Jimi Hendrix - All Along The Watchtower

Until approximately the 1960s, songs were marketed in print form primarily as sheet music, including a composed piano accompaniment. Beginning around 1930, chord symbols were often also provided, for guitarists and for pianists who did not read music well enough to play the written out accompaniments.

Jazz musicians have always tended to reduce song arrangements to a basic harmonic framework, in order to create the space needed for improvisation and chord symbol notation would have helped them to do this. In the early 1940s, a commercial product called Tune Dex Cards presented songs with just melody and chord symbols, suggesting a general acceptance by musicians of what we now call lead sheet format. When jazz musicians of the 1940s wrote their own tunes, they probably would have used lead sheet format, notating the harmonic accompaniment with chord symbols, rather than with a piano arrangement. Early, illegal fake books used this format as well.

Since the 1960s, jazz education, once nearly non existent, has become widespread. This has created a market for lead sheet versions of standards, intended for improvisers. At the same time, amateur music making no longer means gathering around the piano to read through sheet music arrangements. In the print music market, sheet music has now been almost entirely supplanted by fake books.

The quality of fake books has improved considerably over the last half century. In the 1950s and 1960s, fake books were generally encountered as poorly edited bootleg collections, they are now produced legally, and publishers usually make at least some effort at accuracy. The current approach to indicating harmony is the approach that jazz musicians favor, reduction to a basic functional framework. Chord progressions are often altered, and stated in terms of harmonic cliches, standard devices that are easy for improvisers to work with.

In the 1940s, our list of jazz standards shows a growing number of tunes composed by jazz performers. These compositions in many cases never appeared in printed form, but were marketed to the public only as recordings. If they ever were notated, it would probably have been in lead sheet form, for the benefit of the composer and his fellow musicians. The harmonic language was basically that of the previous decade, with the addition of some modern devices.

Source: Jazz Standards: Harmony and Form by Peter Spitzer

Jimi Hendrix - All Along The Watchtower

• Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Classic Rock
• Released on: Electric Ladyland Album
• Written by: Bob Dylan

"Jimi Hendrix was the recipient of several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1967, readers of Melody Maker voted him the Pop Musician of the Year, and in 1968, Rolling Stone declared him the Performer of the Year."

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