Ways to Play a Scale

[Tal_175]

Wow, your comprehension skills are worse than mine.

That's a ridiculous thing to say.

The actual theory is CST was popularized and codified through the Berklee curriculum. Not that it didn't exist before, but it wasn't codified like it is now.

So there is CST and there is vocabulary. Nothing else ever happened in music in terms of abfractions and codification? I don't know if you get that my post is meant to be sarcastic.

Also, what does CST existed before 60's but it wasn't codified as it is now, mean? That's a bigger claim than you seem to realize.

[Strat-itis]

There is a recurring theory about the mindset of pre-60's jazz musicians on the forum.
- Their main source of musical education was the pieces of vocabulary they picked up from the masters that came before them.
- They just repeated these pieces of melodic ideas in their playing while occasionally making variations strictly by ear.
- They had no scalar reference to organize these melodic ideas and explore new ideas in addition to their aural processes other than the key.
- Not a single one of them. They all worked exactly the same way. None of them ever thought of any musical abstractions and generalizations beyond specifics and learned nothing from classical composers. That all came after the 60's.
- There is no evidence for any of this but one could definitively conclude the accuracy of all of the above by looking at what they played. It is impossible for it be any other way.

Yup, like they didn't have formal knowledge back then. I had an epiphany the other day about how this is obviously nonsense. Although the forum is slowly getting away from this dogma, a clear reminder that this is contrary to common sense, even though people try to pose it as common sense is this: Society was MORE ordered / formal / traditional back then, not less. Society was extremely regimented, so that would obviously be how the music was structured. When you see footage from the 40s, even when people were supposedly being spontaneous or even wild it was still deeply scripted. It's not like Bird and Bud were sitting around on bean bags winging it into soundcloud like gen z antiintellectuals. They approached it formally. Bird even said so.

[pamosmusic]

There is a recurring theory about the mindset of pre-60's jazz musicians on the forum:
- Their main source of musical education was the pieces of vocabulary they picked up from the masters that came before them.
- They just repeated these pieces of melodic ideas in their playing while occasionally making variations strictly by ear.
- They had no scalar reference to organize these melodic ideas and explore new ideas in addition to their aural processes other than the key.
- Not a single one of them. They all worked exactly the same way. None of them ever thought of any musical abstractions and generalizations beyond specifics and learned nothing from classical composers. That all came after the 60's.
- There is no evidence for any of this but one could definitively conclude the accuracy of all of the above by looking at what they played. It is impossible for it be any other way.

I don’t really recall seeing anyone say anything this extreme?

[pamosmusic]

Yup, like they didn't have formal knowledge back then. I had an epiphany the other day about how this is obviously nonsense. Although the forum is slowly getting away from this dogma, a clear reminder that this is contrary to common sense, even though people try to pose it as common sense is this: Society was MORE ordered / formal / traditional back then, not less. Society was extremely regimented, so that would obviously be how the music was structured. When you see footage from the 40s, even when people were supposedly being spontaneous or even wild it was still deeply scripted. It's not like Bird and Bud were sitting around on bean bags winging it into soundcloud like gen z antiintellectuals. They approached it formally. Bird even said so.

Couldn’t you frame repeating things they’d heard and played verbatim with minimal variation and rejecting things that hadn’t been proposed by their forebears as being the more structured approach than generating ideas from theory?

Not saying that’s what people were doing, but you can always tell a weak thread of logic when you can use it to support the exact opposite conclusion.

[pamosmusic]

Again — I don’t think I’ve actually seen these rigid arguments anywhere here, but taking the best faith representation of the ideas y’all are arguing against would probably be something like what Christian often says.

And he’s not saying these guys didn’t know theory. They for sure did. They also loved classical music, Bach in particular in lots of cases. He’s generally just saying that they don’t apply scales and theory to harmony in the same way we do now, and that they seemed generally to prioritize playing things that sound good and justifying them later to working within any established framework. So the frameworks we use to understand harmony might not really get us terribly far in our attempts to sound like we’re playing jazz.

[Tal_175]

I don’t really recall seeing anyone say anything this extreme?

I don't think people explicitly say that. These are often implied as the implicit strawmen framework within which some people talk about pre 60's jazz. There have already been objections to scalar organizations in this very thread and the underlying principle of such objections is this more folksy view of the early jazz musicians.

[Tal_175]

And he’s not saying these guys didn’t know theory. They for sure did. They also loved classical music, Bach in particular in lots of cases. He’s generally just saying that they don’t apply scales and theory to harmony in the same way we do now, and that they seemed generally to prioritize playing things that sound good and justifying them later to working within any established framework. So the frameworks we use to understand harmony might not really get us terribly far in our attempts to sound like we’re playing jazz.

So what frameworks did they use? When did musicians stop prioritizing things that sound good?

Again — I don’t think I’ve actually seen these rigid arguments anywhere here, but taking the best faith representation of the ideas y’all are arguing against would probably be something like what Christian often says.

I am not saying that these views represent what Christian thinks or says. I am not talking about a particular person.

[AllanAllen]

I don't know if you get that my post is meant to be sarcastic.

I take back what I said about your comprehension skills. Mine are worse, LOL.

Also, what does CST existed before 60's but it wasn't codified as it is now, mean? That's a bigger claim than you seem to realize.

I simply mean, it was one of many ways to navigate jazz. It seems to have gained popularity along the time Berklee and the Aebersold books came along. Currently, it appears to be an endless well for youtube content. Read some biographies and autobiographies of musicians and you'll see a void of CST as we know it before the 70's. just two examples.

George Benson wrote about pulling lines from Parker records, learning things on stage with Jack McDuff and talking to classical musicians about what they do.

In Kansas City Jazz by Briggs Haddix there are anecdotes of Charlie Parker in the Jay McShann band showing the other saxophone players "Tea for Two phrases" to keep up on Cherokee.

It's not to say they didn't know x or y theory. But there is a rich history of telling people "play it like this, man" and getting through a tune.

[pamosmusic]

So what frameworks did they use? When did musicians stop prioritizing things that sound good?

Thats the point. We don’t really know what frameworks they use. It’s seems clear enough that you’re more likely to see straightforward functional chord substitutions (i.e. D#dim does the same job as G7 here, so I’ll just swap them out) rather than harmonic chord over chord substitutions (i.e. I’ll play Fm7b5 over G7 to get these particular extensions). Beyond that, who knows.

I am not saying that these views represent what Christian thinks or says. I am not talking about a particular person.

Again, that’s kind of my point — you’re talking about how the thing you’re arguing against is a strawman argument. But I haven’t seen anyone make that strawman argument … which means you’re also having a strawman argument of your own.

[Tal_175]

Thats the point. We don’t really know what frameworks they use. It’s seems clear enough that you’re more likely to see straightforward functional chord substitutions (i.e. D#dim does the same job as G7 here, so I’ll just swap them out) rather than harmonic chord over chord substitutions (i.e. I’ll play Fm7b5 over G7 to get these particular extensions). Beyond that, who knows.

That's actually my point (that we don't know).
You can find these functional substitutions in the post 60's jazz too. I don't think of that as a distinguishing characteristic of pre 60's jazz as opposed to players that came after. You can also find long scalar lines in the pre 60's jazz. So if what you are saying is we just don't about the formal foundations of how those early players developed their music, I agree with you. If you are saying that "that's what everyone is saying all along, no one has ever made claims about the formal frameworks or lack thereof used by early jazz musicians", I disagree with you.

Again, that’s kind of my point — you’re talking about how the thing you’re arguing against is a strawman argument. But I haven’t seen anyone make that strawman argument … which means you’re also having a strawman argument of your own.

If you are saying that you have not seen anyone who wrote a post identical to mine, that's correct but that's not what I claim. I can find you individual posts saying things like, they didn't think melodic minor scale, they just added leading notes or even "they didn't play scales" etc. I was making an inductive generalization of a certain set of beliefs about the musicians of that era. If you are saying you have not seen any posts that reflect such beliefs, than I guess we read different posts.

[Tal_175]

Also one can reasonably hold the views reflected in my post. I am skeptical about it but it might represent at least some of the masters from that era. I just think that's a lot to take for granted without historical evidence or definitive conclusion from transcriptions.

Another strange notion is seeing the post 60's formal jazz education as divorced from pre 60's jazz. What is strange about it is that the people who formed these institutions and taught at them (like Oscar Peterson, Gary Burton, Pat Metheny) were products of the pre 60's jazz (at least in their formative years). There is a bit of a disconnect there. Did they try to teach pre-60's jazz but they were very bad at formally codifying that era (or not nearly as good as Barry Harris?), or did they just decide to move on from the music they listened growing up and teach something else altogether?

[Christian Miller]

It's a complicated issue and frustratingly difficult to research (at least for me).

Some questions to bear in mind

- what evidence can we find of modern CST in published materials?
The earliest I've seen using the modern system and nomenclature - albeit in an incomplete form - is early 60s. There are some precursors - George Russell, John Mehegan that have points of departure. Of these the most relevant to my mind is the Tristano approach which seems to have taught melodic minor applications on dominant chords IF Peter Ind's memory is reliable. I don't actually know how influential Tristano was on the boppers? More info welcome.

As far as I can tell, these influential teachers all had their own schools. They did not represent a standardised way of doing things.

- do musicians play notes that relate to CST on records?
That's not necessarily dead simple to answer, as analysis carries within it assumptions about the muscian's process - but I am personally reasonably comfortable saying that Stephane Grappelli is playing the Lydian Dominant scale on G in this solo, for instance.

HOWEVER I suspect (but can't prove) how he arrived at it is probably stemming from altering the G major key with the note Bb to accommodate the chord (whether by ear or theory), rather than knowing what a Lydian Dominant scale is.

Which leads us to
- did musicians consciously use some version of CST before our documentary evidence of CST?
This is very hard to know. We are going on personal account and looking at the records and comparing.

From interviews, most players of the era seem to regard chord scale theory as being a new idea, or even one at odds with the way they learned. CST sounds were clearly accessed in some other way, because they are on the records. But it seems from transcribing that even in the post modal era there's a lot of diversity in the way players played with scales. Trane doesn't use scales like Herbie does, for instance. I think they all had their own take on scale use in jazz, and no doubt they also shared their ideas.

A lot of playing decision are made by ear. I know a lot of keyboard warrior types seem to find this hard to countenance, but very talented musicians who are used to picking up music by ear, are in fact, very talented and able to play music by ear. (I also know that this is a muscle that one can build.)

Most today learn jazz school music theory in order to enter into the profession, of course.

Did musicians in 1921, say, practice scales? Of course they did. Everyone has practiced scales for centuries. From what I have seen so far, chord scale theory only appears to have documentary evidence going back to the early 1960's or perhaps 1950s at the most - depending on how we define CST. If new evidence can be given by anyone, I'd love to see it.

[rpjazzguitar]

I started playing late in 63, studying with a jazz musician.

I don't recall anybody talking about scales until a couple of years later when I was exposed to Chuck Wayne's scale fingerings and arp fingerings. The idea, to the extent I was aware of it at the time, was this. Chuck would harmonize every note in the melody, with a chord melody, and then try to play on all of those changes. I was under the impression that this was to be done with arpeggios. I don't recall hearing anything, at that time, about how to use the scales I was practicing. And nothing about tonal centers.

I do recall, around 65, overhearing some older musicians discussing something called "modes" and "modal", but I never heard a clear definition.

As far as I was aware, there were chords, substituted chords, chord tones and ears. You had between 4 and 7 chord tones, depending. And you knew not to play a maj7 against a dominant or a minor against a major (oversimplifying) or a b9 on a major or minor chord. Anyway, that gave you one group of notes that you knew would work and a couple to avoid, and a few that you had to deal with by ear.

Of course, I was a mid-teenager first learning, so I assume I wasn't privvy to advanced discussions, but that's what I recall.

Oh, there was something called "runs", but I can't recall how they worked.

Years later, I played with a horn player who said that his early jazz education was entirely by ear, as was his entire peer group's. He knew nothing of the sort of theory you now find in books, even though he could read. If he didn't know the tune, he'd have to wait to hear each new chord.

[Christian Miller]

Also one can reasonably hold the views reflected in my post. I am skeptical about it but it might represent at least some of the masters from that era. I just think that's a lot to take for granted without historical evidence or definitive conclusion from transcriptions.

Another strange notion is seeing the post 60's formal jazz education as divorced from pre 60's jazz. What is strange about it is that the people who formed these institutions and taught at them (like Oscar Peterson, Gary Burton, Pat Metheny) were products of the pre 60's jazz (at least in their formative years). There is a bit of a disconnect there. Did they try to teach pre-60's jazz but they were very bad at formally codifying that era (or not nearly as good as Barry Harris?), or did they just decide to move on from the music they listened growing up and teach something else altogether?

I think what happened is that prior to this era musicians had diverse backgrounds and there were many schools of jazz education, including the purely ear based players and various flavours of teaching.

The other thing is that Berklee post 1974 was as I understand it was geared towards post functional jazz. Musicians like Gary Burton, Pat, Swallow etc were looking for something moving on from standards and bop. Chord scale theory was part of this.

In fact, as far as I know it’s still customary to mostly teach bebop language using the same sort of approach that many players used in the 50s which is taking licks and vocabulary on II V s and applying to changes. (Maybe these days someone gives you a cheat sheet of them to get you started lol.)

But even to this day I think it’s a stretch to say there’s one way all the schools teach. I think it’s more that people get syllabus books from Berklee and so on and think that’s the way everyone teaches. Maybe. Obviously places like UNT and Berklee are influential. What do you think?


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[GuyBoden]

What do you think?

I think that a loose apprenticeship within a Jazz band(s) with elder experienced players was the old method.

If you played every day/night within a band you'd learn fast or quit or get fired.

[Christian Miller]

I think that a loose apprenticeship within a Jazz band(s) with elder experienced players was the old method.

If you played every day/night within a band you'd learn fast or quit or get fired.

Of course.

But people still obviously worked on their playing on their own as well…


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[pauln]

Practicing "scales" (everything derived from scales and their various sequences) is a necessity for all instruments in order to learn the mechanics of execution. The different ways of sounding "the same thing" need to be examined - the same pitch may have multiple methods of formation of which some are more favorable for ascending or descending in different contexts, or for management of tone quality, etc. On the guitar e.g., this may come down to whether to hold position and stretch or to shift position... with practice one's hands may learn to choose based on the mechanical requirements of what is about to follow.

I do not employ any process of starting with a formal "basis" like the major scale and producing modifications to change it into what I want to play... I would never want to hear something in my mind's ear that is inappropriate which I don't wish to sound, in order to change it into something I do wish to hear and sound; I play directly the sound of what I want to hear. I find it remarkable that people succeed with a series of verbal-musicological steps to accomplish this.

Regarding Wes, he said he didn't practice anything that he wouldn't play in a tune. That's really the hard version of "learn tunes", a boundary version of "everything you need to learn to do is in the tunes you want to play". Of course these are advice for post beginners...

[Tal_175]

I think what happened is that prior to this era musicians had diverse backgrounds and there were many schools of jazz education, including the purely ear based players and various flavours of teaching.

The other thing is that Berklee post 1974 was as I understand it was geared towards post functional jazz. Musicians like Gary Burton, Pat, Swallow etc were looking for something moving on from standards and bop. Chord scale theory was part of this.

In fact, as far as I know it’s still customary to mostly teach bebop language using the same sort of approach that many players used in the 50s which is taking licks and vocabulary on II V s and applying to changes. (Maybe these days someone gives you a cheat sheet of them to get you started lol.)

But even to this day I think it’s a stretch to say there’s one way all the schools teach. I think it’s more that people get syllabus books from Berklee and so on and think that’s the way everyone teaches. Maybe. Obviously places like UNT and Berklee are influential. What do you think?

Not sure why that is. I didn't study jazz at a university (except for some courses I took from the jazz department when I was doing my undergrad). But I think there is a certain view that sees jazz education at universities as unauthentic or even blame certain technical tendencies in the music of post 60's to the formal jazz education. At least on the surface there is something that doesn't add up. Many people who are hired in these institutions are legit jazz musicians that respect the tradition (as least that's what they say in the interviews, lol).

There doesn't seem to be a unified pedagogical approach. A lot seem to depend on the private instructor a student gets. Different teachers place importance on different things. Someone who graduated from a respectable jazz program once told me that she couldn't improvise at all when she graduated because her instructor focused on artistic aspects of improvisation when what she needed was fundamentals.

[Strat-itis]

I don’t really recall seeing anyone say anything this extreme?

Some people do pose that. It's gotten better because I've beaten it down lol.

Couldn’t you frame repeating things they’d heard and played verbatim with minimal variation and rejecting things that hadn’t been proposed by their forebears as being the more structured approach than generating ideas from theory? Not saying that’s what people were doing, but you can always tell a weak thread of logic when you can use it to support the exact opposite conclusion.

I didn't mean to fail to mention that I think it's both. Almost all great musicians have the ability to learn and communicate aurally, and they have a framework. Bird even said in interview that he gained his prowess from studying formal material in books. So I'm calling bs on the idea that formal knowledge wasn't used back then, but I'm not saying it was only structural composition. It's both, aural and structural.

[Strat-itis]

Also one can reasonably hold the views reflected in my post. I am skeptical about it but it might represent at least some of the masters from that era. I just think that's a lot to take for granted without historical evidence or definitive conclusion from transcriptions.

Another strange notion is seeing the post 60's formal jazz education as divorced from pre 60's jazz. What is strange about it is that the people who formed these institutions and taught at them (like Oscar Peterson, Gary Burton, Pat Metheny) were products of the pre 60's jazz (at least in their formative years). There is a bit of a disconnect there. Did they try to teach pre-60's jazz but they were very bad at formally codifying that era (or not nearly as good as Barry Harris?), or did they just decide to move on from the music they listened growing up and teach something else altogether?

Of course it's a lot to take for granted. We're not devoid of evidence that the greats used music structural devices, whatever you want to call them, cst red herring aside. Joe Pass, Herb Ellis, and Barney Kessel all use theory in their tapes. Bird said in interview he learned his structure from books. Barry was born in damn 1929 and was a theory machine. Bill Evans said in universal mind that he couldn't improv a lick after studying classical as a child until he learned theory. In a Milt Jackson interview, the host asked him why he likes Round Midnight so much and he said because it's in a minor 'mode.' etc. It's just silly that there's any discussion at all about how the greats must have just been doing things aurally, or 'we don't really know.'

[Christian Miller]

Not sure why that is. I didn't study jazz at a university (except for some course I took from the jazz department when I was doing my undergrad). But I think there is a certain view that sees the jazz education at universities as unauthentic or even blame certain technical tendencies in the music of post 60's to the formal jazz education. At least on the surface there is something that doesn't add up. Many people who are hired in these institutions are legit jazz musicians that respect the tradition (as least that's what they say in the interviews, lol).

There doesn't seem to be a unified pedagogical approach. A lot seem to depend on the private instructor a student gets. Different teachers place importance on different things. Someone who graduated from a respectable jazz program once told me that she couldn't improvise at all when she graduated because her instructor focused on artistic aspects of improvisation when what she needed was fundamentals.

Who is saying that?


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[Christian Miller]

I mean Ethan Iverson has spent the best part of two decades wailing on the inadequacies of CST based teaching and celebrating the deeper traditions of jazz improvisation, but he is very much engaged in jazz education.

At the end of it, it comes down to the fact that people coming into jazz are often exposed to CST first. I know it was the case for me. And you can get somewhere with it too at first. The problem comes when you start to see the solution to all problems as ‘more theory’ or even ‘cool II V bop licks’ or the Barry Harris method like I usually teach - when in fact these are all cool things, but if you can’t play music well, you probably need to work on being a better musician.

Which is of course harder to teach. But a good teacher can show you the pathway towards this.

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[Tal_175]

Who is saying that?

Who is saying that the jazz education at universities are unauthentic?

[Christian Miller]

Who is saying that the jazz education at universities are unauthentic?

Yes


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[Tal_175]

Yes


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Ethan Iverson for example.