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Contrafact
A contrafact is a musical work based on a prior work. The term comes from classical music and has only since the 1970s been applied to jazz, where it is still not standard. In classical music,
Jazz#
Well-known examples of contrafacts in jazz include the Charlie Parker/Miles Davis bop tune “Donna Lee,” which uses the chord changes of the standard “Back Home Again in Indiana” or Thelonious Monk’s jazz standard “Evidence”, which borrows the chord progression from Jesse Greer and Raymond Klages’s song “Just You, Just Me” (1929). The Gershwin tune “I Got Rhythm” has proved especially amenable to contrafactual recomposition: the popularity of its “rhythm changes” is second only to that of the 12-bar blues as a basic harmonic structure used by jazz composers.
Classical#
Examples from the classical oeuvre include the Ave Maria (Bach/Gounod); Sinfonia by Luciano Berio using fragments from Mahler; George Crumb borrowing Chopin’s nocturnes; or Matt A. Mason’s “Heiligenstadt Echo” which takes from Beethoven’s Sonata in A♭ major, op. 110.
See also#
- Contrafactum
- Stomp progression