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Well, here's the chords to one of my tunes...
Cmaj7 / Db7 #9 #5 / Am11 / Ab7#11
Fmaj7#11 / Bb7#11 / Am11 / E7#5
Am7/ Cmaj7/ Db7#5#9 / Fmaj7
Bbmaj7#11 / Am9 / Fmaj7#11 / G13
Am11 / Am11/ Am11/Am11
Bbmaj7#11/ Bbmaj7#11/ Bbmaj7#11/ Bbmaj7#11
repeat Am to Bbmaj7#11 sequence
FMAJ7#11 / Fmaj7#11 / G13 / G13
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01-18-2014 09:26 PM
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Well, my Real Book is half full of modern modal tunes. Kind of Blue was a long time ago, and lots of what we're talking about starts there. It is curious how much focus we put on pre-modal repertoire in this forum considering all the great modern jazz standards written by Shorter, Hancock, Joe Henderson, Coltrane, etc. Modern players wrote modern standards that have been around for 50+ years. It's not all about old pop and show tunes.
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Me too Jeff, it is very hard for me to get a groove going for newer jazz music but I do enjoy listening to some of it. When I first started listening to John Coltranes' music, I thought it sounded like a very skilled sax player doing scale and arpeggio studies. I think that was because I didn't understand it or how to analyze it. Later, after Howard Roberts pointed out some of the the characteristics and theory of Johns' music, I really became interested and began to enjoy it very much.
Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
wiz
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Real book tunes with non-bop/standard harmony one might be expected to play on casual gigs. Excluding stuff like Coltrane changes as that's a bit more of a known quantity:
Beatrice
Inner Urge
Yes or No (the first few bars of the A - the rest is ii-V-I city)
Ju-ju
Deluge (and most other Wayne TBH)
Very Early (Very Tricky!)
Icarus
James
Bright Size Life
Any more for any more?
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Also Jobim's harmony, while very tonal, is based more on bassline movement than bop style harmony, so many players find it tricky.
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Originally Posted by christianm77
Not "modern" perse, but a few years ago on another forum I was curious to get a list of common tunes going that had few or no ii V progressions. Again, obviously many of these tunes are still pretty old:
500 Miles High
All Blues
Beatrice
Cantaloupe Island
Fall
Footprints
Freedom Jazz Dance
Gloria's step
Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
Impressions
Inchworm
Infant Eyes
Inner Urge
Jinrikisha
Juju
Little Sunflower
Maiden Voyage
Mercy Mercy
Milestones
Moondance
Mr. P.C.
Naima
Nardis
Nefertiti
Old Devil Moon
Passion Dance
Quicksilver
So What
Song for My Father
Syeeda's Song Flute
The Jody Grind
The Peacocks
Time Remembered
Tones for Joan's Bones
Very Early
Watermelon Man
Well, You Needn't
Wild Flower
Witch Hunt
Monk is also a blind spot for many jazz musicians as the vocabulary needed to play over monk tunes is very different than either bebop or the modal/shorter era kind of harmony.
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those are definitely cool but not really harmonically advanced like the tunes from Bierach, Towner, Abercrombie or Ronnie Miller. Originally Posted by christianm77
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As for more current composers/musicians who evolved past the approaches that Shorter made popular, maybe...Bill McHenry, David Binney, Dave Douglas, Ben Monder, Kenny Wheeler, Chris Speed, Noah Preminger, Vijay Iyer, Walter Smith III...a lot of folks. Wish I had some charts to share but I don't.
Again the Shorter and shortly-post-Shorter era is awesome, some of my favorite music.
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Jack, I want to emphasize I'm not putting down any style of harmony, I think my point is worth making because of just what you say - we tend to be a little "behind" the times. An important aspect of that is even the fact that we might refer to music of the 1970s as "modern." I get that the term distinguishes the music from the 30s, 40s, 50s, and some of the 60s.
So that stuff is great to work on and listen to, and it's cool to note the very large variety of approaches that composers of the last 20 years take..mixing genres, forms, even concepts of how a composition is structured..."free" sections, different forms of "free" improv, etc etc. There's all this great stuff out there. I think Bill McHenry is great...
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THese are all great tunes, some with tricky changes, but I don't think of these as the kind of tunes that Jack is referring to in the OP, except maybe Icarus. Originally Posted by christianm77
My rough (revisionist?) take on the history goes like this
In standards the harmony mostly came first, was diatonic with some modulations, and the melody was diatonic with enclosures
Guys like Shorter and Golson started matching the harmony to the melody rather than the other way around, "loosening" the grip V-I resolutions had on harmony. Mingus also did this in the sense that he changed the process of "playing blues melodies over diatonic chords" to "playing blues chords" under blues melodies.
Then in the 70s, (maybe inspired by pianists use of upper structures/superimposed triads), people started writing tunes melody/harmony/bass lines more or less equal in importance and independent. (This happened in Fusion tunes too).
Of course, nothing can be explained this simply, but I think the kind of tunes Jack refers to are built with melody/chords/bass lines/rhythm on equal footing rather than subservient one to the other, so effective soloing requires addressing all three ingredients rather than just the chord symbols.
Liebman explained his approach in detail in a clinic I attended a few years back. One of the things he said that resonated with me is he thinks of tunes he writes as "problems to be solved". With standards everybody eventually "solves" the problem of blowing over them, so he started writing tunes that required him to find new ways to solo musically over them.
For me, blowing over tunes like this takes hours of practice on each new tune. I was in a band (http://watercourserecords.blogspot.com/p/xtet.html ) a few years ago that played all originals with nary a II-V-I and every tune was a completely new challenge to play on. Typically I worked out "skeleton" ideas, based on certain melodic moves that worked at certain points in the tune, and pitch collections that worked over a few bars. To avoid being repetitive required figuring out a bunch of different approaches to each part of the tune, to avoid resorting to the the same thing each chorus.
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sometimes I think you and I are having totally different conversations. my point is that guitarists typically ignore anything written since 1970. I also have an issue with your contention that the artists you mention have moved "past" Ritchie Bierach and Ronnie Miller. The artists you mention have gone in a different direction for sure. Originally Posted by JakeAcci
Did Monder evolve past John Coltrane? Not sure how you can even quantify that.
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The central point is pretty simple, and we agree on: It's good to acknowledge that there's more to jazz than Miles, Charlie Parker, and the great american songbook. I just think it's good to also acknowledge all the composers that are more recent as well. Pretty simple! I'm not even arguing with you about anything.
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I think people have different definitions of modern too.
For me modern jazz starts sometime in the 50's, after bop.
Contemporary jazz is a large span of time - perhaps including fusion, perhaps not. In the former case that around 40 years of history, which is as long a time span as it took for us to get from the Hot 5s and 7s to In a Silent Way!
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That's pretty heavy when you think of it that way.
No wonder folks in the 50 ' s thought we'd be in flying cars by now...
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what's sad is that I started listening to jazz about 40 years ago.... Originally Posted by christianm77
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Since the 70's, the jazz community has become continually more fractured, and the Real Book collection of tunes ends in that era. Also, fusion and the young lions retro-revival created many detours in the progressive continuum, and consensus on the later jazz canon has really become an matter of opinion.
Who can agree on a modern style standard written in the last 25 years? I don't think it's happening outside of academia. Beyond major urban jazz centers there's little exposure, no viable jazz community or audience. It leaves a lot of musicians at a disadvantage, and the internet offers too much conflicting information for intermediates to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Jack, you say that Inner Urge, Deluge, etc., aren't as harmonically advanced as the the music you're addressing, I'm curious what additional concepts beyond modal and chord scale theory need to be referenced to handle those Ron Miller lead sheets you provided?
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i agree with you "cosmic".
Not sure what your question is. Are you asking what concepts are necessary to play over Ronnie Miller's tune? If so, standard chord/scale theory and analysis of slash chords and polychords as well as the ability to understand how those chords are being utilized within the framework of the tune.
You know, standard white, nerd stuff.
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Completely agree with your analysis Originally Posted by cosmic gumbo
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In fact, new standard is a free form modal vamp, as far as I could notice among young musicians, I occasionally meet.
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To have a standard "as we know it", those who play good have to play it in inovative way, over well constructed form, formed around some good essence.
Modern composers put the essence (rhythm and melody) secondary, making complex forms over nothing, hoping the complexity of the form will trigger some inner sense of melody at listener's. Or, they make overly complex melodies, to fit their overly complex form, so nobody can connect, except for nerdy white Jazz guitar students.
Musicians despise the form and go for musicianship, proving themselves in modal vamps.
Authors who are about essence, they are not about complexity and usually are not extremely good musicians.
Therefore, above 2 categories consider them lower beings. So, they go to folk and pop, where hired guns do all the playing as per some dated presets.
Of course, you have the big music industry thing, too, where inovation and excellence have completelly different meaning.
I could spam the thread with my clip "Music is the waste", but I won't, because it has nothing to do with jazz.
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Interesting post. You have summed up a lot of what I've been thinking very clearly.
This was summed up for me below - the Dave Leibman quote about seeing a tune as a problem to be solved. Why not view a tune as a tune? There are some contemporary musicians working in jazz who have this sensibility, in fact, but many see tunes fundamentally as a vehicle for their skills.
In jazz we have some great composers who were in some way limited (but stylistic!) players - that is, not total virtuosos. I'm thinking here of Horace Silver, Miles Davis, Ellington (?) and Monk. These are analogous in some way to the catalysing figures such as Dylan, Lennon, Bowie, Reed, Bjork, Waits etc etc in rock/pop. (You can probably think of some more recent examples :-))
However in classical music, we do have have many examples of highly skilled executants who were also great improvisers and composers - such as Bach, Mozart and Chopin! There are also strong examples in jazz - Kenny Wheeler, Wayne Shorter, Mingus and many others spring to mind. SO the two are not exclusive.
I actually think a bit more concern for either/both the craft of instrumental classical composition (which many tin pan alley song writers had) or songwriting from *words* would help.
Many think that they can write worthwhile music just because they are strong soloists, and some of our really good jazz composers have had some background in classical composition, and most of the jazz standards are simply great songs that anyone can relate to.
One needs to develop your chops in this area with the same intensity as one does anything else.
Originally Posted by Vladan
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There are hundreds of fabulous musicians in places like NYC writing complex, new jazz originals that have tremendous rhythm, melody and harmony. Originally Posted by Vladan
i.e.
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and folks should RUSH out immediately and pick up this album.
Some of he compositions on here are incredibly similar to the "modern" '70s Ronnie Miller writing, harmonically.
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Thanks for the links. I've kept hearing good things about Gilad H, so it was nice to hear a bit of his music. Originally Posted by jzucker
TBH it still sounds like the type of music that jazz guitarists listen to, but being a jazz guitarist, I very much enjoyed it :-)
I'd put my vote in for Aaron Parks, of course. His music is full of attractive tunes. I would say though that this music does start to move in the direction of 'instrumental prog rock.' Not necessarily a bad thing of course, and it might have wider appeal because of it.
(epic Kurt shred is a cheeky bonus)
I also quite like Miles Okazaki, whose music is less song like, but interesting from a compositional point of view.
Not sure how much any of this stuff 'crosses over.' Probably one of the biggest successes jazz has had in popularising contemporary jazz writing in the more-or-less mainstream over the past few years has been EST - how popular were they in the US?
With EST sometimes people get a bit snotty about them, perhaps because they did write melodies and had some mainstream success.Last edited by christianm77; 01-20-2014 at 11:02 AM. Reason: Link fixed
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I'm glad there are so many of them. In context of your original post I have nothing else to say.
However in context of subthread I responded to, which is setting a new standard tunes/ repertoire I have to.
Yes, I'm glad there are so many of them. Now all they have to do is exchange one tune each, ammong themselves, and there will be a 100s of tunes worth of standard repertoire for hundreds of fabulous young musicians. Is there a chance that could ever happen?
Also, if there are hundreds in NYC, how many thousands are there in USA? How many millions all over the world? Is it possible they're all so fabulous? I believe they are, but it's kinda tricky to set on standard with so many fabulous people producing fabulous music.
Maybe we should raise our standards? Maybe I should not think about so many wonderfull players from this forum as of top notch players. Maybe I should level them down on the ladder, and almost everybody else subsequently untill I remain with only couple of fabulous ones? I think it's much more natural state to have couple fabulous, not so many exscellent, ....., plethora of average, ....
Don't you think so?
Back on our "on topic - off topic", Is there any one specific tune from above mentioned that stood above the rest, gaining popularity ammong other jazz musiciaans, if not general public. Anybody ever to call it out on a jam session? Any heavyweight to have it in own repertoire?
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you're totally missing the point. It has nothing to do with whether the tunes are considered "standards" or are part of any particularly agreed upon repertoire. The point is "the music". The fact that guitarists are for a large part ignoring harmonic movement beyond show tunes of the '50s. In the '60s and '70s when folks like Ritchie Bierach and Ralph Towner decided to push the envelope, they didn't sit back and look for "standards". They created their own music.
I don't see this happening in general among jazz guitar fans. They seem content to rehash the tunes from the 40s and 50s. I love those tunes too but am just pointing out that there's an entire world out there that we shouldn't ignore.
Originally Posted by Vladan
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