ALONG ONE WALL OF SID JACOBS ’
Hollywood teaching studio resides a stable
of beautiful hollowbodies—everything from
a custom 7-string Benedetto featuring a
high-A to a ’71 Gibson Johnny Smith that
Jacobs bought new as a teenager. Along the
opposite wall stands a towering shelf of
books by or about everyone from Stravinsky
to Slonimsky, Miles to Zappa, Woody Allen
to George Carlin. In this room—and on
Jacobs’ fretboard—many eras of music and
thought collide, and the ideas that result are
captivating. A performer who has worked
with everyone from Eddie Harris, Buddy
Montgomery, and Brad Mehldau to Luciano
Pavarotti and Ike and Tina Turner—and
an instructor at GIT (Guitar Institute of
Technology) for the past 20 years and
counting—Jacobs miraculously channels
Lenny Breau, Bill Evans, Bach, and more,
often within the same musical phrase.
Today, Jacobs is talking about pedal tones.
“Listen to this note,” he says, striking the
low-E string on a Hofner Verythin archtop.
“When you hit a low note like this—
especially if you play it on an acoustic piano—
it’s easy to hear that there’s a lot more in
there than one single pitch. There are overtones
in there. Without those harmonics and
partials, the note wouldn’t sound natural.”
Three notes that reside within a ringing
low E, says Jacobs, are the harmonics heard
at the 7th, 5th, and 4th frets of the same
string. Pluck those three harmonics in succession,
and you’ll hear B, E, G#—a secondinversion
E major triad having the same
pitches as the E triad fretted in Ex. 1.
“If we hold a low-E pedal tone under that
major triad [Ex. 2], it sounds very normal,
because that major triad exists in that pedal
tone. It exists in nature,” says Jacobs. “The
bass note is very powerful—it’s generating
the three notes of the triad. Things get weird
when you put a different triad over that same
note [Ex. 3]. In this example, the E triad
within the bass note says ‘I am king,’ while
the Eb triad fretted above is saying, ‘No, I
am king.’ So, you have this interesting
bi-tonal struggle going on—two territories
vying for supremacy.”
As is demonstrated by the Eb/E symbol
we gave the chord we just played, sometimes
the best way to describe a bi-tonal harmony
is simply to name the harmony that is sounded
by the upper voices, and then, on the right
side of a slash mark, name the bass note separately.
One of the most famous and influential
studies of bi-tonal “slash chord” harmony is
John Coltrane’s entrancing ballad “Naima,”
off his seminal 1959 release, Giant Steps. The
tune makes for a beautiful and approachable
chord melody on guitar because the theme is
so simple (lots of held notes) and the tempo
so slow.
“I usually don’t move a song away from
its original key,” says Jacobs, “but I couldn’t
resist moving ‘Naima’ up a half-step from
Eb to E, so I could use the open low-E string
pedal tone in a lot of chords.”
Rife with compelling slash chords, Jacobs’
arrangement of “Naima” is presented in Ex. 4.
Note: The melody is written in the upper
voice throughout, though it doesn’t always
appear on the highest string in the chord. For
instance, in bar 2’s Em9, the melody note is
the F# on the 11th fret of the third string.
“With some of the trickier grips, such
as the very first chord, you’ll find the chord
is a lot easier to fret if you angle your
guitar’s neck up, towards the ceiling,” says
Jacobs, who plays the song with a loose,
almost rubato feel. “You don’t have to
phrase this piece literally as written, harmonizing
each melody note with a big chord
on the downbeat. Instead of doing that, I
often give melody notes a little separation
by playing them first, and then filling in the
chord around them.”
The song’s AABA form is simple: Play
the first four bars of the example, repeat them
as indicated, play through to the end, return
to the top and play to the fine. To close things
out, try Jacobs’ simple rising chords in Ex. 5.
Rich with the jangle of open strings (including
an open-A pedal), this soothing series of
diatonic harmonies makes a gorgeous ascending
tag in the style of Coltrane’s famous outro
on “Naima.”