He does this after the head and for a few choruses before reverting to the usual 12-bar choruses and finally finishing with twice through the head. This makes the choruses temporarily 16 bars long. What is unusual about these breaks is the that they are additional four to the 12-bar form, rather than just taking a solo break in the first four bars and the band rejoining for the last eight bars. After the head he added an extra four bars at the beginning of each chorus where the band stops and he takes solo breaks showing off his incredible blues-lickery skills. Peterson did something similar but different with the song form on his Night Train album recording of C Jam Blues. The original Ellington arrangement added an extra 4-bar break for each new soloist at the beginning of their solo.
Peterson makes the most of this in his solo choruses (see below under That Gospel Thing. This is what the arrows are showing.Īdd into the mix the fact that F#o7 sounds like D7b9 and C7/G sounds like G-6, we have two more potential arrows propelling is forward from bars 2-3 and 6-7. What cannot be denied is that there are chains of dominant 7 chords round the cycle of fifths which propel strongly from one to the next. Not all classical harmony analysis applies. In the same way, bar 1 may be C7 but it is both tonic and V/IV. Some would analyse this as V/V but it is really still functioning as Pre-Dominant. Peterson often plays the II chord at bar 9 as a dominant 7 (D7). This notation for analysis is explained in another article. The blues is traditionally a 12-bar form and the jazz blues chords have become standardised as something like this: The song form is straightforward on both of those recordings: 12-bar blues all the way. The young (27) Peterson quartet also recorded it in 1952, but as a kind of novelty boogie-woogie number. There is a live jam session recording from 1967 with the Peterson trio but, nothing unusual about this, apart from the front line sound like they just got out of bed (Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges). But the track only lasts 3.5 minutes whereas in Denmark, they stretch out for nine! This is where he introduced the 4-bar breaks into the arrangement described below. Probably the one most have heard is on the classic Night Train album from 1963, the year before the Denmark video. Peterson had recorded C Jam Blues before. The tune is an old Ellington blues jam tune of no particular merit except that it gets the blues changes ticking over to allow the band to take solos. But when you start to dig, there is so much more. It’s tremendous swinging playing, as you might expect. This article links to specific parts of this video to illustrate each point. One of my favourite Oscar Peterson videos is C Jam Blues in Denmark in 1964 with Ray Brown on bass and Ed Thigpen on drums.
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