"Modern" Jazz Harmony

[omphalopsychos]

I agree with Jeff. Chords using secundal and quartal construction in jazz have been around for 60 years. In that tradition I think some recent additions from folks like Vic Juris have influenced players like Gilad. Some voicings that come to mind are to take any chord you already know and replace one of the “important” voicesm with its more ambiguous diatonic neighbor.

Neo soul has some cool harmonic ideas.

I think people like Mary Halvorson are really pushing it with using functional chords in an anti-functional way.

[cosmic gumbo]

It all boils down to how you want to arrange or order the journey of tonic and dominant. You're simply either on one or the other.

[ragman1]

I'd call what Kreisberg does modern harmony. Whatever the background, which is usually fairly standard, he sounds like he's playing on a different planet. I don't know what he does - fifths, ascending major thirds, however he gets the sound.

But whatever, it's definitely 'modern'. To my ear, anyway.

[princeplanet]

It all boils down to how you want to arrange or order the journey of tonic and dominant. You're simply either on one or the other.

Interesting to read this. I approach all Functional Jazz harmony that way, ie, divide everything into either Dominant , Altered Dominant or Tonic. But as I've not done much delving (as yet) into non functional tunes, do you think the T/D strategy can still work? Do you simply look at one chord at a time and decide if it's chord tones layout to favour either a Tonic or Dominant treatment regardless of the chord either before or after? Will you find some chords too ambiguous for this approach?

I always thought CST was the preferred approach for Modern Jazz Harmony....

[princeplanet]

check this out. starting with a maj 7 chord, by adding a b6 to the scale you see it morph as you go up the scale:

CGBE
DAbCF

so those two are nothing, but then

EADG
FBEAb
GCFA

Your last 3 posts have me totally confused! I'd love to know what you and Christian are on about re converting BH stuff into modern chords, can you point me to something a little easier to understand?

[cosmic gumbo]

Interesting to read this. I approach all Functional Jazz harmony that way, ie, divide everything into either Dominant , Altered Dominant or Tonic. But as I've not done much delving (as yet) into non functional tunes, do you think the T/D strategy can still work? Do you simply look at one chord at a time and decide if it's chord tones layout to favour either a Tonic or Dominant treatment regardless of the chord either before or after? Will you find some chords too ambiguous for this approach?

I always thought CST was the preferred approach for Modern Jazz Harmony....

Modern harmony I'm thinking more determining key center shifts and targets I want to hit. Are the changes implying some type of cadence? Lots of room for interpretation.

[christianm77]

If you have a non functional progression who always have the option to make it functional.

OTOH if you have a functional progression you can always treat it as nonfunctional

Another way to get to the everything on everything concept, rather than oo now I plays a modern.

[princeplanet]

If you have a non functional progression who always have the option to make it functional.

OTOH if you have a functional progression you can always treat it as nonfunctional

Another way to get to the everything on everything concept, rather than oo now I plays a modern.

Not sure what you mean here, I obviously have heard people playing outside against plain standards, but how do you sound functional against non functional harmony, ie, without Dom to Tonic cadences...

[christianm77]

Not sure what you mean here, I obviously have heard people playing outside against plain standards, but how do you sound functional against non functional harmony, ie, without Dom to Tonic cadences...

Tonal targets. You make a dominant.

If I had to simplify it down, this is how my friend and colleague Joe Browne put it and there’s a lot of truth:

Post modal playing = floating on the changes, exploring the sound of chords

Functional/Bebop = playing into the chords, resolving

If you want to sound less functional, remove the 3rds from your dominants. Altered Dom’s without thirds are very much part of modern soloing, but to be fair Lester started this journey in the late 30s.

But I don’t quite like this summing up, because it ignores the melody and is focussed on chords. What I now realise is that the melody of a well written modern tune has a massive bearing on how to solo on it, just as it does with 1920s music. As true of Havona as it is of Stardust.

All of those extensions and modal implications come from melody on chords. Another reason why I dislike CST is it waters many of these sounds down, relating them to a generic 7 note wash that sounds like jazz school.

That’s not what I hear Wayne doing for instance. And a lot of early soloists were key centric - modal/pentatonic even, and often playing creative rephrasings of the melody rather than changes per se. I hear Wayne carrying this on in his soloing, on a few of his tunes there’s a path through where you can play the blues. He’s kind of got more like that, less and less language into his later years. And yet I learned bop scales from him, apparently he knows and can still play the whole history.

Jordan’s/Stephon Harris’s approach seems to cut to the heart of the sound. It’s not necessarily what everyone does - it has a style - but it seems a good approach and I like its openness. And it is super flexible. (Also it seems to map onto what a lot of contemporary players - Donny McCaslin, Joel Frahm, Lage Lund - hear things.)

Interestingly the bebop era kind of neglected the melody side of it and focussed on the chords... that seems to have begat the current educational paradigm.

Of course there are modern tunes that don’t have much of a melody to them, but there’s not much point playing those. Just put the record on.

[princeplanet]

Tonal targets. You make a dominant.

...

I like what you wrote about nonfuctional on functional, but for the reverse, when you say "make a dominant", could you give me an example?

[christianm77]

I like what you wrote about nonfuctional on functional, but for the reverse, when you say "make a dominant", could you give me an example?

Sure.

Oh look Reginald, there’s a Gmaj7#11 chord

I say D7 to you Gmaj7#11 with any and all subs I deem fit.

Inner Urge A for instance becomes

E7alt Am6 C7 F Bb7 Eb Ab7 Db

And you can add in ii vs obviously. Forward motion into the 1 of each chord (rhythmically) then you ignore the chord and set up the next one.

Important thing to realise is rhythmically the dominants anticipate. So that E7alt happens in the last bar of the previous form. This is what you’d play if there was a break for instance. Really bop solos should start at the end of the previous form - you are always anticipating, driving the music forward.

This is the resolving way right? Everyone knows what a major or minor chord sounds like so don’t overdo it on those. Let the dominant dominate.

Drive a truck through it. You could end playing mostly Bb7 alt on F for instance....

The other way is play dominant on all chords.

Am6/F#m7b5 becomes D7

Brecker did this a lot

Fmaj7#11 becomes G7

Does that make any sense?

[christianm77]

Somewhere in this interview Evan Marien (Holdsworth) makes the point that every chord in nonfunctional changes music can be considered a major or minor while the sound of the dominant always disrupts the sense of non functional tonality (iirc)

Dominants always sound functional. Wayne shorter plays with this a lot actually. They may not resolve V-I but they always want to resolve. Even in tonal changes playing we have

b7-1 4-1 2-1 b6-1 7-1 b2-1

All being fairly usual and some very common. And along with 5-1 that’s 7 of the 12 possibilities. Diminished symmetry gives us the others....

So looking at it that way, playing changes and playing ‘nonfunctional harmony’ isn’t that different... if everything can be perked up into a dominant on one hand or softened into a tonic major/minor on the other....

[princeplanet]

...
Drive a truck through it. You could end playing mostly Bb7 alt on F for instance....

hahaha, I like the cut of your gib (don't you guys say "lorry"?)

Yes Christian, you remain one of the few on here that seems to always make sense, cheers.

[christianm77]

So what happens to the subdominant then? Does that become tonic or dominant? And why isn't only two chords going to sound boring?

Subdominant is dominant with the teeth out. The teeth in this case is the leading note of the key.

Making everything subdominant (and introducing lots of modal interchange) is a good way of getting a more ‘modern sound’ actually although gospel music etc also does this most often. No leading note... Gospel choirs apparently tend to harmonise with a 6 note scale 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 - no 7

So you have the major pentatonic + amen. In jazz we have, well, soul jazz, Wes and so on. And independently via Carole King, James Taylor and Burt Bacharach to V7sus - the boomer chord.

Hmmm, connection?

And on the other hand we have the modal music that was moving away from functional changes. But people had been floating around on changes for a long time... in fact some players made the contrast between open harmony on the A and much more driving functional harmony on the B - I can think of Prez and Charlie Christian as good examples...

I find this quite interesting. I always think 3 7 resolving sounds a bit Oktoberfest. Fine to have a bit of it, bit too much sounds a little square for jazz....

[princeplanet]

Oh look Reginald, there’s a Gmaj7#11 chord

I say D7 to you Gmaj7#11 with any and all subs I deem fit.

... and funny you should write that,just earlier today i was trawling through a book of jazz lines by Jay Umble and all his lines for Tonic chords were mostly #11, all of which sounded better to me played as Dominant lines, hehe ...

[christianm77]

Yeah I think the tonic #11 chord is mostly an ending chord thing in the 50s.... it just sounds a bit much on functional tunes to me... otoh I’m not always a fan of it on nonfunctional tunes either.

#11 is just it’s own thing. Obviously it relates to dominant and subdominant....

Maj7#9 is a good one though... surprisingly handy actually....

[princeplanet]

Subdominant is dominant with the teeth out. The teeth in this case is the leading note of the key.

....

To pull the discussion back to Functional Harmony for a sec, the IV chord for me sometimes can be Tonic sounding, Dominant sounding, or both (when the IV appears in Autumn Leaves?). When the IV starts Just Friends, there's no way you wanna treat it as Dominant, it clearly is more related to the Tonic in that instance. That's why I sometimes say the IV is "Ambitonic"

[christianm77]

To pull the discussion back to Functional Harmony for a sec, the IV chord for me sometimes can be Tonic sounding, Dominant sounding, or both (when the IV appears in Autumn Leaves?). When the IV starts Just Friends, there's no way you wanna treat it as Dominant, it clearly is more related to the Tonic in that instance. That's why I sometimes say the IV is "Ambitonic"

Yes, the IV is kind of it’s own thing. Actually I’ve never tried dominant on Just friends.... that prog Cmaj7 Cm(maj7) sounds great on Am7 D7, as rag among others have pointed out, but how about the other way? I’ve had some success with this provided D7 is altered.....

but as reg points out a lot of my dominant language is actually subdominant stuff .... so I suspect I’m thinking dominant scale but targeting the hell out of the b7 and 2 of 5 subs (Fmajor and Dm on G7 for instance) found within the dominant scale.... so there’s probably less difference than my posts suggest.

The IV is really really useful. And it all comes back to degree 4 of the scale course....

The main difference is playing INTO chords really... I can play F#maj7–>C and it will work as a resolution... anything is possible.

I’m not sure if you mean over Just Friends you wanna play the tonic, G on C or treat C as a separate key. Either works.

[ragman1]

only tonic and dominant

So what happens to the subdominant then? Does that become tonic or dominant? And why isn't only two chords going to sound boring?

[princeplanet]

I’m not sure if you mean over Just Friends you wanna play the tonic, G on C or treat C as a separate key. Either works.

I mean Tonic G over C. Treating the first chord as C tonic doesn't work for me, I can't hear a passing diatonic F nat note there without shrieking...
In some past thread there was someone who described the IVmaj7 (when occuring after the Imaj7) as an "overrun", I dig it.
However, given that you seem to often hear IV as Dom sans teeth, what would you suggest as the clearest example where, if using T/D reduction approach to improv, the IV sounds right as D but wrong as T ?

[princeplanet]

So what happens to the subdominant then? Does that become tonic or dominant? And why isn't only two chords going to sound boring?

Didn't Christian address this in #148?

At any rate, you don't change the chords, just what you play over the top. Dividing things into T vs D never gets boring! OTOH, spelling out every chord (even the subdominant ones) in every tune does sound boring - no rub ! For my ears anyway... Must say though, that there have been times where NOT addressing the ii separately in a ii- V (as opposed to treating it as V) doesn't sound quite right, but 95% of the time it does... YMMV

[christianm77]

I mean Tonic G over C. Treating the first chord as C tonic doesn't work for me, I can't hear a passing diatonic F nat note there without shrieking...
In some past thread there was someone who described the IVmaj7 (when occuring after the Imaj7) as an "overrun", I dig it.
However, given that you seem to often hear IV as Dom sans teeth, what would you suggest as the clearest example where, if using T/D reduction approach to improv, the IV sounds right as D but wrong as T ?

Im not sure if I understand the question, because you seem to mean playing I on IV.

So you can play I on IV and it sounds grand

But IV on I demands resolution to I.

In the case of Autumn leaves we are heading to the subdominant of the next tonal area (relative minor) anyway. You can hear Eb major as a subdominant in Gm as well as in Bb, so it’s kind of a bridging chord? It’s not in the original changes anyway. Customary to add a IV in when going to VII....

So maybe -there’s a hierarchy

I always works
IV works on IV and V
V works on V

But I’m sure this is a simplification

[princeplanet]

Im not sure if I understand the question, because you seem to mean playing I on IV.

So you can play I on IV and it sounds grand

But IV on I demands resolution to I

In the case of Autumn leaves we are heading to the subdominant of the next tonal area (relative minor) anyway. You can hear Eb major as a subdominant in Gm as well as in Bb, so it’s kind of a bridging chord? It’s not in the original changes anyway. Customary to add a IV in when going to VII

What I meant was playing V on IV. Can you think of an example where that works, but I on IV doesn't?

[christianm77]

What I meant was playing V on IV. Can you think of an example where that works, but I on IV doesn't?

Well the problem/key feature is the 4th degree. The note not found in the harmonic series. That’s always going to demand resolution, either back to 1 or by 4 becoming the new root.

Anyway, I can’t think of an example. I on IV always sounds great.

[princeplanet]

BTW, jzucker would probably be rolling his eyes to see that 6 years on, this thread has been reduced to a very basic discussion on very Functional Harmony ! (Sorry Jack)...