Whisper Not

The bluesiness of the half-diminished seventh chord

When I was in college, I picked up a cassette of Legacy by Jon Faddis from the dollar bin at the record store. It's a kind of greatest hits of jazz trumpet, and it was one of the best dollars I ever spent. The last three tunes were especially wonderful: "A Child Is Born" by Thad Jones, "Lil' Darlin'" by Neal Hefti, and "Whisper Not" by Benny Golson. I have to give it up to the producer for that sequencing; the obvious move would have been to end the album on "Lil' Darlin'", but instead, just when you've been lulled into a peaceful slumber, "Whisper Not" opens up a whole new and unexpected atmosphere of nocturnal mystery. I rewound this part of the tape endlessly.

Here's a live performance of Benny Golson playing "Whisper Not" with the Jazz Messengers in France in 1958, along with Art Blakey on drums, Lee Morgan on trumpet,  Bobby Timmons on piano and Jymie Merritt on bass.

Golson gives some insight into his compositional process in this Jazzwax interview with Marc Meyers.

I used to start by writing the chords to a song first and then adding the melody. Later I did it the other way—with the melody first and then the chords. Now I write bar-by-bar. Why chords first? What I wanted to do is construct the platform musicians would use to improvise. The chords were like a network across which musicians would travel, so they were more important. The chords had to be beautiful and inspirational.

The metaphor of chords as a network across which musicians would travel is one of the best I have ever heard for how jazz improvisation works.

I love melody. A song for me has to have melodic content. But melodies are nothing more than intervals, like a fourth or a sixth. Melodies are just a series of intervals. What's fascinating about intervals is you can trigger listeners' emotions when you use the right one, like skipping a whole 6th or 7th, up or down. By doing this, you reach deep into the grotto of the heart’s core.

The grotto of the heart's core! Here's what Golson had to say about "Whisper Not" specifically.

There's no hidden meaning behind the song's name. I just liked the two words together. Critics used to intellectualize about its meaning, insisting the song title was related to Homer and Nietzsche. I’d just laugh. I wrote it in Boston at George Wein's Storyville club when I was with Dizzy Gillespie's big band [in 1956]. I wrote that tune in 20 minutes.

Here's a more recent live performance, in which Golson phrases unbelievably far behind the beat.

My favorite version of "Whisper Not" is Dizzy Gillespie's big band arrangement, which includes Golson on tenor. I don't know whether Dizzy or Golson wrote the chart, but it's a killer.

Out of all the many recordings of "Whisper Not", the one that gets sampled by hip-hop producers the most is the one by George Shearing. It's a so-so arrangement, but it has nice sonic ambiance. For example, check out this Statik Selektah track.

Leonard Feather wrote some mildly goofy lyrics to "Whisper Not", and since then, many vocalists have recorded it. Fortunately, the melody transcends the words. I like Ella Fitzgerald's version the best.

This obscure 90s rap song begins with a slowed-down sample of Ella, it's weird and great.

Okay, so, the tune. I learned it from the chart in The New Real Book Volume II. The melody is an immediately memorable one, with a natural bluesiness, yet it also threads its way through three different minor keys. It is not difficult to write an accessible bluesy melody, and if you have been to music school, it's not difficult to write something with a lot of key changes, but few people can do both at the same time.

The tune gets some of its smoky mystery from its many half-diminished seventh chords. If you come from a rock or pop background like I did, this chord is an exotic sound. To understand its role in jazz, start with the C natural minor scale:

Now build a chord on D, the second scale degree, by going around clockwise and adding every alternating scale degree:

This chord has two names. In classical terminology, it's Dø7 (D half-diminished seventh). It's like a D diminished seventh chord, but the seventh is not fully diminished, thus the term "half-diminished." (If this makes your head hurt, you are not alone.) Jazz musicians also call the chord Dm7b5 (D minor seventh flat five), because it's a Dm7 with a flatted fifth. (This name makes my head hurt less.) In the context of C minor, the chord usually has predominant function, setting up a G7 chord.

Some less important half-diminished facts: Dø7 has the same pitches as Fm6 (F minor sixth), and Benny Golson is thinking of this equivalence in "Whisper Not", as we will discuss below. I sometimes like to think of Dø7 as a rootless voicing of G7sus4(b9). Taken in isolation, the chord has an inherent bluesiness, since its pitches comprise four of the six notes in the D Aebersold blues scale. Here's a more detailed interactive explainer of the chord.

Now you're ready to think about the chord changes in "Whisper Not." Here's the A section:

| Cm  Cm/Bb | Aø7  D7b9 | Gm  Gm/F | Eø7  A7b9 |
| Dm  Dm/C  | Eø7  A7b9 | Dm7  Em7 | Fm7  G7b9 |

The first bar is in C minor. The second and third bars are in G minor. The fourth through seventh bars are in D minor, and the eighth bar wraps back around to C minor. Golson achieves some of these key changes through pivot chords:

• Aø7 is both the vi chord in C minor and the ii chord in G minor.

• Eø7 is both the vi chord in F minor and the ii chord in D minor.

The second A section is much the same as the first until the ending.

| Cm  Cm/Bb | Aø7  D7b9 | Gm  Gm/F | Eø7  A7b9 |
| Dm  Dm/C  | Eø7  A7b9 | Dm7  Em7 | Fm7  Bb7  |

You might think that those last two chords are taking you into E-flat major, or maybe back to C minor via the backdoor ii-V. But no! Instead, the B section begins with a very unstable Aø7. 

| Aø7       | D7        | Gm7      | C7        |
| Eø7       | A7b9      | Dø7      | G7b9      |

The melody suggests that the first chord is really an inverted Cm6, and then the F-sharp over the D7 evokes the sharp fourth of the blues in C, even though by now the chords are telling us that we are really in G minor. Cool. In the sixth and seventh bars, the movement from A7b9 to Dø7 suggests V-i in D minor, but the Dø7 is too unstable to be a real tonic. Instead, it's the beginning of a ii-V in C minor to set up the final A section:

| Cm  Cm/Bb | Aø7  D7b9 | Gm  Gm/F | Eø7  A7b9 |
| Dm  Dm/C  | Eø7  A7b9 | Dm  Dm/C | Ab7  G7   |

I won't talk through the ending, you can see it on the chart. But it's a classic Benny Golson move to have a descending chromatic bassline under a rising melody. 

I have been wanting to learn this tune on guitar forever. The melody is not hard, and the chords aren't either, but I wanted to play them both at the same time, and that is awkward. I finally realized that if I changed the key, I could give myself more open strings to work with. So here's how I've been playing it.

Ethan Iverson talks a lot about "folkloric integrity". Like I said above, writing a complicated tune with a lot of key changes is not as hard as you might think, especially if you don't care whether it sounds musically logical or not. The challenge is to make harmonic complexity sound organic and natural. The melody to "Whisper Not" and Benny Golson's solos on it do not sound like running a maze. They sound like soulful blues that just happens to move through a few different keys. 

"Whisper Not" also provided the title for Benny Golson's autobiography. He has a whole chapter about the blues.

I hug the blues to my chest the way Whitman hugged the seashore. I’m talking about the low-down dirty blues, not some faux imitation with substitute chords obscuring the feeling. There comes a time when only the gospel-inflected, carnally tested blues can accomplish an old, down-home spiritual cure. To play the blues is to cure yourself by admitting what ails you. Songful complaint, intelligent mourning—telling it like it is. I’m speaking about the origin of blues more than a hundred years ago: the field hollers and the gut-wrenching, call-and-response of collective singing on Civil War–era cotton plantations and farms. The blues, with its three basic chords and a few authentic modifications, is thoroughly “American,” the heroic source and origin of jazz. If a scholar or a hipster from outer space dropped in, demanding the keys to the jazz mother lode, you could invite your newly arrived guest directly to hear Tommy Flanagan’s treatment of Billy Strayhorn’s “The Meaning of the Blues.” Or stop your eager visitor in his tracks with Ray Charles’s “Georgia,” alongside Hank Crawford and Jimmy McGriff playing “Lift Every Heart.” If you want to lovingly bruise the ears of your new extraterrestrial pal, introduce him to Pops’s “West End Blues,” or maybe to his duets with Ella Fitzgerald on Gershwin’s sublime scores from Porgy and Bess. When was the last time you listened to “Bess, You Is My Woman” or “I Loves You, Porgy”? And if the grease is not yet adequate, try the deepest essence of blues: Dizzy Gillespie’s “After Hours,” recorded for Verve in 1957 with Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt, and Ray Bryant. Or check out Johnny Hodges with Duke Ellington’s Orchestra sliding across Rabbit’s own song, “Jeep’s Blues.” Give a spin to Cannonball Adderley’s seductive “Barefoot Sunday Blues.” How about Horace Silver’s “Cape Verdean Blues”? All else falling short, play Art Tatum’s “Aunt Hagar’s Blues.” You dig?

No matter how sophisticated one’s ears, sometimes one’s heart yearns for the suffering and joy of the deepest roots of jazz. The blues are lyrical explorations that do not require the orthodox rigor of twelve bars. Their unrivaled emotional persuasion will never disappear from our wounded planet (pp. 309-310).

This is the condition that my writing and playing aspire to.