SMT-V: The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal
SMT-V is the open-access, peer-reviewed video journal of the Society for Music Theory. Founded in 2014, SMT-V publishes video essays that showcase research in music theory in a dynamic, audiovisual format, presented so as to have the potential to engage both specialists within the field as well as interested viewers outside the music theory community. The journal features a supportive and collaborative production process, and publishes several videos each year. Read more about SMT-V here.
Latest Issue: 11.4 (July 2025)
Improvising the Changes in a Miles Davis Rhythm Section
Ben Geyer (Mount Holyoke College)
Individual musicians can make different chord choices in each pass through a tune’s form. This variability sometimes results in harmonic disagreement between musicians even as they play together. Harmony is a primary lens for understanding improvisation, but what kind of lens fluctuates in its prescription? To navigate this tension, this video turns to the jazz greats, exploring how pianist Red Garland and bassist Paul Chambers strike a balance between harmonic consistency and variation on Miles Davis’s recording of “Bye Bye Blackbird.” I treat their combined 14 choruses as a corpus—a selection of related examples analyzed for patterns—and find that they approach distinct “zones” within the tune in one of three ways: as “fixed,” “what-variable,” or “when-variable.” This framework motivates a modified lead sheet that captures not only the tune’s moments of regularity, but also its spaces for harmonic improvisation.
Keywords: jazz, improvisation, interaction, chord, harmony, Miles Davis