dfan says

I recently went on a James Bond binge and watched all the canonical movies, ranking the theme songs as I went. Ethan Iverson graciously offered to host the resulting piece on his super usually-jazz-but-always-interesting blog Do The Math.

It begins:

One of the more entertaining categories of popular music of the last 50 years is the James Bond movie theme.

Having recently watched all of the canonical EON/Broccoli Bond movies, I can assert that sometimes the four minutes of opening credits is the high point of the entire film. As with any art form, my first instinct when encountering these specimens was to rank them.

Despite the wide variety of style to be found in these songs, there’s a lot of commonality too. Usually there’s a sense of danger, demonstrated by minor keys, chromaticism, or menacing orchestration. There’s often a pinch of swagger as well, though, communicating how Bond can confidently overcome any crisis no matter how dire. Of course the music also often projects sexuality; at its best this coexists with the dangerous vibe, though there is a sub-tradition of straight-up ballads. Often the main Bond theme is quoted, a tradition I found charming at first though it quickly wore on me.

My ranking is of course informed by my own prejudices about what makes a good song and what makes a good Bond song in particular. As I listened to them over and over when making this list, I developed a bit of Stockholm syndrome; even the songs I disliked the most started to take up residence in my head. But the bottom one stubbornly refused to get any better:

Continued at Do The Math.

One of my favorite tournaments at the Boylston Chess Club is the annual Herb Healy Open House held every New Year’s Day. You get to socialize and play four relatively quick (G/40) games of chess, and there’s an unrated section if you stayed up too late the night before. This year I played in the unrated section as usual and had four interesting games. Let’s take a look!

In the first round, my opponent and I both fumbled around through a weird opening move order until we ended up in a King’s Indian sideline that neither of was familiar with.

I think that this position illustrates a frequent 2000 vs 1600 phenomenon. As White I haven’t done anything super tricky yet, but all my pieces are developed and ready to take action in the future. Black’s pieces are scattered all over the place; his queen and bishop haven’t moved yet and his knight on a6 isn’t much better. One of the things I feel I’ve gotten much better at in the last couple of years is just putting my pieces on good squares and seeing what opportunities present themselves instead of constantly pressing and trying to make things happen before I’m fully developed.

Black tried to get a little more developed with 11…Bd7? but this takes a retreat square away from the knight on f6 and leaves the bishop in a spot with two possible attackers and only one defender. After 12.e5! Black’s only reasonable move is 12…Nh5 but that’s clearly not what he wants to be doing in this position. After 12…Ng4? 13.Bf4! there was no way to avoid losing a piece to the upcoming h3. He resigned a few moves later.

In round 2 I ended up in a weird kind of reversed Benoni position and I found myself on the defensive, with my pieces rather tied up. The tide started to turn in the following position:

White’s been making me rather unhappy with threats against my d4, c7, and b7 pawns all game. Searching for a way to untangle myself, I looked in desperation at 17…Nd8! and was surprisingly pleased with what I saw. Moving the knight frees me to play …c6, blunting the effect of White’s light-squared bishop, removing a target from c7, and forcing White’s b5 knight back. I also protect the b7 pawn in the meantime so White doesn’t have any tricky discovered attacks against it. Despite all those pieces on the back rank, I finally felt really good about my position and expected to bounce back off the ropes with great force.

White went all in with 18.h5 Bh7 19.Be5, attacking the d4 pawn, but I hadn’t thought this would work. After 19…Ne6 20.f4 f6 (my point; the bishop is trapped) 21.f5 fxe5 22.fxe6 Qxe6, I was already pleased with my extra pawn when White suddenly played 23.Ng5!?

Yikes! After 23…hxg5 White pins and wins my queen with 24.Bd5. For a while I thought I was in big trouble; if 23…Qf6 24.Bd5+ Kh8+ 25.Nf7+ Rxf7 White has 26.Rf1, which looked like it would win the exchange once I moved my queen. But then I realized I could just take on f1 with with 26…Qxf1+ 27.Qxf1 Rxf1+ 28.Rxf1 and I’m still a piece up. Gratefully, I played 23…Qf6 and White bailed out with 24.Nxh7, but after the intermediate 24…Qf2+ White’s king was in trouble. In the ensuing complications I picked up a piece and exchanged down to an easily winning endgame.

My 2-0 start meant that in round 3 I got to play on board 1 against Mika Brattain, who at 2402 is the third-best 15-year-old in the country. (One of the things I really like about playing in chess tournaments is the way that it totally flattens out lots of differences like age. I’ve literally seen a 90-year-old play a 9-year-old on equal terms.) He played a Najdorf with …h5, a plan that I know a little about but have never encountered myself. The main idea is that it stops White’s g4-g5 plan in its tracks. I thought I remembered that the standard antidote was to push on the queenside, so I did so, but a couple of moves later I was not too pleased to find myself in this position:

Black is about to get …d5 in with the help of his queen, and then he’ll already have accomplished everything he could have hoped for from the opening. After the game, Mika said that he thought that my earlier a5 was a big mistake because now I can’t push the queen away with Na5. What am I supposed to do, take the rook that I just moved from f1 to c1 and put it back on d1?

Yes, I am! After 15.Rd1! Black’s queen doesn’t have much point on c6, so the tempo loss isn’t a big deal. I can bring my a1 rook over to c1 and everything’s nice and tidy. This has been played 4 times in my database (out of 6 games) and White did fine, winning two games and drawing two. It can be really hard in chess to look at a position with fresh eyes and be willing to basically undo your last move, and I was not up to the challenge here. I played 15.Na4? and after 15…d5 Black was already better, and although I put up a decent fight, I lost in 30 moves.

The fourth round pitted me against the wily Tim O’Malley, whose rating is “only” around 1800 but who has a keen tactical eye and is always a threat; in fact, he had already dispatched two higher-rated players this tournament already. I thought that it would be a short game when he fell into the famous “Noah’s Ark” trap (so-called because of that’s how long it’s been around):

White played 8.d4? Nxd4! 9.Nxd4 exd4 and now he can’t play 10.Qxd4 because after 10…c5 and the queen moves, Black plays …c4 and traps the bishop.

At this point I kind of mentally chalked up the game, but Tim kept fighting, playing for maximum activity, and I found myself having a little trouble getting all my pieces working well, although it seemed like just a matter of time until I could simplify down to a winning endgame, especially since I was up on time 10 minutes to 1 in the following position:

Probably the easiest way to keep everything under control here is 29…Rd7, protecting against Re7. Instead I immediately tried to trade pieces with 29…Bd5?, and after 30.Bxd5 Qxd5 Tim bashed out 31.Re8+! Argh, it’s the infamous hook and ladder trick, winning my queen for a rook!

After a minute of staring disbelievingly at the board, trying to decide whether to resign, I played on with 31…Rxe8, because hey, at least there’s not a lot of time left on our clocks, so the duration of my misery is limited. Besides, I remembered a fortress pattern from one of the Yusupov books and it seemed possible that I might be able to set it up, especially since Tim only had one minute and probably didn’t know what I was aiming for.

Long story short, I got there 20 moves later:

I wasn’t 100% sure at the time, but according to the tablebases, this is in fact a theoretical draw. I played 51…Kg7 and from that point I can just shuffle my king between g7 and h7 and my rook between e6 and h6 as the situation warrants, and White can’t make progress. It’s very important that my pawn isn’t any further up the board, or there would be room for White’s queen to sneak around from behind. On move 72, with 7 seconds left on his clock, Tim finally gave up and agreed to a draw. I was upset that I turned a win into a loss, but on the other hand I kept fighting and turned the loss back into a draw with the aid of some endgame knowledge that a lot of masters don’t know, so I could be pleased with that. And the spectators enjoyed it!

If you write C++ code like I do, when you add a new method to a class, you:

1. type the function signature into the declaration in the header file;
2. copy and paste it into the source file;
3. either type in the name of the class by hand or hunt around looking for another instance of it to copy and paste in.

I finally got tired of step 3 and wrote a little Emacs Lisp code to semi-automate the process. It scans through the source file looking for things that look like scopes, presents you with a list of them to choose from (in descending order of frequency, so the one you’re most likely to want is first), and then inserts the one you choose.

Here it is:

(require 'ido)

;; Returns a list of all strings of the form "<x>::" in the current
;; buffer, sorted by decreasing frequency.
(defun all-c++-scopes-in-buffer ()
  (let ((scope-alist nil))
    (save-excursion
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (while (re-search-forward "\\w+::" nil t)
        (let* ((scope (match-string-no-properties 0))
               (ass (assoc scope scope-alist))
               (pair (if ass
                         ass
                       (setq scope-alist (cons (cons scope 0) scope-alist))
                       (car scope-alist))))
          (setcdr pair (1+ (cdr pair)))))
      (mapcar 'car (sort scope-alist (lambda (x y) (> (cdr x) (cdr y))))))))

(defun insert-c++-scope ()
   (interactive)
   (save-excursion
      (insert
       (ido-completing-read "Insert scope: " (all-c++-scopes-in-buffer)))))

If you don’t use ido, then 1) you are nuts, and 2) you can just use completing-read instead of ido-completing-read.

Of course, I have this bound to a key rather than type M-x insert-c++-scope every time.

My Emacs Lisp is rusty, so I imagine that there’s a more idiomatic way to do this (no convenience function to look something up in an alist and automatically add a default pair to it if it’s not already there? really?), but it works, and makes the experience of writing C++ in Emacs a little more pleasant.

This is a book about music cognition: attempting to understand how people understand the music they hear. Temperley’s main thesis throughout the book is that a profitable way to study music perception is to pretend that the listener is doing a Bayesian analysis to determine the structure (e.g., time signature and key) behind the musical surface (the audio signal being heard).

Bayes’ Theorem seems to be pretty hot these days. It’s a statement about probabilities, the main point of which is that the a priori likelihood of certain states is useful information when trying to figure out what state actually exists. A standard example is that if a certain disease is incredibly rare, then even if you test positive for it with an only slightly fallible test, it’s still quite unlikely that you really have it.

The whole idea that musical perception is largely about creating models in your head about what’s going on, with associated expectations about the future that can either be met or thwarted, and that composers are constantly playing with those expectations, is associated in my mind with the late Leonard Meyer, who is definitely worth reading. I recommend in particular Emotion and Meaning in Music.

Temperley uses Bayesian analysis to simulate how listeners create a presumptive model for a given musical signal; for example, if a note arrives a little later than expected, the listener has to make an on-the-fly guess whether that is due to a syncopation (the tempo remains constant and the note is offset from its expected location relative to it) or rubato (the tempo has slowed down slightly and the note is exactly where you’d expect in the slowed-down tempo). If you have a model for the relative probability of the two cases, you have good grounds for guessing which is actually going on. (Note that the model can change according to what kind of music you’re listening to: the answer to the above question is much more likely to be rubato if it’s a classical performance and syncopation if it’s a rock performance).

Temperley creates these sorts of models to generate proposed probability distributions in varied domains, from time signatures to key determination to modulation detection. There are some good standard corpora of analyzed musical examples so he’s able to evaluate his models to existing ones fairly accurately, and they perform well though not groundbreakingly so. One nice thing is that the models tend to be fairly simple compared to many other ones in the field, which tend to be rather special-cased and apparently a bit fragile.

I was very pleased, by the way, to find that a scale-determination system that I had come up with independently in the late 90s for use in creating automatic accompaniment for MIDI renditions of karaoke songs was basically exactly the same as one of the standard systems that the academic world came up with. (The short version is that for a given timespan you take the total duration of each pitch class and take the dot-product of that 12-dimensional vector with a vector representing a signature for each hypothetical scale, then take the maximum. Not rocket science but it was nice to come up with a simple quantitative algorithm that performed well in practice.)

Even though there’s no silver bullet here, the ideas in it are quite interesting. I particularly like that the models end up being fairly straightforward and don’t require a ton of specialized tweaks, which is a promising feature. The math involved is real, but if all you care about is the music you can probably gloss over most of it if you trust the author. Worth reading if you’re interested in how people perceive music, either for its own sake or because you want to exploit it as a composer or performer.

Another step in my continuing quest to learn more about jazz by transcribing recordings. I like Wayne Shorter’s 1960s albums a lot, and “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum” (YouTube video) is my favorite tune from the most famous of them, Speak No Evil. The spur to do a Shorter tune came when Ethan Iverson transcribed his solo from Lee Morgan’s “Party Time” and I found that our conceptions of Shorter’s rhythm were pretty different, largely because he is so lazy (behind the beat). There’s a fine line between playing ahead or behind the beat and syncopating; in one case you’re turning a knob in an analog way and in the other the knob has turned so far that it’s reached the next “notch” and you’ve actually created a different rhythm. Shorter straddles that line really interestingly, playing in such a fluid way that even when he’s super late you can feel the “real” rhythm that he’s relating to, like the note is a balloon on a long string tied to the beat.

I did all the parts except for Herbie Hancock’s piano comping during other solos and Elvin Jones’ drumming, so the whole thing came out to 10 pages and I won’t dump it all here, but the PDF file is here. Some thoughts I had about the song while working with it:

Those piano chords at the beginning are really tasty. I haven’t the faintest idea how to analyze them from a jazz harmony theory viewpoint; from a classical perspective I’d say they serve the same sort of function as a I64, sitting on a dominant drone, setting up a real arrival on I (which, eight bars into the head, turns out to be B♭­). I’m not certain about every note in every chord but it sounds pretty right to me when I play it on the piano.

The tune itself is really interesting. It starts out in a clear G minor; then the B♭­ that the melody lands on basically turns into an A♯, creating a major-seventh dissonance in the bass, and resolves to the B♮ of G major, but the line still ends like a question, largely because it curves up to the fifth (D) rather than down to the root (G). The second four measures imitate the first four but end up in the parallel major, B♭­, with the melody again landing on the fifth instead of the root as the underlying B♭­7 harmony immediately moves us away towards E♭­. The middle eight measures have a pretty simple implicit harmony from the bass (and the solos later refer to that harmony rather than what’s going on in the melody here), but the melody instruments do a cool parallel-fourths-and-tritones thing that adds some nice dissonance. A standard ii-V-I progression brings us back to a recap of the first eight measures, in which the melody finally lands triumphantly on B♭­, but the bass refuses to follow suit, obstinately sitting on C♭­/B♮, forming the exact same major-seventh dissonance that was the first hint of harmonic oddness back in the third measure.

Freddie Hubbard’s trumpet solo feels the most classical of the three in its rhythm and harmony. He plays most straightforwardly in the bluesy middle third, a pattern the other soloists will follow.

Wayne Shorter’s tenor sax solo is really rhapsodic by comparison. He takes two choruses and I’m glad he does. It’s not super virtuosic but he stretches and pulls the beat in really interesting ways. The simplest rhythms are the ones he massages the most, like the simple eighth-note riffs starting on measure 69; they’re so laggy it’s tempting to try to notate them differently, but they’re clearly really lazy eighth notes, not some crazy syncopation. I particularly like the syncopated three-note blasts starting at measure 93, especially the way that they gradually subside back into the A section rather than exploding as you might expect them to. After I finished it I discovered Kevin Sun’s transcription of the solo, and the comparison is really interesting. We agree 99% on the pitches (unfortunately for you, my transcription is at concert pitch and his is in B♭­), but we often have big disagreements on the rhythm.

Herbie Hancock’s solo is the least lyrical, in the sense of sounding like a vocal line; it comes more in little bursts of riffs. The left-hand voicings are probably the component I’m least sure of in the whole transcription; I wouldn’t be surprised if I accidentally put in something unidiomatic there. The style is really interesting to me, since my instinct when I try to improvise is still play something that sounds like a sax plus harmony, rather than this more interesting collections of riffs and stabs. The rising pattern of four triplets as he finishes is really tasty.

I transcribed Ron Carter’s bass all the way through because I noticed that transcribing the bass is something that Ethan does, and I learned a lot from it that I’m sure will be useful for my left hand. It’s tough to hear the bass and sometimes he’s between pitches, so you may not agree with me about every note. In general I was impressed by how he was able to sustain interest but not distract from the soloing going on on top of him.

I’ll try to pick something more simple next time! Maybe something from the 50s. In the meantime, comments and proposed corrections are encouraged.