
- Lego Field Guide (Bob Keller)
- Scrambled Lego Bricks
- Phil Clark’s “Book of Lego” (posted with permission)
- Impro-Visor 5.03 versions of Roadmaps in “Insights in Jazz” (work in progress)
John Elliott recorded some patterns that I’ve reordered by similarity
Also see jazz harmony visualizations
Issues with lego
- Some repeated larger blocks aren’t named, eg. a sequence of cadences modulating a whole step down, video: How High The Moon / Ornithology, Little Boat, One-Note Samba, Tune Up, Afternoon in Paris, Cherokee, Joy Spring, Recorda Me, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Invitation, A Night in Tunisia, Alone Together, maybe Groovin’ High
- Lego doesn’t talk about typical reharmonizations and variations. For many standards, there are structurally fixed chord and there are variable chords. All available analyzes deal with exactly one version of changes for each standard. It’s yet to research whether typical variations are shared between instances of same lego bricks or rather per-standard idiosyncrasies.
- Names of joins are arbitrary and better be changed to ±1±2±3±4±5+6
Misc
- A list of songs that have similar chord progressions and tonal shifts
- David Baker “How to Learn Tunes”
- Marc Sabatella
- Recent work on adding colors: YouTube, paper
