Kelvin Andreas

Survey of Jazz Composition

W. Scism

The Music of Brian Blade

In my opinion, one of the many jazz composer/arranger who has
a lot of influence on todays jazz writing is Brian Blade.
Born and raised in Louisiana, Brian Blade is an American jazz
drummer and composer. When he grew up, he was exposed to a lot
gospel music and he started his musical journey learning the violin.
During high school he shifted more towards jazz music and started
listening to giants like John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis,
among many others. He started to get more attention from jazz
musicians when he played for saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and since
then has played with his own group, The Fellowship Band, and many
other artists like Joshua Redman, Kenny Garrett and Armando Chick
Corea.
His music and compositions are influenced by a lot of different
things including jazz, gospel, and folk music. Seen from a jazz
perspective, I would say he is influenced by orchestralist music. Jazz
composers like Duke Ellington, Gil Evans come into mind when we talk
about the orchestralists. They dont write their music like other modal
jazz or bebop composers. Their music is melodically driven and it

doesnt require heavy rhythmic and harmonic structures. Another

composer that influenced his music is Joni Mitchell, a singer-songwriter.
A singer-songwriter has a more lyrical-style of writing music. Other
than that, his music is heavily influenced by gospel music that has rich
harmonic materials and interesting bass lines.
The main melodic characteristics of his writing are simple
melodies. One of his composition, Embers (Landmarks 2014) has a
very repetitive but lyrical melody. The A part of the song starts from do
and it goes down to sol by stepwise motion, but every note is repeated
with various rhythms. This continues on mostly by stepwise motion
with occasional leaps just to get back to same area again. In the whole
composition, theres only one note thats not in the key signature and
that is the b7, which is only a little bit dissonant. The harmonic
materials of his writing are very heavily influenced by gospel music.
The progressions in gospel music are usually pretty simple in essence
but they have a lot of ornamentation to it. It is mostly diatonic, has a
lot of suspended chords, and accompanied by a somewhat active bass
line. They sound really rich even though they dont have much
dissonance to it. To illustrate this, Im going to demonstrate examples
from the same composition, Embers. The A part of the song starts out
with a Gsus2 chord and it holds there until the last measure then it
changes to a first inversion D chord before it goes back to Gsus2 again.
While it stays on one chord, the bass keeps playing the root but with

an active, repeated rhythm. The rhythmic characteristics of Brians

writing is very unorthodox. The tunes in his group, The Fellowship
Bands albums rarely have swing rhythm like traditional jazz. It is
mostly based on straight eights, like Embers, Stoner Hill. Other times it
is based on a strong, four on the floor groove and the drums play more
freely like Bonnie Be Good or Friends Call Her Dot.
I would consider Brian Blades music to be eclectic, or rather, yet
undefined. You can definitely hear the influences of earlier jazz
composers like Duke Ellington and Gil Evans in his melodic writing
style. You can also hear the influences of contrapuntal jazz in the
intertwining melody lines of the two saxophonists in his Fellowship
Band. Modal composers and small-group composers like Miles and
Wayne Shorter also influence his compositions structurally, in the way
his composition are structured (the form and the solos transitions). Not
to mention he also has influences from other genre of music like
gospel. So in my opinion it would be fair to say that his compositions
are still undefined yet.
The recording that best exemplify the work of Brian Blade is
Landmarks (2014). I chose this particular album because 7 out of the
10 tracks in this album are his compositions (one of them cocomposed). Other than that this album is an example of deep
exploration of Brians style of writing. It really pushes the boundaries of
what we would call mainstream jazz and thats what makes it really

special. The album carried the spirit of previous jazz composers and
Brian adds his own color to it. Since the release, it received great
reviews from critics and websites and became one of the albums that
jazz musicians listen to.