Head (music)

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In music, particularly jazz, the head is the main melody or theme of a piece^[1]. Standard practice is to play the head at the beginning and the end of a performance of the song. The head of a piece can be any number of bars long; most commonly it is a series of multiple 4- or 8-bar phrases. For example, the 12-bar blues and many 16-bar forms consist of 4-bar sections, and many other jazz heads are 32 bars long, consisting of four 8-bar phrases. Notable exceptions are Miles Davis' Blue in Green, featuring a 10-bar form, and Scott LaFaro's 20-bar Gloria's Step, consisting of a repeated 5-bar phrase followed by a 10-bar section. More complicated formats are possible, an extreme example being Brad Mehldau's Boomer, whose form consists of repeated sections where the bassist and pianist play in 7/8 time for 8 bars while the drummer plays in 4/4 time for 7 bars.

The head sets the key and chord progression of the piece. The chord progression, being some number of bars in some rhythm, is what jazz musicians refer to as the form, which cycles indefinitely. Performers will improvise solos over some number of repetitions of the form, eventually returning to the head and ending the song.

Head is also used to refer to the beginning of the form itself. In jazz circles, this sense may be referred to as the A section (or simply the A), the top of the form, the top of the head or the head.

In addition, there is a musical direction in classical music called Da capo, which translates from Italian as the head. Upon this direction, the performer(s) are to return to the very beginning of the piece of music and play it again, ignoring any repeat signs.

John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," a jazz standard, is a unique and easily recognized head, which can be heard in this Ogg audio file: Giant Steps.ogg.