A riff/motif: Chinese or 50s-USA drive-in...source?

Cafe Society
1

There’s a brief riff within an instrumental interlude in Diana Krall’s recording of “All or Nothing at All” on Love Songs that to me conjures up 1950s era music, drive-in burger joints with waitresses on roller skates and modded hot rods in the parking lot and a juke box spinning 45 RPM vinyl records.

Snippet

I asked some friends what it is that she (or her band, it’s the guitar that’s doing it) is referencing in this riff, i.e., what’s the original tune that it’s from. Got a lot of “Huh? Dunnno what you mean” responses, a couple of “Yeah, I know what you mean but I don’t know what it’s from either”, and a couple of “Oh, that sounds like the riff that folks play whenever they want to say ‘Yo, this is Chinese’, like when the movie is about to fade to a scene in Chinatown”.

I know what they mean, too. Here is an example of that, snipped from the final bars of a track titled “Samba do Avião” on Morelenbaum2/Sakamoto’s album A Day in New York, where by the time of the gong-like crash at the end you can practically smell the Kung Po Chicken w/Hot & Sour Soup on the air.

But even though melodically they are the same notes in the same pattern, the riff in the Krall track definitely conjures up a different response, and I still think it’s a different auditory meme, definitely something a la American Graffiti.

Well, now I’m curious about both of them, wondering who else gets the imagery and sense of “Yeah, that’s an auditory stereotype riff” on these two and wondering if anyone knows the original source audio for either of them.

2

Well, both riffs are what are known as pentatonic scales. Pentatonic meaing, obviously, 5 tones. There are two basic pentatonics - the major and minor.

Major and minor pentatonic scales contain the exact same intervallic steps, starting from different root notes (i.e. C major and A minor contain the same tones, but each start from a different place in the scale)

C major pentatonic: C D E G A C
A minor pentatonic: A C D E G A

(This is what is known as a relative minor relationship - A is the relative minor of C major.)

But to quickly answer your post, the pentatonic scales have a very distinctive sounds, and are used in a great variety of non-western musical traditions. One of them happens to be Asian, and is often identified as the ‘Chinese riff’ - your riff is a variant of that. The most common one is the riff that can be heard in the intro to the disco classic Kung-Fu Fighting and in numerous ‘entering Chinatown’ scenarios in bad movies. However, pentatonics appear in almost every musical tradition in some shape or another.

The pentatonic scale is also often used in American traditional rock, blues, and folk musics - with the minor pentatonic scale being the first scale 90% of all electric guitarists learn, and the major pentatonic appearing a lot more in folk, bluegrass and country styled musical traditions.

Basically, the pentatonic is an incredibly versatile scale, and because it avoids some of the more ‘conflicted’ (my own term, no cite) tones of the (western) traditional major scale - the 7 and the 4, it’s REALLY hard to play an ‘awkward’ or ‘wrong’ (meaning unintended) note with it.

Try noodling on just the black keys of the piano, you’ll see what I mean…

And if really want to get crazy, check out some quartal theory. That sh*t’ll drive you nuts.

3

The notes are more or less the same, but the style is different. The Krall riff sounds jazzy, which is a function of the time-stealing (instead of straight eighth notes, there’s a dotted eighth and a sixteenth: “doo di-doo di-doo doo, doo di-doo”) and the stepped bass. They’re both hallmarks of light jazz, and also of the orchestral light pop sound of the 60s (heard in quite a few period Christmas songs recorded by people like Steve and Eydie).

The other snippet is very deliberately made to sound “Asian” (which seems to mean “musically spartan” in this case). No background harmony, no time-stealing, nothing but straight eighths all the way through.

4

It’s both!

I don’t know if she’s trying to evoke both the ‘chinese’ feel and a 50s pop feel, but that is, to me, the effect.

What it sounds like to me is someone doing a 50s pop tune and trying to evoke a chinese feel without sacrificing the feel of their own genre.

5

OK, but c’mon folks, help me out here…what is it about this little musical phrase (the Krall snippet) that resonates “50s”? The tune itself, “All or Nothing at All”, is standard jazzy-torch stuff; it’s this one little riff-meme that brings up visions of chromium bumpers and goin’ to the hop.

6

But it doesn’t. Not for me, at least. Fifties Rock ‘n’ Roll is not the musical corner of the middle of last century that the snippet evokes for me. Light jazz/light pop (a la Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme) of circa mid-60s, yes.

7

Well, yeah, that was the other possibility, that it’s “just me”.

I figured if it was the same as (or highly reminiscent of) an intro or bridge section of a well-known piece from that era, and/or from something retro such as Stray Cats or Meat Loaf (I could imagine it inserted into “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, for example), someone would recognize it if I asked, so I did.

I’ve had a couple other people I played it for before posting it here say “Yeah, I know what you mean, but I don’t know what it’s from”, so I’m hoping for some resonances here.

8

It’s the quality of the guitar that does it for me.