-
Based on the selection of players whose transcriptions were analyzed in this video, I'd have expected a Phrygian Dominant bias, but not to the extend that it occurred.
Edit: He starts playing the transcriptions and keeping the scores around the 9:20 mark if you want to skip right to that point.
Last edited by Tal_175; 12-12-2025 at 02:02 PM.
-
12-12-2025 12:57 PM
-
Examples start after nine minutes
I recognize the second Chet Baker line from Autumn Leaves with Bill Evans on Rhodes!
-
Yes, I'll put that in the OP.
Originally Posted by Clausstrom
Examples start after nine minutes
-
It depends on the chord and its function. The sound of the harmonic and melodic minor scales is distinct. The iii of a major key (Em7 in C maj) needs the harmonic but you're usually safe with melodic over the ii and vi (Dm7 and Am7).
If there's a non-diatonic ii-V the same applies although if only the V is used then the alt scale doesn't really work. Personally, I use the melodic minor over the ii, but not necessarily, and the alt scale for resolving doms. If I want to produce a b9 or 13b9 sound I use the mel m from the b7 of the dom - both resolving and non-resolving.
I rarely use the harmonic m sound except where it enhances the feel of a V-i. There one scarcely notices it's a harm m sound, it just fits. That's especially true where the tune is one of those pure, rather folky ones like Manhã de Carnaval where the mel m would sound too out of place.
There are always exceptions to all this but I haven't found many. Incidentally, one can also use both the harm m and the mel m over a diminished chord depending on its placement.
-
This is completely unsurprising to me, and I expect anyone who has spent time transcribing music of this era. Originally Posted by Tal_175
BTW I really don't like the term Phrygian Dominant - I think the players would have said minor - more old school. The minor scale on dominant. I think thinking about things from the chord of the moment root all the time can obscure how diatonic things are.
But yes, the same notes by another name of course. The altered scale is rare up until the post-modal era. TBH I don't even hear it that much in post-bop. (You do get tritone subs but these are usually arpeggios.)
The most common altered dominant in a minor key is that mix of natural and harmonic minor notes... So you get the 1-b2-b3-3 tetrachord on the V built from the 5-b6-b7-7 of the minor scale. Modern theorists would call it altered or diminished (and spell it 1-b9-#9-3), but I've seen little in the music of the bop era to make me think that was how they were thinking.
There's a great run at the end of the A section of the Wes solo I'm transcribing (Nica's Dream live in 1965) where he plays a natural minor pattern over the II V I in Bb minor. But - he swaps the first note out for the major 7th - A. So we get this scale
7 b7 b6 5 4 b3 2 1
It's at 1:21
And if there's a scale concept here, it's that. The natural minor notes with a major 7 (the leading tone) added optionally to give the major 3rd of the V7 chord. You hear it in the blues scale as well. Grant Green, Lee Morgan. And that's your II V scale.
Reg mentioned this scale BTW. He sees it as a precursor to the altered scale.
The only thing you have to do to make it altered is flatten the 2 of the minor scale (5 of the V7). You do see b2 as an enclosure note together with 7 around the 1 - for instance in Night in Tunisia or Segment - not uncommon in Western music more broadly. However it sounds to me that the players of that era used the whole tone scale as the V7b5 chord sound (more Bud and Monk than Bird).
If you mash a whole tone scale together with the 1-b2-b3-3 you get the altered scale. Which was originally called diminished-whole tone.
PS: when you do transcribe someone with a clear CST approach like Kurt Rosenwinkel it's REALLY clear. Kurt plays all the text book scale choices. The older players are much looser and more melody oriented. Wes playing the Dorian on m(maj7) chords and so on.Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-12-2025 at 02:37 PM.
-
The only difference between these scales is:
Phrygian dominant has perfect the 4th and the 5th, altered has a b5 (#4).
So instead of the 4th and the 5th, if you play the note in the middle, you get the altered scale. Every other note is the same since #9 is usually added to the Phrygian dominant.
I use both, but for those who are just getting into the altered territory, here are various trade-offs I observed from the learning curve point of view:
- Phrygian dominant (the 4th and the 5th) sounds more inside. The b5 of the altered can be a bit of a dick at times until you get used to it, despite the fact that it's the root of the tritone dominant. It really wants to resolve right away if you emphasize it (at least to my ears).
- Phrygian dominant preserves the standard dominant arpeggio, 1 3 5 7, altered doesn't (it's got a #5 instead). If you are using arpeggios as references for your lines, you'll find Phrygian dominant easier to transition from the plain dominant.
- Phrygian dominant covers the frequently accompanying ii min7b5 chord. The altered scale doesn't outline both chords. So if you want to play that change, the half-diminished calls for a different scale if you are using the altered scale for the dominant.
- When you add #9 to Phrygian dominant, you get three adjacent chromatic notes b3, 3 and 4 in the new scale. Not a show-stopper but the 4th is very useful when you are playing arpeggios from the chord tones. So the addition of b3 is a bit of a curveball when you are coming from the vanilla dominant lines. It's wants to be dealt with idiomatically.
- Altered scale comes from arguably the more versatile melodic minor scale. So your effort to learn it is rewarded with two other very common use cases, tonic minor and lydian dominant. You can add Locrian #2 to this list to play over half-diminished chords but I think that's not as useful as the other two.Last edited by Tal_175; 12-12-2025 at 09:15 PM.
-
These seems a convoluted way to conceptualise it to me. Really it's traditional diatonic minor stuff. A lot of bop lines make sense from this perspective. It's not very far away from classical, the main difference is it's a bit looser vertically (like playing the b3 over the V7 chord and so on) and rhythmically more sophisticated. Originally Posted by Tal_175
I would describe that as the default, and it makes sense that it would be.
I think what happened is when the CST stuff originally came in players were adding in the melodic modes and so on on top of this diatonic basis that they'd all started with, but as time wore on more and more jazz newbies were going straight to CST and didn't do the diatonic stuff first. I think this is probably especially true of guitarists, most of whom wouldn't have much experience with traditional minor. Most of the rock stuff is modal.
It really depends who you check out honestly.- Altered scale comes from arguably the more versatile melodic minor scale. So your effort to learn it is rewarded with two other very common use case, tonic minor and lydian dominant. You can add Locrian #2 to this list to play over half-diminished chords but I think there are other good alternatives for that.
A very good example of the Locrian #2 on a II-7b5 in bop is the opening arpeggio of Conception by George Shearing. The melody has Amaj7#5 on Eb-7b5.(At least that's the way Bud and George play it. Bill Evans plays Amaj7.) In the bridge we also have a descending C melodic minor (From D) on B7.
So that's my bebop era example of both scales. There's probably some others. The C melodic minor thing on B7 is interesting.
If I had to guess I suspect Shearing got it from Tristano - Tristano might be the origin of melodic minor use in jazz. But I'm not 100%. Jimmy Raney OTOH was not interested in Tristano lol. So I think it varied from player to player.
-
Thanks for this! I didn't know it had a name, but it's very evocative and helps to bring my long standing interest in Arabic-Islamic musics into jazz. I like including the b3/#9 variant.
-
They rarely play the augmented second melodically b9-3, so that sort of sound is not one they really lean into. Originally Posted by JazzPadd
-
C phrygian dominant is C Db E F G Ab Bb
C alt is C Db Eb E Gb Ab Bb.
If I try to figure out a chord name for C phrygdom I get Root, b9 3 4 5 b6 b7. Or, C7b9b13(add4).
If I do the same for C alt I get R b9 #9 3 #11 b13 b 7. Or, C7#11b13b9#9, usually known as C7alt. I'm ignoring the 4th.
If I see a C7alt going to say an Fm, I might play xx 899 11 and it's likely to sound good and fitting. C7#9b13. Don't need to ignore anything because this is melodic minor harmony and there's no avoid note.
I think this is what I hear a lot of players do.
Meaning, in practice, the chord from the alt scale ends up getting played as if it were generated by phrygian dominant.
Of course, not everybody is going to do this. But it's what usually sounds best to me and I hear others do it.
-
I don't think it's clear to me what it is that you find convoluted. For example, just to clarify, do you find working on building altered lines using the whole tone scale to be a convoluted approach? Originally Posted by Christian Miller
-
Nice, I was wondering if you'd pick up on that as I typed. Let me just say that it's nice to have my posts read haha. Originally Posted by Tal_175
Well, it's a very guitar way of talking about diatonic minor harmony, let me put it that way. TBF I don't think that diatonic anything is obvious on guitar - in a sense we all kind of lean towards thinking about chords, but a bit of time a piano clears up a lot of this stuff IMO.
I'm not sure I'd say there are whole tone lines per se? You get patterns - whole tone runs straight down (Monk loves them), the augmented triad thing (which Monk did, and Wes lifted), thirds, intervals. Definitely exotic 'spice' that takes you a little out of the usual run of things. I'm not sure that Parker used whole tone at all? I might be wrong.
But the thing about minor key lines, is that they are melodies, not patterns. Talking about Phrygian dominant etc, puts us mentally a bit into the realm of 'exotic harmony', and Jazzpadd started talking about Middle Eastern sounds. Whereas in fact this stuff is in terms of the pitches absolutely rooted in European music, and that way of looking at things, to the extent of avoiding the aug 2nd at the beginning of scale runs and so on, and using octave displacement. Stuff that you see in Bach. And actually, that's congruent with the type of music education these players had, jazz players were repurposing a the European music materials that were lying around - it wasn't all they were using, but it's quite a lot of it.
-
Yes, harmonic minor is a common scale choice for V7(b9) > Im. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
-
The interesting thing is that in jazz, so is natural minor. Originally Posted by Mick-7
-
Yes, both would give you the b9th, but also #9th (b3rd) with the natural minor. I like diminished too, especially if it's V7 > Im6 (vs. Im#7). Actually, I don't think much about scales anymore, just the particular chord progression. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
-
I mean that is another thing jazz people tend to do - separate, natural, melodic and harmonic minor into seperate boxes. In Western music these scales get mixed and matched all the time. This is true of both jazz and common practice European music. Obligatory Bach ex...
-
Tonic scales do a good job in capturing tonality as the static, inside context of a tune (or a section of it). Originally Posted by Christian Miller
But the note choices for tonal melodies do not always come from the tonic scale. The notes outside the scale play a key role in creating forward momentum, and adding tension and color. We kind of conceptualize this as part of the "vertical considerations" in modern harmony. You hear that in Bach's music too. There are bars that have what we now call diminished notes that resolve to tonic notes of the next bar. Of course you know all this. People can study these and come up with rules for how these tension notes are used and voice-lead in a certain period etc. Chord-scale mappings such as Phrygian dominant, whole tone, altered scale etc provide a crude approximation of these harmonic tension notes that lead to the tonic reference. In a way just a different way of viewing the same musical devices. Unfortunately, they don't come with a prescription of how to use these tendencies. A lot is left for the musician to experiment with and discover (or learn from others).
Regarding the chord-centric view vs diatonic view. I don't think it is just a guitar thing. Even if you are playing strictly diatonically, lets say, vanilla G7 going to Cmaj6 (all white keys), I would view the scale and lines very differently for G7 then the resolved C6. It's not terribly helpful to me that they are all white keys if I want to create a sense of harmonic motion. So the vertical consideration, even when there aren't outside notes, is inherent in lines.
-
I mean I like the altered scale, half-whole diminished in minor is the bomb. Originally Posted by Mick-7
It's all good. People come out of jazz courses that teach CST playing great every year.
But then there's another angle - what did the bop players actually do? How did jazz evolve and develop? How does it relate to older practices? What did Trane do that Cannonball didn't? etc etc. I find that stuff interesting. Not everyone does... but I do think it's good for the ears.
-
And Barry’s m6dim scale, which merges all three and sits perfectly for straight dominant (on the fifth) and altered dominant (on the flat second). So G7 = Dm6dim and G7alt = Abm6dim. Originally Posted by Christian Miller
-
Well I mean that is how Barry Harris deals with it - although he doesn't deal with the minor's V in the same way, but that's another thread. He does this for a very specific and good reason which is that we want to focus on repurposing familiar material. (But Barry's approach is not necessarily THE bebop approach.) Originally Posted by Tal_175
One problem is the scale on the V of the minor key is not Phrygian dominant. It really depends what prevailing alterations are found in the minor key at the time. Phrygian dominant is just one. Very often you find what modern jazz musicians would call Mixo b6 or Phrygian. These are of course all emergent from the minor scales. I really dislike the terminology. You need to be aware of the harmony you are outlining within the key - IV-6 V7 etc. I don't think we need to call things a new scale depending on what scale degree we are on within the key. That seems convoluted to me.
Another is that it is IMO quite unhelpful here to get too stuck on the chord of the moment. The jazz way of dong things (at this point in history at least) less about matching the chord to an appropriate scale, but rather looser. Which makes sense because it's music made by people improvising together.
You play stuff in minor, for example. So it's my belief that many of the 'funny' notes come about simply from jazz musicians taking things from European music that would have been matched to a specific chord and ending up over different chords. In the Bach example the D is placed on the implied A-(6) chord, and the D# on the B7 chord as we might expect from textbook theory. In a bebop line it would not be unusual to find the D on the B7. This even applies to that cheeky b2 (b5 against the V7) note which probably comes from the b2 melody note in the old Neapolitan Sixth chord.
Later on jazz theorists analysed these things with reference to the chord of the moment. So even without CST terms, they look at the G7 with a Bb melody note on it and write 'G7#9'. Later jazz pedagogues with a CST approach say, oh G7altered. So you go from a C natural minor melody to a G altered scale just through decisions about what to call things. (This example is from Blue Bossa, of course.)
By always relating notes to a chord - expressed or theoretical - I think it's easy to miss other relationships like this. It's good to look at things both ways - melodic and harmonic.Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-12-2025 at 05:45 PM.
-
Kind of a different thing? Originally Posted by pcjazz
Applying a minor scale on a dominant chord is as far as I am aware a practice completely unique to jazz.
What I think the video in the OP is talking about is basically melody within minor key*. It's just that they couch it in terms of modes. Barry's m6-dim scale contains some - but not all - of these options.
* So within any of the three classical minor scales.
-
Agree, Barry would be more likely to run one dominant into another resolving to tonic minor. (I skipped OP’s video.) Originally Posted by Christian Miller
-
Here's a way that I think about it.
If I'm trying not to sound too vanilla on a dominant resolving to a tonic, the notes I think about are as follows.
If it's a Gdominant resolving to a C tonic, on the G dominant, I'll think R 3 b6 b7 b9 #9. G B Eb F Ab Bb. They lay nicely on guitar, for example, as 3x3446, moving to 3x3444. That is, the #9 goes to b9. The obvious chord is G7b9#9b13.
One issue is that this is 6 notes. They're the six I like best, but they don't make a 7 note scale. Bear with me.
Galt is G Ab Bb B Db Eb F
To get Galt you have to add the Db to my 6 preferred notes. To my ear that Db sound more dissonant than the others. I don't care for it. I understand that a great player can make any note sound terrific. But I'm not surprised the players in the video didn't play it. Of the seven notes, it's the first one I'll let go in a jazz-economy downturn.
For G phrygian dominant you start with G Ab B C D Eb F. To get to my favored six notes you have to omit the C and D and add Bb.
The C is the so-called avoid note on a Gdominant. There's a reason for that, and a reason that people hate that designation.
Now, if I had to add a note to make these 7 note scales I think I'd add the D, but I'm not bothered by a hexatonic.
In fact, I think that the hexatonic is the neglected middle child of scaledom. I'm perfectly happy with G mixolydian without the C. And with C Ionian without the F. Not that I don't play them. I do. But I think of them consonant-non-chord tones.
I'm even happy with Galt without the Db. And, that's something because it's melodic minor harmony which isn't supposed to have an avoid note. I mean, if there was such a thing.
It came to me in a dream that Bach thought this exact same way, but pretty much kept it to himself.
-
Counterpoint: it's like, y'know, C minor. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
The Db on the G7 is a great sound, but you have to know how to use it. Which is to say you have to hear it.
-
I think perhaps that the enormous "secret" about altered notes, that too many seem to lose sight of is that.......there's only FOUR of them!!! Don't overwhelmed yourselves.
Reply With Quote
TW Doyle Tele
Yesterday, 06:17 PM in Guitar, Amps & Gizmos