Improvising the Changes in a Miles Davis Rhythm Section
Ben Geyer (Mount Holyoke College)
Volume 11.4 (July 2025)
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