It’s Already There … [Double Fantasies & Magical Mysteries]

What can we think when the chords in the natural chord progression lead us to “wonderful melodies”?  Well, first of all, we can figure out that we’ve progressed beyond thinking about the chords as we play them and have landed in “the other hand”, where the rhythm of the playing juxtaposed against the voicing can create the sound we are looking to find when we get hit by “pop music” in the first place.  Maybe that isn’t other’s experience, but it is mine.  I remember when I didn’t play music seriously; then I heard differently than I heard when I started to play for real.  It was a great awakening, something I’d probably experienced millions of times before, hearing interiors of sounds that made me wonder “are these musicians talking or ‘am I imagining this’”.  When I was purely a consumer of music, I simply allowed the musicians to lead my hearing.  When I started to think about construction of music, I started to wonder if I was building things into the songs that were merely suggestions – built in the chords – or if they were intentional.  The answer of course is that it is both or dependent upon the players’ ability or intent.  Sometimes, the rhythm of a riff can be conformed to a lyrical thought that is our own but not the original intent of the player, but often the player will have the intent to create the road that we follow.  If we have a beat that doesn’t fit our lyrical conception, the timing will wind up off, and we won’t be able to stay in the beat, in the rhythm, but even if we are in the rhythm, we aren’t necessarily following a lyrical intent of the player/composer. We can fit the timing of the song’s structure to our conception of language, and if we listen long enough with enough intent, we can learn to be fairly good at improv.  This natural “it was already there” element is also one of the reasons that the rhythms written by English speaking players can translate into other Latin languages, or even into Japanese, because, ultimately, the listener is “me Co.”, and we just need to find the right fit in the music to have our “double fantasy” come true ….