“Triads Can’t Produce Real Bebop.” So I Analyzed Bird's tune Confirmation.

[GuyBoden]

Yes, you need to have a strategy for combining and utilizing them - hexatonic scales, tetrachords, etc.

At a push, you could even try copying the actual Bebop recordings.

[pamosmusic]

Totally fair lol

The thumbnail lives in YouTube land. If you decide to press play, it disappears and the rest is just Bird, and his phrases, and triads.

I was going to say that YOU are too old for thumbnails like this.

[pamosmusic]

i mean, in mainstream jazz we voice-lead over chords which are constructed in triads. what else would you expect the language to reduce to? but can you reverse engineer this and go from triads to bebop? this is much harder to tell since almost nobody learns that way.

it also introduces this strange hirarchy where the triad is king and tension notes remain somewhat undefined and left to the students discretion. you say " with lots of tension 2s, 4s, and 6s can get into some bebop sounding phrases." i dont think this is how it works.

I think the thing that really felt unlocked by this sort of approach was Monk tunes. That’s a very different style of phrasing and composition, though obvs.

I also think a lot of great blues sounds live in this zone. You can arrive at and adapt a lot of Grant Green language this way.

And I think for me the utility is not so much that I could hypothetically get bebop language or whatever else by using only or primarily these tools, but rather that I can use these tools to manipulate and incorporate language in a way that often (not always) feels more interesting and flexible.

[Mick-7]

At a push, you could even try copying the actual Bebop recordings.

That's not a strategy, all music can be distilled down to simple harmonic structures but you'll need a system to conceptualize and organize them.

[CliffR]

So much of it will depend on your aesthetic preferences, what triads you use, what tension notes you pick, and how you choose to express the blues. Very malleable and flexible. My best recommendation would be to analyze the blues heads of your favorite musicians and see if you can pick up on any patterns. Which notes feel stable? Which feel melodically tense? Can you figure out what triads and quadratonics are governing their phrases? Lean into those. And maybe apply them ON their blues tunes. That way your lines will feel more connected to the melody and might help you feel like you're not just stuck in an academic exercise... but are actually trying to hear and express the blues based on THOSE CATS' ears and language.

Curious what triads and tension notes you were trying.

I've mostly been focussing on Bird's up-tempo Now's The Time (although I don't care for the head much) and George Benson's Billie's Bounce. If I remember rightly, I was using b9 as tension notes, perhaps 7ths also. I'm thinking particularly of the first 6 bars, before it goes a bit more overtly bebop. As I understand it, Bird would tend to only play the 7th of the F on the fourth bar. I'm more recently given to understand that I maybe shouldn't be using a b9 on a 7th chord unless it's resolving. The triads I was using were just the major triads from the chords themselves.

[James W]

As I understand it, Bird would tend to only play the 7th of the F on the fourth bar.

Flattened seventh.

[CliffR]

In this context I meant to say the flattened seventh.

[Christian Miller]

I like the Stefon Harris approach quite a lot, but I do think it suffers from the same tendency of things like Chord Scale Theory which is to view everything in terms of vertical harmonic relationships. And there's more to life than that.

So I think it's a good approach to have in your tool box.

Bop is full of triads with passing tones, that's very true. I mean... so is 99% of Western music. But as DJG says, going from triads to bop is a more difficult sell. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be in someone's musical ear that has nothing to do with pitch choices.

[djg]

I like the Stefon Harris approach quite a lot, but I do think it suffers from the same tendency of things like Chord Scale Theory which is to view everything in terms of vertical harmonic relationships. And there's more to life than that.

So I think it's a good approach to have in your tool box.

Bop is full of triads with passing tones, that's very true. I mean... so is 99% of Western music. But as DJG says, going from triads to bop is a more difficult sell. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be in someone's musical ear that has nothing to do with pitch choices.

wes gets a lot of mileage out of triad groups. like Gm Cm Dm over Cminor. i would love to know how he exactly thought about that. who has written books about that stuff, i cant remember? garrison fewell? the V triad over the I chord is a big thing in bebop. GG does play a lot of triadic stuff as peter has pointed out. like the marvelous second chorus of miss ann or the pick up in two for one, or the pickup of best things in life. some of grants best spots are just triads in 2nd inversion, the classic opening quarter. of course he got everything from bird. i really would like to dive in the garzone stuff, chromatic triadic approach. but i'm too old for the grind now.

[TF]

I look forward to watching Mr. Klemons' video.

I like the intro picture of CP with glowing eyes.

[Mick-7]

wes gets a lot of mileage out of triad groups. like Gm Cm Dm over Cminor. i would love to know how he exactly thought about that. who has written books about that stuff, i cant remember?

Most of the chordal voice-leading studies in George Van Eps books (e.g., his 3 big 'Harmonic Mechanisms' books) utilize triads, but of all chord types: major, minor, dominant 7th, etc. Mick Gooodricks and everyone's else's books I've seen are derived from his work. As they say, there's nothing new under the sun.

[Strat-itis]

I don’t disagree with that at all.

Bird clearly had command of 7th chords, 9th chords, scales — the full harmonic vocabulary. I’m not suggesting those elements weren’t part of his toolkit.

What I’m exploring is more about structural reduction and prioritization.

When I analyze something like Confirmation, a large percentage of what’s happening at the melodic level reduces very cleanly to triadic cells with added tensions and chromatic connection. That doesn’t negate the larger harmonic awareness behind it — it just highlights how much of the surface language can be generated from relatively small units.

So for me, the question isn’t “triads instead of scales.”

It’s more: if this much of the melodic vocabulary collapses this cleanly, what’s the most efficient foundation to build from and prioritize?

From there, nothing stops someone from expanding into full chord-scale vocabulary. I just find the triadic layer surprisingly and beautifully foundational.

I agree about the reduction and prioritization. I've built a system reducing how Milt plays. So you just have to present it in a cringey click bait fashion with demonic Charlie Parker with blue eyes and tag lines saying no scales no arps. I don't blame you, that gets clicks.

[Cunamara]

1-2-3-5 is a standard tool for lines in bebop and Coltrane. It's a triad plus one more note. I have no idea how that could be possibly controversial. It's everywhere in jazz.

I think one of the problems is that theoretical analysis of an existing piece of music is post hoc. It's an attempt to explain what was played- but the explanation generated is not necessarily what the composer or musician was thinking at the time of creating the music. I think the theoretical explanation usually ends up being more complicated than the original thought because the theoretician is trying to mind read and cannot successfully do so.

Real jazz improvisation is not especially cognitive. Our conscious minds are really very slow and limited; we can process, according to recent research, about 10 bits per second. That will not allow us to get through a bebop solo. We'll be thousands of bits behind by the end of the chorus.

Our sensory systems can process close to 1 billion bits per second and I think the process of learning to play jazz is learning how to develop and rely on that. We refer to that as "developing our ear" but it's really developing the whole sensorimotor system of the brain. We learn, often, through laborious cognitive processes that are very slow, with the hope of entraining those into our subconscious/sensorimotor/whatever you want to call it system to come forth in response to the situation. The cognitive, conscious mind is really not all that helpful on the bandstand because it is just not fast enough.

This is one of the reasons it's hard to play jazz properly while staring at sheet music. Sheet music continues to engage the conscious, cognitive mind and that interferes.

When I read interviews by master jazz musicians, a pretty consistent theme is that of learning things by ear, "getting it under their fingers," and then going out and playing. What I don't hear from those master musicians is that they were trying to play authentically like Charlie Parker; they're trying to play authentically like themselves. Only Charlie Parker could authentically play Charlie Parker. Indeed, the errors that they make in learning things by ear become the foundation for their own particular style.

When I see YouTube videos of someone playing along exactly note for note, nuance for nuance, with some recorded solo I simultaneously think "wow, I'm impressed they can do that" and "wow, what a waste of time if that does not actually inform and develop into their own unique vocabulary." George Benson and Tal Farlow and Jimmy Raney and Wes Montgomery and Herb Ellis and Barney Kessel learned Charlie Christian's solos, but those were only a springboard and not an end in and of themselves.

[jordanklemons]

i mean, in mainstream jazz we voice-lead over chords which are constructed in triads. what else would you expect the language to reduce to?

Having spent several decades in the jazz guitar education space - both as a student myself and as a teacher....
Based on the major emphasis of chord-scale theory, modes, and 7 chord arpeggios I've seen as the driving force throughout that world...
I would have expected the language to reduce to scale runs and 7 chord arpeggios.

Well. That's what I would have assumed prior to meeting Stefon Harris.

but can you reverse engineer this and go from triads to bebop? this is much harder to tell since almost nobody learns that way.

I can only speak for myself but, after meeting Stefon and hearing what he was doing with triads, I went all in on the triad approach. And then when I lost the ability to play and had to relearn, it became my primary approach. So obviously for me, yes, I believe it works. Beautifully in fact.

I'd be more curious to know what you think.
Did the Confirmation analysis make sense?
Did the etude I wrote sound like bebop? Because those lines were all created with major and minor triads.

it also introduces this strange hirarchy where the triad is king and tension notes remain somewhat undefined and left to the students discretion. you say " with lots of tension 2s, 4s, and 6s can get into some bebop sounding phrases." i dont think this is how it works.

Again... Did the etude sound like bebop and bebop phrasing? Because - as the color codin in the pdf shows - the notes were probably 80-90% triads. And the remaining were either tension notes (lots of 2s, 4s, and 6s) or a touch of leading tones and chromaticism. I can only speak to what my ear hears and how I think, practice, and create. To me is sounds like bebop phrasing. I'm more curious what you and others think.

[jordanklemons]

Isn't Blues for Alice very similar to confirmation? Both are fairly rapidly moving ii-V chords so maybe triads are a good tool here. Do you feel the same for a simpler progression?

I'm a big triad nerd
Been exploring these ideas for over a decade now and have spotted them during analyses everywhere and choose to use them as my primary approach for basically everything... fast moving bebop changes, simpler progressions, dense post-bop harmony, modern jazz... everything.

I find it works beautifully across the spectrum for me.

[jordanklemons]

At a push, you could even try copying the actual Bebop recordings.

Sure. If you like. Absolutely!

I'm just personally more interested in studying the anatomy of the language, understanding it on the building block level, and practicing direct application of that melodic architecture to authentic improvisation today instead of feeling trapped inside of memorizing riffs and trying to force note-for-note executions of other people's ideas into my playing hoping that in years (or decades) it will infuse into fluency.

Obviously that approach can work. I just don't believe it's the only one.
And this one works better for me.
But to each's own

[Strat-itis]

^ I share this view. I've been doing the same thing with Milt over the past year of codifying the structure of it. Not only using osmosis. And you can do them in parallel, the aural and the structural. It's not a binary.

[Cunamara]

Most of the chordal voice-leading studies in George Van Eps books (e.g., his 3 big 'Harmonic Mechanisms' books) utilize triads, but of all chord types: major, minor, dominant 7th, etc. Mick Gooodricks and everyone's else's books I've seen are derived from his work. As they say, there's nothing new under the sun.

That's interesting. I did not know for sure that Mick's work had roots in Van Eps's work, but I had wondered if there was some connection. Certainly Mick G would have been aware of it, although he seems to have taken it to another dimension.

[Mick-7]

That's interesting. I did not know for sure that Mick's work had roots in Van Eps's work, but I had wondered if there was some connection. Certainly Mick G would have been aware of it, although he seems to have taken it to another dimension.

I recall him mentioning it an interview but I couldn't tell you where/when. I think he distilled the concepts in Van Eps three massive tomes to basic principles, which is no easy task.

[GuyBoden]

I do think that using triads is a good foundation method, but in combination with the usual Bebop; Approach notes, Enclosures, Octave displacement, Chromatic leading notes, Rhythmic displacement, Diminished Arps etc.

But, rhythmically Jazz is very complex, so maybe copying and playing-a-long with phrases from the actual great Jazz recordings will get a more authentic Jazz sound.

[Christian Miller]

Triads are quite intuitive for guitarists if you can get people to stop thinking about fingerings. I do feel it’s a really good way into mapping the changes of a tune on the fretboard.

The issue with Barry is you need to really know your scales and be prepared to sink a lot of time into it. The barrier to entry is high if you’ve only ever played rock guitar, say.

So I would tend to say starting with triads derived from basic chord shapes in combination with transcription and application of licks is the most obvious way to get started with jazz

I may change my mind again in a few years.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[jordanklemons]

I think the thing that really felt unlocked by this sort of approach was Monk tunes. That’s a very different style of phrasing and composition, though obvs.

I also think a lot of great blues sounds live in this zone. You can arrive at and adapt a lot of Grant Green language this way.

And I think for me the utility is not so much that I could hypothetically get bebop language or whatever else by using only or primarily these tools, but rather that I can use these tools to manipulate and incorporate language in a way that often (not always) feels more interesting and flexible.

Big time yes. Monk has these shapes and structures all over. I just worked through a transcription of one of Charlie Rouse's solo on a Monk recording with a student of mine and they were all over. Bird's melody on confirmation? All over. A couple of years ago a student asked me to work through one of Rosenwinkel's tunes with him... specifically with the goal of getting some solo guitar and trio style playing happening. Triads and quadratonic phrases everywhere. They are wildly flexible and in the decade+ now I've been exploring them... they seem to show up everywhere. Awesome to hear they were helpful with Monk's tunes and incorporating language for you!

[jordanklemons]

I've mostly been focussing on Bird's up-tempo Now's The Time (although I don't care for the head much) and George Benson's Billie's Bounce. If I remember rightly, I was using b9 as tension notes, perhaps 7ths also. I'm thinking particularly of the first 6 bars, before it goes a bit more overtly bebop. As I understand it, Bird would tend to only play the 7th of the F on the fourth bar. I'm more recently given to understand that I maybe shouldn't be using a b9 on a 7th chord unless it's resolving. The triads I was using were just the major triads from the chords themselves.

Not sure if you're asking advice or just thinking out loud...

But yeah. I generally hold off on using the b7 until bar 3 or 4 of the blues. Yes it's a dominant chord at the top of the form. But it's a tonic dominant. Similarly, I hold off on the tension b2. That suggests 7b9 dominants and sets up the classic V7b9 needing to resolve type of vibe. Tension natural 2 gives a cleaner and more tonic dominant vibe at the top of the form. Then if you want to create that harmonic shift, drop it to tension b2 and/or b7 near the end of the first four bars to suggest the movement from a tonic dominant to a V7/IV dominant to set up the movement to bar 5.

Bird's head on Now's the Time isn't always thought of as the most hip melody ever... but it's a beautiful example of a major triad + tension 2 quadratonic phrase. I love how simple he's okay with it being!

[CliffR]

Not sure if you're asking advice or just thinking out loud...

But yeah. I generally hold off on using the b7 until bar 3 or 4 of the blues. Yes it's a dominant chord at the top of the form. But it's a tonic dominant. Similarly, I hold off on the tension b2. That suggests 7b9 dominants and sets up the classic V7b9 needing to resolve type of vibe. Tension natural 2 gives a cleaner and more tonic dominant vibe at the top of the form. Then if you want to create that harmonic shift, drop it to tension b2 and/or b7 near the end of the first four bars to suggest the movement from a tonic dominant to a V7/IV dominant to set up the movement to bar 5.

Bird's head on Now's the Time isn't always thought of as the most hip melody ever... but it's a beautiful example of a major triad + tension 2 quadratonic phrase. I love how simple he's okay with it being!

Thanks Jordan - I very much appreciate the advice.

Now's The Time's head (love the solo) always reminds me of this nursery rhyme:

[GuyBoden]

Thanks Jordan - I very much appreciate the advice.

Now's The Time's head (love the solo) always reminds me of this nursery rhyme:

Also, it's been stated that the "Now's the Time" riff was based on the song "I'm in the Army now":