The Remington warm-up for jazz band

(Updated August 2020) Greetings, jazz band director. I imagine your Google search has delivered you here in your pursuit to see how you can apply this classic band exercise to your jazz ensemble’s warm-up.

Whether or not this your first time directing a jazz ensemble, I believe I can help you with a Remington Exercise in four variations using “jazz chords” and designed to instruct students on the uses and common practices of harmony in a jazz setting. This is a workout for the rhythm section as well as the horns.

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What You Get

• Variation A: Major

• Variation B: Minor

  • These variations are great for middle/high school ensembles that are still learning the essentials of how to play and tune in a jazz setting. Every tuning note is heard within each chord’s triad. these variations stay in one key signature and use standard chord progressions that each last one measure apiece. Nothing tricky here!

• Variation C: Functional harmony

  • This gets a little more complicated for your rhythm section. Variation C introduces a slew of basic chord progressions that they will see in jazz standards, big band and most modern jazz tunes. This includes the ii-V-I progression in major and minor keys, the IV-VII-I progression, the use of a secondary dominant (I-II7), some ii-V-I sequences, a deceptive cadence from major to minor, and some diminished chords. Additionally, the tuning notes begin to rely on 4th, 6th abd 7th of some chords.

• Variation D: Advanced functional harmony

  • Everything and the kitchen sink! The harmony moves quickly here (usually in two beats) and will give your rhythm section a headache trying to keep up. There are several quick modulations and extended voicings against the tuning notes. Good luck!

How to Use This Exercise

1. Use it “as-is” and focus on primarily on tuning and blending with your rhythm section playing along!

2. Use an isolated four-beat rhythm to play on each written tuning note. This can help work on your band’s articulations. This can also be done in different styles—not just a 4/4 swing feel.

3. Make this a voice-leading exercise. Have your students write a sequence (1-2-3-5, etc) to be modulated and played on each chord/starting note. This is similar to the Patterns for Jazz approach and works great for Variations A & B.

4. Have chord players write their own voicings over written notes (using closed harmony for pianists). This is fun to teach the essentials of voicings and “box in” harmony players by limiting their choices.

5. Similarly, have younger bassists write out their own walking bass lines. Make sure that they are using notes from the actual chord on beats 1 and 3. Add depth by asking for a more vertical or horizontal line.

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Original post from 2010:

If you're a wind player, particularly a brass player (and ESPECIALLY a trombone player!), then you are probably aware of the Remington warm-up method.  It's probably the most used warm-up method and tuning exercise for band students.  But, just in case you are NOT aware of this method: the idea began with Emory Remington trying to teach his trombone students how to play 1) in tune, 2) with good sound and 3) with a good legato articulation.  Eventually, he developed this exercise (expanded and published by Donald Hunsberger): [slideshare id=1798433&doc=theremingtonwarmupstudies-090801081739-phpapp01&type=d]

Simple, eh?  That's why it's used so often.  The idea is that by limiting the notes to those on the same harmonic partial, the trombone student focuses solely on articulation, sound and slide positioning (tuning).  Because it's an incremental exercise utilizing descending half-steps, it should be easy for a student to hear and understand when each interval is in or out of tune.  At the University of Houston Moores School of Music, the wind ensemble program uses a similar warm-up based on the descending F major scale, a method popularized, and probably initiated by, Director Emeritus (and Texas band legend) Eddie Green.

That being said, you can imagine my challenge directing a bunch of wind ensemble students for their first outing in a jazz ensemble.  In wind band, these students usually only encounter the major, minor and diminished chords; so they're only used to hearing the I-3-5 and sometimes 7 or 9 chord tones.  My goal was to get 15 horn players to start hearing the extended jazz harmonies that rely on 7-9-11-13 chord tones and their varying alterations.  So as a transitional tool, I wrote out the Remington warm-up harmonized in a jazz context.  It's my gift to you, the jazz band directors of the world:

Jazz Remington Warmup

It has proven to be quite useful.  It not only gets the students to hear extended harmony, but it also allows the the rhythm section to participate and work on getting around the keys.  I tried to keep the exercise simple, with each written note occupying only a 1-3-4-5-7-9 chord tone.  This way, it's not too hard a stretch for the horn players to hear how the chord progression relates to the written "melody".  It's also endlessly variable:

• The exercise can be re-harmonized infinitely and there are numerous substitutions for the chords written here (but I do stress that each variation maintain a chord progression rather than unrelated chords back to back)

• Sometimes I would have the lower instruments play the roots to even out the balance of 15 horn players to 4 rhythm section players

• I would often substitute a rhythmic idea for the whole note to work on articulation, style and phrasing with the horns

• It's also great for music theory pop quizzes: "What chordal tone are we on now? How does this chord progression function?"

I hope this helps, and best of luck to anyone who uses this exercise!

FAQ: Understanding Jazz Chords and Symbols

(EDIT: This post's content seems to emphasize harmony without context, but I can assure you that this is most definitely NOT how harmony works. If you're reading this for some clarity on the means behind chord symbols, you've come to the right place. But understand that I've presented these symbols and meanings without regard to functionality.) I recently had a student ask me to recommend a book that would be a good resource on jazz chords and, more importantly, how to decipher the symbols for each chord.  My immediate thought was, “Book?!  There’s no book on that!”  Of course, I’m sure there’s probably a few hundred that deal with that particular topic in great detail.  However, I’m in no mood to go looking through book after book after book for good examples.  So, I went immediately to Google to find simple guides online.  There were plenty, but only a few stood out for their clarity, thoroughness and simplicity.  My main complaint was the spelling and labeling methods for each chord and the tendency of most guides to get bogged down in technicalities (i.e. intervallic structures and alterations).  People need a SIMPLE guide to this topic without being hit over the head with a ton of theory.

My guide to the CORRECT spelling and labeling of simple jazz chords: Basic Jazz Chords

If you feel like knowing a bit more, here’s a guide to deciphering lead sheets (borrowed from an article by Keith Felch in JazzEd Magazine): Deciphering Lead Sheets

Simple, right?  I’ll create a more extended guide with chord extensions and further alterations for my next update.

Jazz music of the Aughts

In thinking about my follow-up to The New Jazz Standards, I've been trying to establish a criteria for evaluating music and establishing rules (for lack of a better term) to apply to modern music as "standards". Today, I read this short article about jazz in the "Aughts" (Noughts? Noughties?) written by JazzHouston co-creator and administrator, Andrew Lienhard. He offers some wonderfully simple and well-stated insights to jazz music of the past decade. Here's a refreshing outlook on jazz music of the past decade:

...there's renewed focus on original music, especially among new artists. Most debut albums were as much a playing debut as they were a program of new compositions. The music is more complex too -- rhythmically, harmonically, arrangements, etc. But that complexity is not a means to an end as it was in the 70's and 80's. It's more of a base than a flavor. And there's much greater cross-pollination between mainstream genres. Hip-Hop entered the music, so did Indie Pop and Electronica. Case in point is the ubiquitous interest in covering modern pop music. Radiohead became the new Rogers & Hart.

I completely agree. Plus, I love lists, so this was a no-brainer to re-post. He's even got a "best of Houston" list!

The New Jazz Standards, Part I - History

A question I often get asked is, "What are the new jazz standards?"  In fact, I ask myself this question quite often!

If you're not a musician, or just unfamiliar with the term "standard" as it applies to jazz music, you might need some filling in. Standards usually refer to those songs written in the golden age of American songwriting, between 1920-1960.  Most of these songs are considered part of the Great American Songbook, consist of composers from Tin Pan Alley and the large majority were written for musical theater and movies.  Composers such as George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rogers and Jimmy Van Heusen are regularly associated with this field. Because these songs constituted the popular music of the day, they had a strong influence on the current musical trends of the time. Songs such as "All the Things You Are," "Summertime" and "Night and Day" are prime examples of this period. There are great lists of these compositions at the site JazzStandards.com (ranked by popularity) as well as Wikipedia (organized chronologically).

How then did we arrive at the term "jazz standards"?  It depends on who you ask.  Remember when I mentioned that these songs were the popular music of the day? Well, it's no coincidence that these popular tunes infiltrated other styles and genres, such as jazz music, which was still blossoming in the 1930s.  Also, most of these tunes were written in the jazz tradition that had grown in popularity in the previous decades. By the 1930s, many composers were interested in jazz music as a vehicle for the popular songs that they were employed to write for Broadway musicals.  This led to the development of popular songs having many jazz-influenced chords and harmonies, which in turn influenced jazz music to incorporate the popular songs into the repertoire of jazz music. It's a sordid mess, since jazz and popular music of the 1930s through the 1950s were so closely related.

However, during this same time period, there were some new compositions being written exclusively for the jazz idiom.  This is broadly defined when an instrumental tune is written first with the lyrics added later, or without lyrics at all. Although they have gained immense popularity over the years, they were originally written as instrumental vehicles for improvisation and NOT popular songs. A lot of Duke Ellington's works ("Solitude," "Caravan," and "Cottontail"), "Take the 'A' Train" by Billy Strayhorn, "'Round Midnight" by Thelonious Monk and "Take Five" by Paul Desmond fit this definition.  Each became widely popular despite starting out as jazz instrumentals.

This is why people differ on their definition of the term "standard" as it applies to music. To some, a "standard" is only one of those popular songs contained in the Great American Songbook. These people would also insist that a "jazz standard" needs to be exclusive to the jazz idiom and largely based on improvisation. Others, such as myself, put them all together. To me, if it's a popular song, instrumental or not, it's a standard.  Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You" deserves as much recognition as Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" to be considered a standard.  Of course, it must be from 1920-1960 to be really called a "standard" by my definition.

So what about after 1960?  Well, that's the whole point of this series of blog posts.  As music genres became more specialized from 1960 onward, it is harder to define what the future of the standard really is.  Before getting that far, though, I'll try to define in musical terms what a standard entails. I'll go beyond the historical significance of the topic and look into the theoretical qualities of the popular standards. Part II - Musical Analysis: for music theory geeks only!