Riffs—short, repeated musical phrases—have always been potent because they have a way of crawling into your head and improving your ability to recall a song. They also are particularly effective at getting you to buy the record on which a catchy riff appears. The funny thing about great riffs is that you don't even know you're being subsumed by them. They enter your unconscious through your ear and just live there unnoticed.
Musicians are not immune to the power of riffs. The song enters the musician's head and, at times, resurfaced when the musicians is composing. If the musician recalls where he or she heard the riff, they most often will change it. Or they convince themselves that they wrote the riff and often wind up the object of ridicule by listeners and musicians. [Image above, John Coltrane's score for A Love Supreme]
Which brings me to the point of this post. The other day, I was listening to a favorite album—The Art Farmer Septet, recorded for Prestige in July 1953, featuring Art Farmer (tp), Jimmy Cleveland (tb), Oscar Estelle (as,bar), Clifford Solomon (ts), Quincy Jones (p,arr), Monk Montgomery (el-b), Sonny Johnson (d), and unknown (perc-1).
As the album's Mau Mau was playing, I suddenly realized that the background riff playing sounded awfully familiar. The more I focused, the more the riff sounded like the famous one John Coltrane used 11 years later on A Love Supreme. Did Coltrane knowingly use the riff credited to Art Farmer and Quincy Jones? Or was it one of those riffs that entered a composer's brain and sat there. We'll never know, of course, since Coltrane died in 1967 and Farmer passed in 1999.
You be the judge:
Here's Art Farmer and Quincy Jones's Mau Mau from 1953. The riff starts at 1:43...
And here's John Coltrane's Acknowledgment from A Love Supreme (Impulse) recorded in December 1964. The riff starts at 00:30 and continues throughout the track...
from JazzWax http://ift.tt/2lKpkKu
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