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Ralph Patt American jazz guitarist

Ralph Oliver Patt was an American jazz-guitarist who introduced major-thirds tuning. Patt’s tuning simplified the learning of the fretboard and chords by beginners and improvisation by advanced guitarists.

Ralph’s Web Site

Born December 5 1929 -Died October 6 2010

Ralph Patt wiki

I never met Ralph Patt or heard him playing live, but I found his Major Thirds Tuning and his approach to learning jazz standards to be wonderfully useful and logical. When I started learning jazz guitar, after our Norwalk High School Jazz Band won the nationals, I saw the gravity that Berkeley School of Music had achieved to pull jazz students to their school. I studied their jazz guitar method books and the legendary Real Book which came out of there. This Real Book, a “fake book”, that infringed upon copyright protections to give playable, but not necessarily “as recorded” chords for jazz standards, became ubiquitous in the gigging jazz band world. So did the philosophical basis it embodied. In the method books put out by Berkeley for jazz guitar, this same philosophy was laid out. It became an accepted, maybe THE accepted way to think about jazz standards, jazz playing for the guitar, and the nature of jazz itself.

It took me years to realize, after seeing Ralph Patt’s “Vanilla Book”, just what The Real Book and Berkeley School of Music were doing. During times when duodecaphonic music, serial music, atonal ‘twelve tone row’ music was dominating much of the art music and education circles, the philosophy of how to achieve ‘jazz’ on guitar (and other instruments) that was embedded (without much notice) in the Real Book Series and systematically taught in the Berkeley Guitar Method books was gently causing a revolutionary shift in the appreciation of exactly the nature of “Jazz” was, prescribing, for some, “What Jazz IS”

This, with the mystification of “improvisational solos” by many (if not most) professional jazz players, began to drive the argument that Jazz IS AN HISTORIC ART FORM, FROZEN INTO A TIME FRAME DURING WHICH THE SOUND PALATE OF JAZZ EXPANDED FROM EARLY ETHNIC GIN JOINTS THROUGH INCREASING COMPLEXITY WHICH REACHED IT’S ZENITH WHEN THE “TENSIONS” ON THE 9TH, 11TH, AND 13TH WERE FULLY EXPLORED AND MODAL ‘FUSION’ WAS EXHAUSTED. Latin rhythms were co-opted and bebop was so esoteric that it drove away dance audiences. What more harmonic inovation could there be after the altered dominant and fully memorized licks on minor 2, Dominant 7 and Tonic 6th? Jazz, some people argued, existed as history and what we can do with it, the onlything we can do, is repeat the history, copy the music, revitalize it like an old classical symphony with a dead composer. To me, this sounded like they were saying “Jazz is Dead”. This also meant that we had to educate students to “keep it alive” (or rather to remember it like we, as family, sit at the tomb, remembering our deceased loved ones) , had to play the tensions and movements and riffs we learn from listening to the inventors and old professionals of jazz.

This, and the ABSOLUTE necessity to avoid clams (wrong notes) and to sound like the recorded jazz music the professionals would sell to make their livings, made JAZZ AS HISTORY a music that was NEVER improvised. If the players were more honest, some of them who were caught in the trap of ‘classicalizing’ jazz, might put a section of truly improvised music, maybe 8 bars or measures to say that there was SOME improv. If one wanted to see improvised music one had to find places to listen where so much money wasn’t riding on there being no dissatisfied customers. Dangerous music became, largely, something rare and small. It was much like the million dollar “live” concerts of many pop musicians of the time which were almost entirely prerecorded with a small section of “live” talking to the audience or a single live song to avoid law suits. Being an usher at many of these concerts over the years, I saw how the pop and, more disappointingly, the jazz artists would play ‘note for note’ concerts of supposedly jazz ( and therefor improvised) music back to back, from the 7 o’clock show to the 10 o’clock show or the next day. The wonder of classical music, if it is not dead itself, is that it incorporates other music forms and preserves some version of them into the future. What is defined as classical is always growing and composers reach out for new sounds and methods and styles.

I always argued that “jazz” was/is the live improvisation version of “music that incorporates other sounds and styles and rhythms and ideas”, music that is alive because the definition of what it is keeps growing. If so much of the philosophical and methodological emphasis of the Berkeley School Jazzers was/is invested in fixing complex extended chordal harmony to standard ‘jazzable’ songs, then, eventually, it all sounds and becomes the same thing. The palate is limited by the notion that, for instance, a large flat nine, flat five chord is the alternate dominant of moment, which prescribes, allows or ‘fits’ a certain set of single note harmonic structures which ‘function’ in a predetermined way to move us from tension to release and consonance. Even if the inventors and teachers of this only intended to increase the understanding of how certain jazzers used chords to fix harmony and create melodic structure, hoping that students would, of course, find their own sounds and impromptu moments of genius and musical self-expression and ways to jazz it up, the fact is that so much “jazz” is no longer improvised at all.

Ralph Patt’s “Vanilla Book” is a solution to the sameness of sound of prescribed complex harmony and a “carpet” foundation set by particular ‘tensions’ in the harmonic presentation of the song. He takes the songs he considers to be jazzable standards and gives Vanilla chord changes for them. Minors, Majors, Sevenths are the harmonic palate of these transcriptions. The music, still triadic, allows more exploration of the twelve or more possible tones that can be used as harmonic or contrapuntal melodic enhancements of the melody. The most famous teacher I ever had may have been Lenny Breau, who thought that there was not only a jazz standard reportoire to contain or constrict his ideas, but that pop songs (really any recognizable or relatable melody) were just as jazzable, tried to expand outward from the prison he was seeing that “only certain tunes and harmonies were Jazz” I think Ralph Patt wanted standards to be rethought as bare bones that could be reharmonized in many, not just one of many possible heptatonic (or octatonic or otherwise) melodic patterns.

I, therefor present Ralph Patt’s Vanilla Book here in case the websites his fans are paying for now, goes down.

About “The Vanilla Book”

This book attempts to uncover the basic (“Vanilla”) chord changes to over 400 of the most commonly played jazz “standards”. There are many good books that show how to use chord substitutions, but if the basic chord changes are not known, substitutions and embellishments often confuse the improviser and the listener. Embellishments to basic chords such as added 6ths, 9ths, 13ths, flat 5ths etc. are usually determined by the melody notes and the style of music being played. Chord substitutions are influenced by the style of jazz being played and the individual preference of the musicians. The purpose of this book is to help the jazz player learn the basic “changes” and allow the player to add embellishments and substitutions on a solid framework. Basic chord progressions are somewhat subjective. This book reflects the way I hear these tunes and is meant to be a starting point in the never ending quest for the “right” chord changes. I’m open to different opinions. I hope this can be used as a forum to discuss basic chord progressions to jazz standards

Vanilla Book Index

To use the Vanilla Book online, click on a letter of the alphabet to search for a song’s title. Click a song title to view The Vanilla Book chord changes. You can click the print icon on your browser to print a copy of the song’s chord changes. A B C D E F G H I J L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

AFTER YOU’VE GONE
AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’
AIR MAIL SPECIAL
AIREGIN
ALEXANDER’S RAGTIME BAND
ALL BLUES
ALL GOD’S CHILDREN GOT RHYTHM
ALL OF ME
ALL OF YOU
ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE
ALMOST LIKE BEING IN LOVE
ALONE TOGETHER
ALONG CAME BETTY
ALWAYS
AM I BLUE
AMAZING GRACE
ANGEL EYES
ANYTHING GOES
APRIL IN PARIS
AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU’RE YOU
AS LONG AS I LIVE
AS TIME GOES BY
AT SUNDOWN
AUTUMN IN NEW YORK
AUTUMN LEAVES
AVALON
AZURE

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BASIN STREET BLUES
BAUBLES, BANGLES AND BEADS
BEAUTIFUL LOVE
BERNIE’S TUNE
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA
BEWITCHED, BOTHERED, AND BEWILDERED
BIDIN’ MY TIME
BILL BAILEY
BIRTH OF THE BLUES
BLACK AND BLUE
BLACK COFFEE
BLUE BOSSA
BLUE LOU
BLUE MONK
BLUE MOON
BLUE ROOM, THE
BLUESETTE
BLUE SKIES
BODY AND SOUL
BORN TO BE BLUE
BROADWAY
BUT BEAUTIFUL
BUT NOT FOR ME
BY MYSELF
BYE BYE BLACKBIRD
BYE BYE BLUES

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CABIN IN THE SKY
CAN’T GET OUT OF THIS MOOD
CAN’T HELP LOVIN’ DAT MAN
CAN’T WE BE FRIENDS
CARAVAN
CARNIVAL (BLACK ORPHEUS)
CHEEK TO CHEEK
CHELSEA BRIDGE
CHEROKEE
CHICAGO
CHRISTMAS SONG
COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
COMES LOVE
CONFIRMATION
COTTAGE FOR SALE
COTTON TAIL
CRAZY RHYTHM
CRY ME A RIVER
CUTE

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DANCING IN THE DARK
DANCING ON THE CEILING
DANNY BOY
DARN THAT DREAM
DAY BY DAY
DAY IN – DAY OUT
DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES
DEARLY BELOVED
‘DEED I DO
DEEP PURPLE
DESAFINADA
DJANGO
DO NOTHIN’ TILL YOU HEAR FROM ME
DON’T BLAME ME
DON’T GET AROUND MUCH ANY MORE
DON’T TAKE YOUR LOVE FROM ME
DOXY