Are contrafacts plagiarism ?

[CGR]

Interesting article on the Guardian website about plagiarism in poetry. See: https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...man-will-storr

It set me wondering about all those tunes based on other tunes that we have in the Jazz world. Are contrafacts plagiarism? Are licks & lines quoted from famous solos plagiarism?

Wikipedia has a facinating list of contrafacts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jazz_contrafacts Of course there are far more than those listed.

Personally I love it when a player kicks off into an 'original' tune and I recognise the chord sequence or I recognise a bunch of licks, or even a whole chorus, in a solo over a standard originally by Bird, Dexter or Trane. Seems to confirm my view of myself as a bit of a jazz nerd - a smile of selfsatisfraction and smugness together with a nod of the head to show that I'm in the know. It's part of our world. Its how we learn to play jazz, we copy solos from recordings and build on them.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

In the bop beginning....

"KoKo" - Charlie Parker

Bars 1-8 - Alto saxophone and trumpet in unison octaves
Bars 9-16 - Brief trumpet solo
Bars 17-24 - Brief saxophone solo
Bars 25-32 - Alto saxophone and trumpet in thirds/fourths, then briefly in octaves
Following the intro in the first take Parker and Davis (Gillespie?) start to play the melody of "Cherokee". They are interrupted by someone (Savoy Producer Terry Reig) clapping, whistling and shouting, "You can't play THAT!". (Royalties).

Classic side, classic whistle.

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

I think this is a really good point and am sure that there has been the threat of litigation in the past regarding the use of borrowed chord changes. These days, the use of contrfacts to mask the source material seems paper-thin as most people can grasp the underlying melody pretty quickly. I am not so sure that the audience for jazz prior to the 1960s were quite so savvy and would have picked up things such as "Windmill" by Kenny Dorham for example -, a cunning re-working of "Sweet Georgia Brown" which, aside from Ellington, is perhaps the ultimate in contrafacts.

The whole idea that this was a "hip" new way of playing earlier repertoire which defined the difference between bop players and those from an earlier generation is too simple. I have a double CD by Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang and a good proportion of the "originals" are contrafacts on the changes of "Tiger Rag." I get the impression that this was something that was there in jazz at the very beginning when musicians started to use chord changes as a basis of improvisation and was certainly established by the late 1920's.

I think the interesting thing is what tunes were originally selected. I supposed the most obvious three were "Tiger Rag", "I got rhythm" and "Sweet Georgia Brown" with this broadening in the late 30's when Duke Ellington extended the repertoire of contrafacts.

I tend to disagree with CGR as I find the use of contrafacts in be-bop inherently lazy and derivative. Whenever a tune based on the changes of something like "There will never be another you" I do not get pleasure from the surprise of recognizing the changes but think of it as akin to groaning over an old, music hall style joke. It signifies a lack of imagination bordering on desperation and , for me at least. is something that puts me off a lot of bop. Sometimes there is something about late 1940's records that I feel is magical - the sense of rhythm, the quest for the "new" and the shear exuberance of the music. However, contrafacts and the use of head -solo- head patterns does lead to monotony after a while. The use of contrafacts around that time was probably at it's apogee with Lennie Tristano but if you listen to the solo album on Atlantic which includes some of his finest playing on a set of originals, nearly all of them are effectively exercises based on standards. I suppose of he was honest regarding his source material, there would have been a risk of Tristano being threatened with legal action as I believe happened with Gillespie.

These days contrafacts sound hopelessly date. I was actually thinking the other day whilst looking through eh Real Book that standards are totally dull. With the advent of Free playing, the whole need to rely on changes seemed to sound a death knell to contrafacts with the result that, as opposed to having a "cool" quality about them, they are hopelessly dated in this day and age. The best thing about the development of jazz and the emergence of an avant garde in the music was the it obviated the need for contrafacts.

[Serial_Apologist]

To my mind there shouldn't be a problem if sufficiently deep deconstruction has been perpetrated on the original. Where to draw the line has to be the problem: when is a contrafact not a contrafact? A large proportion of standard tunes used by novices as learning vehicles have the same 16- or 32-bar structures and common harmonic modulations as 12-bar blues, and one only has to go through the recordings of the late 1930s and 1940s of Lester Young with Basie musicians to wonder if their ground plan really did offer him much creative leeway. The thing about tunes such as Hot House is that its melodic substitution is an elaboration brought about by beboppers' way of chromatically extending the harmonic range of the originals in their improvising methods, something which had not been foreseen by previous generations' lack of western musical theory applied to improvisation, barring few exceptions eg Hines, Beiderbecke or Tatum: even in the arrangement department the catch-up in the 1920s and 30s was with the Debussy/Strauss generation of early C20 classical music, eg whole-tone scale-based chord formations. The "contrafact" may well be in the ear of the beholder, given that we are all as listeners who don't compose using post-tonal methods preconditioned by several centuries of major/minor diatonic thinking transferred from classical to pop; yet I for one have never seen reference to plagiarism when reference to Strauss's and Mahler's wholesale borrowings from "Siegfried" in "Till Eulenspiegel" and the fifth Symphony's famous Adagietto, respectively, are overlooked.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

I'd just offer the highly heretical suggestion (in this "Ze Joy of the New" place), that "standards" (and their changes) in jazz or otherwise, are standards for a reason? That they have substance, connection and endurance. Which is more than you can say of 90℅ of the "original" compositions that compose jazz albums, even the most "avant" which of course are played everywhere. And not just hummed outside the Vortex.

And yes, as for quotes references, "plags" etc etc, just look at Shostakovich. He loved 'em, for irony, affection, sarcasm, intellectual in jokes, and sometimes not letting a good tune going to waste. Wot a reactionary bastard.

BN.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

And Bartok ripping off all those Hungarian folk songs. OK, he "reharmonised" 'em but any current Guildhall student could do that. Where's the fkg royalties, Bella?

BN.

[Ian Thumwood]

I'd just offer the highly heretical suggestion (in this "Ze Joy of the New" place), that "standards" (and their changes) in jazz or otherwise, are standards for a reason? That they have substance, connection and endurance. Which is more than you can say of 90℅ of the "original" compositions that compose jazz albums, even the most "avant" which of course are played everywhere. And not just hummed outside the Vortex.


BN.

Bluesnik

I understand what you are saying and I think it is fair to say that 99% of newly composed "jazz originals" do not endure. However, I think that the whole question of using "standard" repertoire both as in adulterated and as a contrafact stems lot from the fact that they contain pretty simple harmonic patterns like II-V-I patterns or cycle of fifths and move chromatically, etc. It is an interesting problem because it broadly represents the modus operandi of jazz musicians up to the 1950's after which composers stopped looking at re-harmonising tunes by extending chords with 9th, 11th and 13th but started looking at the sequences themselves. This is an element of jazz that I found fascinating as I think the a lot of the "developments" in jazz are actually driven by theory / composition. As soon as composers started to get more savvy, the need to employ contrafacts diminished.

I suppose that this brings in the whole question of "jazz composition" which has become increasingly more complex and difficult to play making the strides made by be-bop seem quite insignificant by comparison. If you were a jazz fan in the 1950's there would be only a small number of musicians considered to be "serious" jazz composers of which Ellington / Strayhorn were by far the greatest. Even Monk, only cited as one of the very greatest of composers in jazz, was harmonically quite conservative in his writing style and used a number of contrafacts himself. ("Hackensack" = "Lady be good", "Evidence" - "Just you, just me", "Rhythin'a' ning" = "IGR", etc.) In many respects, I don't feel that be-bop was quite the sea-change it was originally made out to be and the reliance on these kinds of harmonic changes whilst admittedly more advanced than say what was going on in the 1920/30's, still seems to me to be part of that historic era of jazz. As soon as you had composers like George Russell looking at music theory or composers as diverse as Herbie Nichols and Wayne Shorter looking at using more unnatural sequences of chords, I think that contrafacts had their day. This may seem a bit controversial but I strongly believe that Herbie Nichols is probably one of the most important figures in jazz composition . If you look through his lead sheets, the whole concept of patterns like II-V-I has been jettisoned and he is very much the fore-runner of such diverse composers as Wayne Shorter, Tom Harrell, Pat Metheny, etc who no longer think of jazz harmony in the way that Charlie Parker's generation did. Oddly enough, my late piano teacher was a huge fan of musicians like Monk, Bud Powell , Garner and Evans although he was not a fan of anyone more "modern" than Chick Corea. He used to have a note book of about 300-odd tunes (mainly Broadway tunes) which consisted solely of the titles of each sing. There was no musical notation but they represented his "repertoire" and whilst he was addicted to altered harmonies, the tunes all shared the harmonic language and form of these tunes.

I don't really agree about jazz compositions not having a life beyond their original appearance on records. The better material does get recycled albeit it often takes a very long while for works by people like Nichols and Andrew Hill to enter the repertoire. I think a lot of this has to do with publications like The Real Book which foster some older ideas amongst amateurs /semi-pro musicians plus the jazz education system which now encourages original jazz composition most of which is pretty forgettable.

I think that CGR has raised some interesting points and maybe the whole copyright issue these days also causes problems which make contrafacts less likely although I suppose that this probably is more related to sampling these days. There have been some fascinating cases in the press with pop groups suing each other for plagiarism and I would have thought that the simpler the kind of material you incorporate in to your pop composition, the more likely this is going to be. It was a shame that Bach was not around to sue Procal Harum.

[Ian Thumwood]

I'd just offer the highly heretical suggestion (in this "Ze Joy of the New" place), that "standards" (and their changes) in jazz or otherwise, are standards for a reason? That they have substance, connection and endurance. Which is more than you can say of 90℅ of the "original" compositions that compose jazz albums, even the most "avant" which of course are played everywhere. And not just hummed outside the Vortex.


BN.

Bluesnik

I understand what you are saying and I think it is fair to say that 99% of newly composed "jazz originals" do not endure. However, I think that the whole question of using "standard" repertoire both as in adulterated and as a contrafact stems lot from the fact that they contain pretty simple harmonic patterns like II-V-I patterns or cycle of fifths and move chromatically, etc. It is an interesting problem because it broadly represents the modus operandi of jazz musicians up to the 1950's after which composers stopped looking at re-harmonising tunes by extending chords with 9th, 11th and 13th but started looking at the sequences themselves. This is an element of jazz that I found fascinating as I think the a lot of the "developments" in jazz are actually driven by theory / composition. As soon as composers started to get more savvy, the need to employ contrafacts diminished.

I suppose that this brings in the whole question of "jazz composition" which has become increasingly more complex and difficult to play making the strides made by be-bop seem quite insignificant by comparison. If you were a jazz fan in the 1950's there would be only a small number of musicians considered to be "serious" jazz composers of which Ellington / Strayhorn were by far the greatest. Even Monk, only cited as one of the very greatest of composers in jazz, was harmonically quite conservative in his writing style and used a number of contrafacts himself. ("Hackensack" = "Lady be good", "Evidence" - "Just you, just me", "Rhythin'a' ning" = "IGR", etc.) In many respects, I don't feel that be-bop was quite the sea-change it was originally made out to be and the reliance on these kinds of harmonic changes whilst admittedly more advanced than say what was going on in the 1920/30's, still seems to me to be part of that historic era of jazz. As soon as you had composers like George Russell looking at music theory or composers as diverse as Herbie Nichols and Wayne Shorter looking at using more unnatural sequences of chords, I think that contrafacts had their day. This may seem a bit controversial but I strongly believe that Herbie Nichols is probably one of the most important figures in jazz composition . If you look through his lead sheets, the whole concept of patterns like II-V-I has been jettisoned and he is very much the fore-runner of such diverse composers as Wayne Shorter, Tom Harrell, Pat Metheny, etc who no longer think of jazz harmony in the way that Charlie Parker's generation did. Oddly enough, my late piano teacher was a huge fan of musicians like Monk, Bud Powell , Garner and Evans although he was not a fan of anyone more "modern" than Chick Corea. He used to have a note book of about 300-odd tunes (mainly Broadway tunes) which consisted solely of the titles of each sing. There was no musical notation but they represented his "repertoire" and whilst he was addicted to altered harmonies, the tunes all shared the harmonic language and form of these tunes.

I don't really agree about jazz compositions not having a life beyond their original appearance on records. The better material does get recycled albeit it often takes a very long while for works by people like Nichols and Andrew Hill to enter the repertoire. I think a lot of this has to do with publications like The Real Book which foster some older ideas amongst amateurs /semi-pro musicians plus the jazz education system which now encourages original jazz composition most of which is pretty forgettable.

I think that CGR has raised some interesting points and maybe the whole copyright issue these days also causes problems which make contrafacts less likely although I suppose that this probably is more related to sampling these days. There have been some fascinating cases in the press with pop groups suing each other for plagiarism and I would have thought that the simpler the kind of material you incorporate in to your pop composition, the more likely this is going to be. It was a shame that Bach was not around to sue Procal Harum.

[Dave2002]

Contrafacts - a word I hadn't heard before. Here is some information - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrafact

Allegedly harmonies or sequences of such can't be copyrighted, but "tunes" - melodies can be.

Here is a list of some common ones - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jazz_contrafacts

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

If you think of the five hundred and one Doo wop, teen and pop tunes cut in the 50s and early 60s to the ubiquitous C, Am, F, G; "50s" sequence, you can see how hard claiming basic ownership would be.

BN.

[jean]

Contrafacts - a word I hadn't heard before...

The word is common in Renaissance music for an alternative text, usually in another language.

Generally the new text has no relation to the original, which sets off discussion as to how far the music embodies the words the composer originally set to his music.

Here, for example, is the text of Tallis's Spem in Alium:

Spem in alium nunquam habui
Praeter in te, Deus Israel
Qui irasceris et propitius eris
et omnia peccata hominum
in tribulatione dimittis
Domine Deus
Creator caeli et terrae
respice humilitatem nostram

(I have never put my hope in any other
but in Thee, God of Israel
who canst show both wrath and graciousness,
and who absolves all the sins
of suffering man
Lord God,
Creator of Heaven and Earth
Regard our humility)

And here is the contrafactum, sung at the 1610 investiture of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales:

Sing and glorify heaven's high Majesty,
Author of this blessed harmony;
Sound divine praises
With melodious graces;
This is the day, holy day, happy day,
For ever give it greeting, Love and joy
heart and voice meeting:
Live Henry princely and mighty,
Harry live in thy creation happy.

[Lat-Literal]

Acceptable in poetry/prose if it comes with a knowing eye. Ideally, that produces a challenge to identify source. You could lift a line from Lennon/McCartney and shift the order of words around or alter just one word in a verse with no other such references. I like that cuteness. The "do you get it?". The "does it make you ask why it is here?". That can extend to music. Otherwise, what is needed is a combination of being upfront about origins and the technical assurance to take it onto somewhere else. That, I think, applies in jazz. The resurrection of folk tunes in classical composition is a slightly different thing. The motive was to save those tunes from disappearing. Sampling in hip-hop etc.....the very fact that it became so routine suggests an artistic laziness in many cases bordering on thievery but I think it is fairly easy to see what is there and what is not. One looks for creative skills or individual technique. I do slightly worry about the litigation instinct generally. It can go too far and will do given rope. Frankly, I am not convinced "Down Under" is "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum (or Oak) Tree"

[Ian Thumwood]

Acceptable in poetry/prose if it comes with a knowing eye. Ideally, that produces a challenge to identify source. You could lift a line from Lennon/McCartney and shift the order of words around or alter just one word in a verse with no other such references. I like that cuteness. The "do you get it?". The "does it make you ask why it is here?". That can extend to music. Otherwise, what is needed is a combination of being upfront about origins and the technical assurance to take it onto somewhere else. That, I think, applies in jazz. The resurrection of folk tunes in classical composition is a slightly different thing. The motive was to save those tunes from disappearing. Sampling in hip-hop etc.....the very fact that it became so routine suggests an artistic laziness in many cases bordering on thievery but I think it is fairly easy to see what is there and what is not. One looks for creative skills or individual technique. I do slightly worry about the litigation instinct generally. It can go too far and will do given rope. Frankly, I am not convinced "Down Under" is "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum (or Oak) Tree"

The sampling aspect is just cynical since it is making up for the fact that either the band / singer cannot play the instrument or that they want to incorporate an element that is familiar in a tune.

I know that courts have looked at the legal aspect of what constitutes plagiarism and the rulings have been quite complex. I suspect that this is due to the fact that what is being argued about is pretty simple musically. It is obvious that words are probably more easy to litigate against and they will clearly not need prior musical knowledge to get to the bottom of. Regarding sampling, this is clearer still. James Newton suing the The Beasty Boys for sampling a flute solo on one of their tracks - something that struck me as odd as this band actually enjoyed quite a reputation as genuine musicians and some of their work actually sounds like MMW, I have heard the guitarist Will Bernard say that they are " a great band" so it is not about a non-musician as you might expect with someone like Kanye West.

It would be interesting to test just how far you can "stretch" a contrafact and how far the substitutions and changes might go before the tune becomes something different. The most extreme I have heard this is on a Peter Evans quartet disc from about 11 years ago which was really disappointing and more recently on a Mark Dresser record where the musicians stretched the form of the standards to the point that their reinvention made be-bop pretty rudimentary. The Dresser album is hugely radical and the centrepiece is a reworking of "I;m getting sentimental over you" which, if CDG was asked, certainly hinted at Body & soul" too. I think this might have a lot to do with the harmonic language of Broadway material sharing a lot but the effect was no so much of musicians stamping a new theme over the head but blowing over the changes rather subjecting the original to an extreme chemical experiment which reduced the music down to it's basis DNA and then rebuilding the music from scratch.

[Lat-Literal]

The sampling aspect is just cynical since it is making up for the fact that either the band / singer cannot play the instrument or that they want to incorporate an element that is familiar in a tune.

I know that courts have looked at the legal aspect of what constitutes plagiarism and the rulings have been quite complex. I suspect that this is due to the fact that what is being argued about is pretty simple musically. It is obvious that words are probably more easy to litigate against and they will clearly not need prior musical knowledge to get to the bottom of. Regarding sampling, this is clearer still. James Newton suing the The Beasty Boys for sampling a flute solo on one of their tracks - something that struck me as odd as this band actually enjoyed quite a reputation as genuine musicians and some of their work actually sounds like MMW, I have heard the guitarist Will Bernard say that they are " a great band" so it is not about a non-musician as you might expect with someone like Kanye West.

It would be interesting to test just how far you can "stretch" a contrafact and how far the substitutions and changes might go before the tune becomes something different. The most extreme I have heard this is on a Peter Evans quartet disc from about 11 years ago which was really disappointing and more recently on a Mark Dresser record where the musicians stretched the form of the standards to the point that their reinvention made be-bop pretty rudimentary. The Dresser album is hugely radical and the centrepiece is a reworking of "I;m getting sentimental over you" which, if CDG was asked, certainly hinted at Body & soul" too. I think this might have a lot to do with the harmonic language of Broadway material sharing a lot but the effect was no so much of musicians stamping a new theme over the head but blowing over the changes rather subjecting the original to an extreme chemical experiment which reduced the music down to it's basis DNA and then rebuilding the music from scratch.

Re sampling you could argue that significant artists have been revived by it in hip-hop - Sun Ra, RR Kirk, John Coltrane, Gil Scott-Heron, Rotary Connection.....the list is very long.

(It has, I think, especially enabled many "proud to be black" jazzers to reach much younger generations who otherwise would never have known)

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

"You could argue". You could also argue that it debases, trivialises, decontextualises and severs the artistic intent of the original. But hey, the original would necessitate a listener effort so that's not going to happen. I mean, art should be served on a plate, with fries.

BN.