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BTW Barry talks about triadic arpeggios in lines as much as he does about sevenths or sixths. I think teaching that jazz is based around seventh chords really encourages people to overlook the simple resources.
Its because people are so conditioned to hear ‘jazz harmony’ and look for secret jazz notes; checking out earlier jazz made me realise how much that music is in the rhythm and phrasing, and then I also realised that was true of the later stuff.
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11-26-2020 06:08 AM
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Another thing specifically relevant to the blues is it seems to me that if you have to make the call between a maj7 and 7 sound as you would from modern jazz theory, you are much less likely as Bird did to use a maj7 on the I chord of a blues.
Or OTOH a b7 on a non blues standard like Lady be Good or Rose Room as Lester and Charlie Christian did.
So the seventh chord thing kind of encourages students to think of ‘blues tunes’ as having separate harmonic practices to ‘standards.’ It kind of squishes the blues influence out of the latter.
There is no separation between the two that I can hear in Bird’s music.
Use instead a triad or 6th as your basic I chord and you have more freedom. Same with minor. (I think I heard somewhere Bird preferred plain minor chords in the comping.)
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I think you're taking my point in a little different way them I'm intending it... or maybe to more of an absurd conclusion them I'm pointing at.
Originally Posted by djg
I'm not against tension and clashes.
You mentioned the idea of resolving the major 7th of a chord down to the 6th, a la BH and how much you loved it in Hello Dolly. That's tension, or a clash, being moved into consonance.
What you're saying you love in that example is exactly what I'm talking about too, except that you're talking about it as a one way street (7th --> 6th) and I'm saying for me I hear it as a two way street (7th <--> 6th). Both directions are possible. I just hear them conveying a vastly different color and emotion. So I enjoy letting my mind categorize them out into two separate sounds the way my ear is already hearing them behave, and study their unique properties and characteristics so I can pick and choose which I want and have more control and intention harmonically and melodically.
Doesn't mean I won't ever step on another's toes... hopefully intentionally... it just gets me into a deeper relationship with sound, how I experience it, and how purposefully I can use it to express.
If I feel like being a bit of a prick on the bandstand to egg on the soloist and see where it pushes him, I absolutely have the choice as a comping instrument to open up the soloists first chorus on blues for alice with a big fat...
x7xx6x
But it would be done on purpose. Before I encountered Barry's ideas and notice how beautifully the major 7th resolved down to the 6th, I didn't have the ability to create that type of sound... because nobody had ever pointed that musical desire out to me and my ear had never noticed it. Now it's so obvious and can be taken advantage of either to avoid 'tension', to convey it, or to convey it and resolve it. All of those options are on the table because my ear grew.
I'm talking about doing the same thing but for the opposing direction. Learning to hear the maj7 chord as not simply an extension of something else, but as it's own stable sound that other sounds want to move toward. All it does is provide a more colorful and diverse palette to work with.
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i think you misunderstood me or read too much into my post. blues for alice is just not a tune where i'd worry much about staying out of the melody's way. Originally Posted by jordanklemons
and my point about dolly is pretty much the same you're making because it does actually go 6 to maj7 and not the usual "tea for two" maj7 to 6 way. i always associate maj7 to 6 with that tune, since i heard T42 years before i went to my first BH class.
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Yet it sounds so right when Wes Montgomery plays just that at the end of the melody statement in Days of Wine and Roses (1:21). Maybe his thumb strokes help soften the aggressiveness! That voicing - maj7th in 3rd inversion - has become much more common. Jonathan Kreisberg employs it all the time: Originally Posted by jordanklemons
I'm one of these weird ocd people who likes to be hyper precise in the way I practice and teach... not sure whether my students love it or hate it
I base pretty much everything around the physicality of a piano player with their left hand controlling the harmony and their right hand controlling the melody (to over generalize things). When playing an FMaj7 in the left hand, I find the F note in the right hand to be incredibly unstable and aggressive because of the interval of the minor 9th it creates against the harmony from the left hand.
(E) (F)
x7xx6x
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Funny that the most common place in bop and post-bop improvisation to find an upward ii-biiidim-iii move is in the opening bars of rhythm changes (Bb6-Bdim7-Cm7-C#dim7-Dm7) yet hardly anyone plays biiidim7 on the descent (Dm7-Dbdim7-Cm7-F7) when dealing with rhythm tunes which is what Gershwin actually wrote in I Got Rhythm! Originally Posted by djg
yeah, but when barry says this about the biiidim chord, he means one very specific movement for the biiidim, namely connecting the ii chord and the iii chord upwards. his complaint is that everybody plays ii V iii VI and nobody plays ii biiidim iii VI anymore. which was sonny stitt's all-time favourite move. it
is most effective when the rhythm section stays on the V chord and only the solist plays the biiio.
take that, CST.
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true. like chris i associate the descending line with pre-bop progressions like "jive at five" Originally Posted by PMB
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I think bop improvisers often hate playing over these sorts of progressions as well. They don't really practice them.
The sorts of things where earlier players would just generalise the changes and play blues or whatever.
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IIRC JK siad he did that even though he knows it's wrong from an arranging perspective. Originally Posted by PMB
I actually find a lot of contemporary jazz harmony based on inverted major seventh chords quite ugly though. They all take the seventh chord as the basic unit, but the problem is those chords don't all invert very consonantly. Maybe that's what they are going for.
But I really like the way Jordan's approach to harmony sounds. It sounds both logical and fresh.
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Maybe I did misunderstand your point. It doesn't feel like we're saying the same thing, so we might have some internet forum cross speaking happening. It happens. Originally Posted by djg
I'm also not really talking about staying out of the melody's way... at least not necessarily. That's one potential outcome of what I'm talking about. But in a bigger picture I'm really talking about learning to hear, think of, and play tunes based on the contour and colors of the melody as much as from the stand point of just playing the changes... if not more so. It's an embrace of the melody and the personality it brings to the table and the desire to get to know that personality and bring IT to the table more than just my own personal musical ideas and riffs or chord tone/scale playing.
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There's no denying it's become a part of the language. But I'm not saying that it's right vs wrong. It's about tension vs resolution... consonance vs dissonance. The minor 9th is an intensely aggressive interval. That doesn't mean it's bad or wrong. I have almost this exact voicing you're talking about arranged out a bunch of times in one of the tunes on my last record. Originally Posted by PMB
There's another tune on that record where the band quiets down and lets the bass player take the melody on the bridge. In the 1st draft, I had the horn section backing up the bass player with a series of moving, non-functional Maj7 chords... including this inversion. But after our first rehearsal, once I heard it played by real instruments, I realized I didn't like how crunchy the chords were. They were stepping all over the bass player which was offering a very sweet and lyrical melody, and it felt wrong. I rewrote that section with the horn players using Maj(add2) chords because it fit the color and emotion of the moment more precisely.
There's nothing wrong with using tension or dissonance. I just find it helpful to align the mind, the heart, the ears, and the fingers and get them all on the same page about our language so that our playing can evolve into greater and deeper levels of color and intention.
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Is JK me or Kreisberg Originally Posted by christianm77
Assuming you mean me...
Yes, I do use it. Both when playing and when arranging... as I noted above. It's not so much right vs wrong. For me as a student and a teacher, it's just about keeping my ears open and being honest with myself about what I'm hearing to remain as respectful as possible to the sounds and the music, and to learn to intentionally control more options... and then encouraging my students to do the same.
There's often talk about the "hip" modern stuff being related to these crunchier inversions of Maj7 chords. But there's also been a movement away from this stuff. Mehldau, Grasper, Aaron Parks, Julian Lage... tons of guys have been embracing 7th-less majors... sus2 and Maj(add2) inversions and even just basic old major triads have become as much a part of our language as Maj7 inversions.
Looking over an Ari Hoenig chart once I spotted a few moments where he'd simply written something like "C" as the chord above the melody (I forget the exact letter name now). I asked him if he was looking for anything in particular. He made it abundantly clear, in no uncertain terms, that he did not want to hear a maj7 or ANY other notes. He wanted a C major chord. Nothing more.
And thank you, by the way
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