The Rhythm Changes and The Death of American Vitality and Loveliness

George Gershwin

For five summers in a row in the first decade of the current century, I attended the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop held on the campus of the University of Louisville. It was, as a fellow attendee put it, like taking a drink from a firehose. World-class faculty, theory classes, combo practice, ear training, and faculty concerts after dinner each night you’d pay triple digits to hear in a New York club.

One of my favorite aspects of the workshop was the bookstore. I’d often cut my lunch hour short to spend way more than I’d budgeted on not only world-opening Blue Note, Riverside and Verve CDs, but instruction books and a seemingly endless supply of fake books. 

One of the most important such books I bought was How To Learn Tunes by David Baker. Baker was an Indianapolis native who’d cut his teeth in the clubs along that city’s Indiana Avenue, along with such future legends as Wes Montgomery and Freddie Hubbard, and who went on to establish the jazz studies program at Indiana University. 

That book introduced me to the concept of contrafacts. Kind of a strange term. I might have chosen prototypes. In any event, the idea is that certain chord progressions appear frequently as the basis for Great American Songbook standards, and, once one can detect that they form the basis for a given composition, one can begin to think ahead about how to improve over it.

Far and away, the most famous and utilized contrafact is the chord changes to “I’ve Got Rhythm” by George Gershwin. He composed this tune for the 1930 musical Girl Crazy. 

What it introduced into American music was the I-IV-II V7 chord sequence, with a cycle-of-fourths middle-eight section that starts two steps above the key of the song and allows a resolution, in eight bars, to the key.

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this codification to the development of American popular music, and, indeed, popular culture.  

The entire form, or sometimes just the A section with a different middle eight, shows up all over the place.

It’s come to be known as the Rhythm changes.

Certainly it’s been used with other melody lines in jazz. Charlie Christian’s “Seven Come Eleven” is over the Rhythm changes, as is “Oleo” by Sonny Rollins, and I’m only scratching the surface. 

It’s been used in a pop context as well.

The Flintstones theme is over the Rhythm changes.

The image of the Flintstones is so readily conjured in the mind of any American that it takes a second to place that cartoon family in historical context. Fred, Wilma and Pebbles were introduced by Hanna-Barbera – on prime time television – in 1960. The series only ran for six seasons. But there’s something so resonant about the show’s introduction over which the theme was played: Fred seeing that it’s quitting time at the quarry, exuberantly letting loose with his signature “yabba dabba do!” exclamation, hurrying home to the fetching Wilma and planting a how-was-your-day kiss on her, gathering up the family, including pet saber tooth tiger Snagglepuss, into the stone-age family car and heading for the drive in.

“Sherry” (1962) was the first hit for the configuration of The Four Seasons that went on to have a string of chart successes for several years. They’d been struggling since the early 1950s, with a record here and there, and stints in places like bowing alley lounges. When they brought on Bob Guadio, by far the youngest member of the group, fourteen years the junior of founder Tommy DiVito, things gelled. Guadio wrote their hits, and memorable tunes they are. 

“Sherry” uses the Rhythm changes. After an eight-bar I-VI-II-V introduction, the members burst forth with a four part serenade to the namesake young lady that’s unbridled pop ecstasy. The lyrics are pure teen romance: an imploring for Sherry to put on her red dress and come out to the young man’s twist party. 

The Four Seasons had a clean-cut image that belied there fact that  a couple of them had prison records and that their manager was a mafioso.

But that’s how it was done. They were Italian guys from Jersey with hearts full of ambition and heads full of glorious sounds. It’s a quintessentially American story.

“Like Love” by Andre Previn (1960) is the title cut from his first Columbia album. Form-wise, it’s the Rhythm changes with a twelve-bar-blues middle section. But it’s the strings that make the arrangement. It’s breezy and warm and subtly sexy. It feels like a man or woman does walking down the street on a glorious spring day having just made a date with his or her crush. It’s smart and sophisticated. Previn takes just enough of a piano flight of fancy to give the piece a modern sheen, but he knows that the thing to do is return to the romance for the final chorus.

The Rhythm changes is just one contrafact that gave us our treasure trove of pop and jazz musical magic. These were basic composer’s tools that could be used in service of musical depictions of rich, deep experience of human life. The experience of grownups, or those who were soon going to be. 

It’s the music of a time that’s irretrievably gone. We have in its place a veneration of the raw and abrasive. Bitterness and alienation are now a given in the way we set out to make art.

We’re the poorer for it, but at least we had recording technology when that music was made. It lives again whenever we hit play.