{"id":1951,"date":"2009-01-20T09:42:38","date_gmt":"2009-01-20T14:42:38","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-01-22T10:43:47","modified_gmt":"2009-01-22T10:43:47","slug":"signature-sounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/signature-sounds\/","title":{"rendered":"Signature Sounds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/72SVN9sO4P4?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nThey&#8217;re only human. Great musicians can fall back on signature sounds, or a motif, as readily as any hack whose run out of ideas while jamming in the basement. As a &#8220;now playing&#8221; example got me thinking, whether by design or default, <strong>Ornette Coleman<\/strong>, on &#8220;The Ark,&#8221; from from his excellent <em>Town Hall, 1962<\/em> can&#8217;t help but play the 4-note theme that&#8217;s best known from his electric free-jazz breakthrough &#8220;Dancing in Your Head.&#8221; Go back to the earliest Coleman recordings and you&#8217;ll hear him play that 4-or-so-note run. That&#8217;s the essence of Ornette Coleman, his <em>Colemanessence<\/em>, if you will. All the other millions of free notes he and his bandmates have played for the last 50-plus years might be meaningless to all but hardcore jazz explorers like our very own &#8220;Boom Boom&#8221; Buskirk if not for our ability to trace &#8211; and cling onto &#8211; the development and recurrence of that 4-note motif.<\/p>\n<p>Then I got to thinking, <strong>Pete Townshend<\/strong> was the first rock musician that came to mind who had such a distinctive motif. For him I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s the suspended fourth he uses with his chords. It&#8217;s something he must have picked up from Phil Spector arrangements, which often hinge on the suspended fourth note (eg, &#8220;Then He Kissed Me&#8221;), and it&#8217;s there in early Who songs like &#8220;I&#8217;m a Boy,&#8221; eventually serving as the driving force in the entire <em>Tommy<\/em> album and, with a twist, <em>Quadrophenia<\/em>. As much as his windmill power chording, Townshend&#8217;s reliance on the suspended fourth chord is his signature sound.<\/p>\n<p><em>Can you identify signature sounds that best define the works of other musicians?<\/em> I don&#8217;t mean something as broad and obvious and <strong>Bo Diddley<\/strong> and his beat but something more subtle that is prevalent and even expected in the sounds this musician creates. Without actual sound samples to post, just point to a part of a well-known song that represents that artist&#8217;s signature sound.<\/p>\n<p>np &#8211; Ornette Coleman, &#8220;The Ark&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They&#8217;re only human. Great musicians can fall back on signature sounds, or a motif, as readily as any hack whose run out of ideas while jamming in the basement. As a &#8220;now playing&#8221; example got me thinking, whether by design or default, Ornette Coleman, on &#8220;The Ark,&#8221; from from his excellent Town Hall, 1962 can&#8217;t <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/signature-sounds\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}