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Once again, a setting on my phone. I typed all caps and it didnt post correctly.
Originally Posted by AllanAllen
i throw myself on the mercy of the forum
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08-05-2025 12:49 PM
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I think you’re discussing something a bit wider than I am at this point. Originally Posted by Mick-7
That is what I meant when I said that the tonality (key) implies the associated scale(s).
But I'm not sure what you mean by "if you know the extensions of the chords" - The extensions I want to use?
- because there are scales that don't imply a particular chord and will work over quite a few chords, for example [from my Slonimsky thread]:
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Nb it’s important to note for those unfamiliar with Barry’s approach that these chord symbols refer to whole scales with all the chords that come from them, chromatic fancy stuff and so on. So you won’t be playing just those chords. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
You break down to a simple framework and re complexify.
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Yes Originally Posted by Mick-7
Beyond that, is beyond the scope of a JGO post. YouTube probably has a few videos on it as well as old seminars from the man himself.
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If I think "G7 but with a Bb and an Eb", I have identified certain notes. G B F D Bb Eb. And, that's assuming I'm not replacing the B. That's only 6 notes. Similar to when a guitarist plays a Db13 fragment over a G7. Originally Posted by P4guitar
Or, another way of thinking about it, is "C tonal center but focusing on the chord tones of G7 with an added Bb and Eb", which is nine notes.
Or, maybe you lower the E but add the Bb, which is 8 notes. G B D F A C Eb Bb. The C is an avoid note, for those who believe in that concept. If I remove the C, and re-order, I get G A Bb B D Eb F. I don't know what to call it.
Maybe this is some variant of CST, but, what I've been exposed to as CST doesn't result in the same sets of notes.
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That seems pretty complicated to my simple brain. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Nevertheless, in the above case you wanted a G7 with a b3 and a #5 and you created a "scale" to get there - a custom chord scale, no? In that same situation, I could employ the Abmin 6th dim scale (if I don't want the 5th), but with the note emphasis being on the G7 chord tones, not the Ab chord tones - one could call this mode thinking. When I see a chord like that, I'm not calculating Galt means Ab Minor 6th dim, but a Galt scale based on the Ab min 6th dim collection of notes, if that makes sense. I'm not very much aware that it's Ab min6th dim, but that it's one type of Galt scale that I've (hopefully) practiced enough to be fluent going in or out.
I just thought of this: maybe part of the confusion is keycentric playing, which is how I mainly view your approach, leads to a huge amount of adjustments (custom scales) requiring knowing the chord, the home key, and what it looks like on the neck to add/subtract the requisite note adjustments. How I view CST is that there is a limited number of chord types and using only a few scales, I can play over them all provided I put in the work. In short, no calculation required because I've preprogrammed a fixed number scalar responses, all of which emphasize the relevant chord tones of whatever the chord is. Another way to put this is key centric playing, as I define it correctly or not, requires almost infinite adjustments, whereas CST only knows a few scales that can be found to fit most circumstances.
Simple brains require less choices and complications.
This is me just thinking aloud and I may revise/refine these thoughts later.
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Thanks for explaining that. It's a very different way of thinking. Originally Posted by P4guitar
I went through some details in the previous post to show which notes my approach ends up identifying - contrasting the results with what I think of as CST. In practice, though, it's much simpler, at least after some preliminary work is done.
I decided, some time back, that I'd learn the notes in the chords and scales I use, in every key and a few enharmonic equivalents. That took some work.
I had found that I couldn't easily learn from a pattern based approach, but I could work around it this way.
So, at that point, thinking key center and adjustments worked very well, at least for standard type tunes. So, for example, All Of Me is in C tonal center, but I adjust for the G# in the E7, the C# and maybe F# in the A7, the F# in the D7 and so forth.
It's harder for, say, Wayne Shorter tunes. But, if you know the notes you usually get 6 or so obvious consonant choices and you can see what the voice leading is from one chord to another. And, once I hear the chord and know the chord tones I can pick other notes by ear.
On the bandstand I'm trying to avoid thinking about all this, but I still use it when necessary to avoid clams.
It mostly works. The occasional clam is caught in the net.
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If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Onward and upward! Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
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Right exactly. Lots of parallels with CST … but using a simplified set of changes to enable to kind of expansion Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Yes... At least when I want that sound.
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transcribed Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Maybe CST is broken?
I think this thread is tied to the "What do I really need to practice?" thread.
Like many here, I practiced CST a lot. Many hours running Chord Scales and arpeggios over progressions.
Learning approach notes and enclosures brought some more focus... but there was still something missing.
Etudes helped a little, always taught to analyze in the chord of the moment. My own transcriptions helped some--more time writing them down then internalizing them.
Playing changes didn't click. Every chord a different scale. Every chord a different scale.
There's also a connection to the "rhythmic topic" as well...
Strong beats and weak beats? I know you've had that discussion elsewhere on the forum. Lining everything up. Still didn't sound like jazz to my ears. Didn't sound like the bebop and hardbop musicians I listened to on the regular. Everything was framed under the CST I was taught in private lessons and in college.
Ear training. I became obsessed with Contextual Ear Training. Started a journal about that journey. Things started to make some sense. Transcribed more. But the result was always notes over the chord in the moment. b9, 5th, #11 over chords in the moment. Christian over here highlighted that key weakness in my methodology. I needed to internalize and hear phrases--and just play.
Then I started studying the Barry Harris method. My past transcriptions started to make sense. My practice sessions sounded less like scales and more like music. I wasn't thinking different scales for each chord. Phrases started to connect more. There was something wholistic going on between the melodic and the rhythmic that I didn't get before. Strong beat/ weak beats (my pop knowledge of Hal Galper) combined with CST didn't get me to that same place. Christian also said on one of his earlier videos that the point of all those chromatics wasn't to line everything up with the downbeats--instead the half steps helped you "come out right at the end."
If you analyzed those half steps in a strictly vertical method with CST--they wouldn't make sense. Even with approach tone this and appoggiatura that--a lot of labeling and not enough playing.
How does all this reflection relate to the OP? If you can't make phrases sound connected and fluid over the form because you are always stuck on the chord of the moment, if you are always playing catch-up, practicing more CST might not help? I couldn't play rhythm changes at all until I studied the Barry Harris approach with a fellow guitarist who actually played with the guy--sometimes being from New York is a point of pride and sometimes... well...
I've wrote the following elsewhere on the internet:
Scales, technique, and harmony are the raw material. Rhythm is the synthesis and transformation of raw material into music.
Without rhythm, we throw scales at the pulse like throwing paint at the wall. Problem is, most of us students of jazz aren't Jackson Pollack (even Mr. B
). You can't decouple rhythm completely from harmony and melody--otherwise rhythm would have nothing to organize and transform. Issue is that CST assumes that you SHOULD separate rhythm from everything else. Harmonic rhythm--the pulse of the progression that creates form--that's rhythmic. Barry Harris's method is the first to approach music pedagogy in a wholistic manner--where rhythm is an organizational and transformational agent of creativity. A lot of that is possible by starting simple and layering in the complexity--while respecting the reality that we play movements, not isolated chords.
I think this post is proof that I can't write on forums. I saw a lot of connections here with other ideas and thought about my own experience with CST and rhythm changes. Word vomit? Maybe. At least I'm not posting as much as I used to, right?
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I think CST is okay to label and categorize stuff after it happened, but I don’t see why you need to do it.
Some people have all their Legos in little bins sorted by color and size, I always just dug around in a big bin. You get more time to play if you don’t spend any time sorting.
P4 says they can use it. Or used to at least.
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I was unaware that CST was so controversial and I have been sort of hesitant to weigh into this whole discussion.
But here is maybe another perspective that was brought up a few times and is basically what I am doing in my video of "Oleo" on page 4 of this thread.
I learned CST and know theoretically what tones belong to which chords, but more importantly I can hear them and normally know what color-effect each tone will have against any given chord before I play it.
These chord scale "islands" are valuable knowledge to have, but they will only get you to a certain point as harmony is not static, and if you are thinking in isolated chords it will probably sound like that.
When I am improvising, in the best case scenario, I am playing a melodic phrase and sort of "adjusting" it to fit the changing harmony as it flies by.
My focus is much more on the phrase that I am playing and how I am going to resolve it.
Once you can hear this stuff in your head then the theory and naming become less important; but conversely for most people with an average musical ear (like most of us), CST is a step that probably should not be skipped.
Most of this discussion is sort of theoretical and word-heavy. Maybe when someone has a strong opinion about something, they could post a short video to demonstrate how their idea translates into the real world so that other players can decide if it is a learning path worth pursuing.
As Alan said in another thread; "talking about methods to play on Giant Steps is easy, it is doing it where it gets hard".
Anyway, my two (euro) cents.
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What I liked about your video and CST in general is that the note choices it provides always work. Keycentric players often have note choices that don't work to my ears. Originally Posted by Question
This is a very important benefit of CST. Originally Posted by Question
I think this problem can be resolved by practicing transitions from one chord to the next in CST. Eventually you start to hear it. Originally Posted by Question
Correct. I would add starting with guide tones first, 3 to 4 note scale, and expanding then to full 7 or 8 note scales. Originally Posted by Question
Always a good idea. Originally Posted by Question
I see some conceptual problems in this thread, not from you Question, that I think conflate some ideas and muddy the waters.
CST is too limited: It's only as limited at the player. If the CST player ignores chromatics and other devices like enclosures it can sound a little too nice. If they don't practice transitions from chord to chord, lines will sound disjointed. If they merely run scales it'll still sound consonant, but boring. CST is what you make of it.
CST is too difficult: What's difficult is not knowing what to play. CST can fix that. Another benefit of CST is that if one really knows it, they can, but don't have to, outline the chord in their single line with no accompaniment, i.e. they don't need other musicians or backing tracks because the listeners hears the harmony in the solos. And as you previously mentioned, Question, CST helps the player learn how the notes effect the chord. Finally CST forces the player to know the song form inside and out, otherwise they'd be playing the wrong scales and that would sound off.
CST and Barry Harris are incompatible: No they're not, it's what I do personally. To me CST is about chord/scale relationships whether it's based on a 7 note scale or an 8 note scale as in the 6th diminished approach. Barry's teachings only make CST richer. Another point is that while Barry's scale of chords always sounds good to my ears, the scale of chords does not necessarily convey the harmonic contours of the song - it may "fit" but it also may not identify the harmony. 6th diminished CST would help clarify this.
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Just have to point out that chord scale theory at least in name didn't exist until the 1970s and seems to originate from an academic standpoint to describe pre-existing music. That's fine but it likely is not the way that the players who were playing were thinking about things. Or at least not necessarily.
Someone above said they think players who don't think in CST use the "wrong notes". That would have to include people who were musically illiterate. Django, Birelli, Chet Baker, among others (most gypsy guys). At their best they are as sophisticated as anyone else. Wes probably falls somewhere in there too.
I'm a lot more interested in what those guys were actually thinking then in the system someone else used to describe it.
I think you could say that George Russell was doing this in the 50s to a degree and that Kind Of Blue and Coltrane were implicated but for playing over traditional jazz harmony most all that stuff was codified well beforehand. People were playing without CST and like...doing a really good job. So it likely was something else.
Probably a combo of solid basic musical training, intricate knowledge of lots of tunes, a solid classical background, etc.
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I can go and look masterclass vid by John MacLaughlin or Adam Rogers and they’ll tell you exactly how they think about it (which is to say they are CST people) so that’s a bit different to the state of jazz information sixty or seventy years ago. Originally Posted by sully75
It’s surprisingly difficult to trace an exact timeline for the development of modern CST but I’m inclined to say mid to late 60s. Jerry Coker’s 1964 book on Jazz Improvisation uses a recognisable but still incomplete version of CST.
People were using bits of info that would later be folded into CST but this didn’t comprise a complete system yet.
From what I know i don’t think it had that much to do with describing or explaining previous jazz really. Musicians were interested in learning the new music of the era, which was fusion and post bop. A lot of them like Pat Metheny had already becoming convincing soloists on standards by copping stuff from records, the time honoured way and wanted to move beyond it into a music that hadn’t been played yet. CST remains an important tool for that kind of music and later music, if only because almost everyone was trained that way.
As I understand it CST is the consolidation of several practices and approaches predating it. I would say substitution theory, extended chord voicings and scale use in general all of which predates CST by several decades.
The development of soloing strategies in post-bop jazz is really messy, diverse and interesting. The guys on Kind of Blue do not play those songs like the theory books…
some players preferred certain sounds to others. I’ve haven’t yet caught Wayne Shorter using the altered scale for instance - he generally seems to prefer whole tone and diminished sounds. I would say a lot of the current choices in the books tend to fit in with Herbie’s choices on those same tunes.
OTOH take something Nica’s dream and compare the solo of the players on the original and other recordings and again you’ll see a variety of approaches. Things that jazz theory would frown on are all over these records, while some players preferred (sometimes intuitively) the choices that every jazz school student learns today, this was by no means the default option.
It’s a lot less neat than things like the Mark Levine Jazz Theory Book seem to suggest and I love it for that.
Nb the post CST era is also longer than all the other eras of jazz put together.
Sent from my iPhone using TapatalkLast edited by Christian Miller; 08-06-2025 at 03:31 PM.
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To me I think of the chord and its extensions. This is basically the approach of Joe Pass. So, I have stolen most of stuff from him, but it is looking at the chord and simply adding extension. Sure, you get the CST but looking at it from the chord point I think gives broad basis and you can fool around with triads in lines. Ideally, I like to practice the tune in this fashion looking at each individual chord but of course where are you going is important.
I have to admit that in some playing situations and when things get really fast with many changes, then you just have to survive and that might be to get it down to the most simply form. For me this is the difference between Paul Desmond who really speaks to me in his playing melodic touch, verse some wild and blowing Sax that wants to do through the whole world in one chorus.
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[QUOTE=P4guitar ]"What I liked about your video and CST in general is that the note choices it provides always work. Keycentric players often have note choices that don't work to my ears".
Just to be clear, I am not really "using" CST in my improv, I am tending to emphasize the notes that outline the harmony and connecting them in hopefully a melodic fashion.
CST informs me what the possible note choices for a chord might be, but it does not tell me the effect against the chord of each possible choice.
I had to develop that through trial and error and lots of transcribing to see what the masters were doing with the material that I already logically knew.
As you well know, certain notes in a chord scale imply the harmony more effectively than others. This is a concept that wasn't clear to me when I first learned CST in the 70's.
Sort of transforming math into art.Last edited by Question; 08-06-2025 at 05:04 PM.
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The thing I find controversial about CST is not the theory, which I find sometimes useful, and sometimes not, but more the way this stuff is so omnipresent in the wider jazz education literature and presents itself the answer to every question. It took me several years from my first encounter with it to realise there was any other way of going about things. Originally Posted by Question
Knowing what a tool is and what its strengths and shortcomings are essential to using any tool well. CST is no exception.
For examples, It is not IMO a tool to teach beginners how to play jazz, by and large. Some (dare I say, people who are obsessive about the technical and theoretic side) persist with it and do well, especially in combination with other stuff like transcription, but we’ve had decades of Aebeesold style approaches - and I think we can reflect and do better.
In the days gone by players started with the music and the technical information came in later if at all.
Ultimately it’s about the ears, of course. Scales can be a useful gestalt to help the ears understand several notes together. But you obviously don’t need to know about chord scales to learn to hear a #11 on a dominant chord or whatever.
Otoh I really don’t like the method of always hearing every note on in a solo line as related to the underlying chord root.
I don’t think that’s necessary in CST but it does seem a type of analysis that is very common, and I don’t think has much to do (as far as I can tell) with how bop era musicians thought. More here (on a Parker rhythm changes line):
This is what I’m driving at as the distinction between subs and extensions/chord scales.
Sent from my iPhone using TapaLast edited by Christian Miller; 08-06-2025 at 04:23 PM.
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you said it better than I did. And yeah CST or whatever you want to call it clearly makes sense for certain types of music. For more II V kinda stuff, 50s and earlier, I don't really know. Type of chord +extensions might be more like it. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I wonder...are there a lot of early charts somewhere? That would be interesting to see.
I would note that as much as John McLaughlin is probably my favorite guitar playing, his straight ahead jazz playing is pretty awful. I like his early playing on changes better than his modern playing. He seems to excel in modal/Indian situations but playing changes, not so much. Adam Rogers kills in all directions though.
As far as learning to play music goes, man I spent a long time avoiding learning "licks" because somehow they would make me sound like everyone else or something and that seemed to be the prevailing wisdom for a long time and that just seems to be the dumbest advice I've ever gotten. Learning scales early on did nothing for me.
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When you are starting out in a form of music you have to learn music, no? I think most people interested in jazz realise that jazz is a style of music, and they want to sound like that. Originally Posted by sully75
There’s a sort of implicit suggestion in the presentation of popular jazz books that this can be accomplished through the exercise of music theory, which I don’t think any competent jazz teacher of any flavour would suggest and I doubt many on this thread would agree with either.
This is one reason that I think it may be best to shelve the ambition to become ‘a real improviser’ until further down the line. I know that’s not a universal view necessary something I’d be super dogmatic about. But, yes, licks. If you are starting out, don’t be a snob about them! You haven’t earned the right… yet.
If you are a good aural musician already you have a leg up in a new genre because you can hear more already, and have some idea of how to transform sounds into playing. You might miss subtleties and particulars, and not everything is necessarily easy because of those skills, but it will help a lot. You won’t need to be told where to put your fingers so much, if nothing else.
But needless to say, for most this is a skill set that needs to be developed.
The thing that has made that snap into focus for me is learning to become a highly amateur classical/baroque improviser. This stuff all comes up there too. It’s just different content. The process is identical.
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Christian made some good points, and I agree that there is no need to exclude any one system for another one.
I transcribed some Michael Brecker lines that I liked over the years and quickly realized that using the "this note against that chord" analysis was useless.
With Brecker the arc and shape of the line made it sound great even though it often had little if any harmonic relation to the chord upon which it was played.
It is a bit like abstract painting in that a shape or color is justified by the context in which is is found.
Also, in the beginning some sounds like minor pentatonic were easy for me to hear; but with altered sounds I found it helpful to understand the structure before I could really get it into my ears.
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Beg to differ about McLaughlin's straight ahead playing. His playing on Live In Tokyo especially is really exquisite and swinging. Originally Posted by sully75
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That's a fusion album, no? Playing Mahavishnu stuff? I know JM can do that amazingly. Originally Posted by James W
I'm talking about playing straight ahead jazz. I don't like it. The After The Rain album being one example.
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