Ben Markley Trio
Live Jazz music? In Dubois? This was a first but definitely not a last. We were thrilled when concert attendees had the opportunity to learn more about jazz and enjoy a something we've never brought before...
HOW JAZZ WORKS
Transcript of Presentation by the Ben Markley Trio
August 17, 2025 at the Headwaters Center, Dubois WY
Ben Markley: The greats of this music are masters of variation. You know, if you listen to oneof the famous songs by the Beatles, like Yellow Submarine, it’s always going to sound like Yellow Submarine. If we play Billy Brown right now, it’s going to be different because I get to make that choice to play different things. Seth is going to play a different bass line. Brian is going to play different on a lot of the accompaniment.
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Ultimately, we take a song that has a melody, a song form that is perhaps 12 measures long,
with 6 chords. We take that form and we play it multiple times, and we improvise, based on the
melody, the chords, and the scales that go along with them.
Here's what the chords sound like with no melody, and then with the chords.
These two are very accomplished musicians. I’m going to let them tell you a little aboutthemselves.
Seth Lewis: My name is Seth Lewis. I work with Ben at the University of Wyoming. You heard Ben talk about melody. The bass does that, but unlike the piano, I play one note at a time. The piano plays chords. What I do is I take those chords and I pick which notes from within those chords I'm going to play to make the foundation. I'm constructing an accompanying baseline, playing each piece of the harmony and moving between the chords. I'm improvising the baseline based on what is happening harmonically moving the song. The same thing is true when we get to our solos. We take those same chords, and instead of accompanying, we're creating our own melodies.
Does anybody whistle to themselves or sing? Sometimes you don't know what you're singing, you're singing something that you've heard, something that's familiar, or something that's in your mind. That's really what we're doing when we're improvising. We're hearing these melodies, and it's a spark of inspiration to for us to think about new melodies to create. Ultimately we're trying to weave our melodies to go through the chords as they change seamlessly. You're just hearing an expression of of one clear idea that ties them all together and ultimately, hopefully makes something musical and it's beautiful.
Brian Claxton: I play the drums, which is really fun. I think my main responsibility is the way I see it to bring continuity between the melody harmony and the rhythmic elements. Even though they're playing with great time and great rhythm, it’s a fun aspect to have things that are continuous and then things that vary. So the high-hat provides like the snapping and toe tapping element. But then I also provide the rhythmic foundation and then I play around with the melody and harmony.
The drummer can kind of create this propulsion that feels like a rhythmic resolution. The easier way to explain it is I just get to have fun and hit some stuff.
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Ben Markley: What's really neat about them is they're excellent players, Brian and Seth, butalso very accomplished in the academics. We all have our doctorates in this music. So we're pretty good about teaching and explaining.
You know, jazz has been around for quite a while, and one of the neat things about the history of this music is that we're lucky to have almost all of it, all of the history, recorded in full. When we go back to JS Bach or Mozart, you can have to hear you have to go back to people performing them. But we can actually go to the direct source and hear that. What are some of the differences between jazz and, say, Western classical music? I think one of the biggest things is rhythm. For that we are borrowing heavily, almost exclusively, from theAfrican culture. We can kind of go into into some of the islands and there's a mixture of things going on, but for for me the bottom line that's different is syncopation. In American musical history, one of the first places you might have heard it is from the accomplished pianist Scott Joplin. He wrote The Entertainer and the Maple Leaf Rag.
If you look it up from the dictionary, it talks about the unexpected. One of the big components of what makes it swing are the off-notes. So if you divided a beat up in half – 1 and 2 and 3 and4 – there would be more of an emphasis on the “and.” It gives the music an excitement that kind of pushes it forward.Seth Lewis: In African culture, they talk about the human being an individual instrument. It’s in our bodies. If you think about your heartbeat, that's the source of all of our life, right? And so that pulse is the thing that brings folks together. And in this music, Ben talks about individualities where each person is going to have their own individual feel… So we are always listening to each other and trying to adjust and accommodate, while still providing a solid foundation of where that feeling is.
Brian Claxton: In my instruments, I play a basic subdivision, I'm almost always playing quarter notes in the accompaniment. This provides a kind of gnosis of where the beat is. Sometimes I'll add little embellishments and that's just to provide a little bit of momentum, a little compulsion, give the beat a dance, if you will. But that is the link between these two instruments. That's the rhythmic foundation of the music.
Ben Markley: Also, playing groups of 2 beats versus groups of 3 beats is a big part of African music which has definitely worked its way into jazz. If you keep that rhythm going, it creates a three- over-four pattern, which basically means you're kind of playing two different time signatures at once. The feeling that that gets to the music is it makes it feel relaxed. and energetic at the same time.
It’s kind of a miraculous combination that shouldn't make sense, but it does when you feel it and you hear it. It’s really great for dancing and getting people moving to the feeling with its kind of electric energy. But again, it's like really relaxed at the same time. We’re basically talking about a swing kind of feel. We've never played this tune [“Billie’sBounce” by Charlie Parker] like this before, but we're going to try to play the melody the first time through straight. This is kind of similar to what you would hear in a lot of Western classical music. It’s very dependent upon the downbeat. When we play swing, we're very dependent on the downbeat too, but we also accent the off beat as well.
So we're going to play the first time straight, and then the second time we'll play it through with swing.
Do you get the difference? Definitely. For me, it makes me feel alive to play it the second way.