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

[Christian Miller]

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.

BTW Jordan I've been working a lot with spread voiced quadrads lately. Some very interesting sounds in there...

[jordanklemons]

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.

That’s a thoughtful point. I actually share some of that concern about purely vertical thinking.

But in practice I don’t really treat it as “one triad per chord” in a strict harmonic sense. That’s one useful milestone, but it's not the whole picture. Sometimes the triads lines up directly with the harmony, and other times they function differently. That’s where it starts to feel less like chord-scale thinking and more like a kind of structural and systematic approach to melody and language for me.

going from triads to bop is a more difficult sell.

I’m curious what you mean by "difficult to sell." Do you mean it’s conceptually difficult to convince players that triads can generate convincing bop language, or that the musical results themselves often don’t come across as idiomatic?

There's a lot of stuff that needs to be in someone's musical ear that has nothing to do with pitch choices.

I agree that pitch choices alone aren’t the whole story. Rhythm and phrasing are huge pieces of it to me. In my experience, working with smaller triadic structures often pushes those elements to the forefront to be prioritized more because I'm not thinking in larger scale positions. I’d be interested to hear what other elements you have in mind.

[Christian Miller]

That’s a thoughtful point. I actually share some of that concern about purely vertical thinking.

But in practice I don’t really treat it as “one triad per chord” in a strict harmonic sense. That’s one useful milestone, but it's not the whole picture. Sometimes the triads lines up directly with the harmony, and other times they function differently. That’s where it starts to feel less like chord-scale thinking and more like a kind of structural and systematic approach to melody and language for me.

Yeah, I think of solo changes as being separate from but related to the song changes. That relationship might not be vertical. The classic is putting something like a Co7 over an F7 going to Bb in a V-I. It makes sense in terms of where we are going, but there isn't really a clear vertical relationship to the Chord of the Moment.

Again, this criticism is not that CST or Quadratonics means you HAVE to think this way, but rather that it encourages that way of thinking without outside input from a teacher, or examination of the music (preferably both.) I think it's important that students are both skeptical about systems in music, but also open to seeing where they lead.

I’m curious what you mean by "difficult to sell." Do you mean it’s conceptually difficult to convince players that triads can generate convincing bop language, or that the musical results themselves often don’t come across as idiomatic?

Yeah sorry I wasn't being very clear. I think that the pitch choices themselves are not a determining factor of convincing jazz playing. I imagine here I'm preaching to the choir.

I agree that pitch choices alone aren’t the whole story. Rhythm and phrasing are huge pieces of it to me. In my experience, working with smaller triadic structures often pushes those elements to the forefront to be prioritized more because I'm not thinking in larger scale positions. I’d be interested to hear what other elements you have in mind.

Yes and one advantage you've often identified with the limited selection of notes is that they allow the student to concentrate on playing rhythms, as an extension of the classic 'improvise on one note' exercise. I really like this aspect, and IMO if someone can't get something good out of the quadratonic approach reasonably quickly, it's a sign there's a deeper skills issue. But that basic skills issue is the exact thing that most jazz education materials sort of skirt around.

A good jazz musician can make a Dorian mode, a quadratonic or a triad sound like jazz. So, the central problem for educators remains - "how do we turn people into better jazz musicians?" As usual the tradition has the pithy answer - go to the records - but it's not something we can put in a book.

My experience has been generally that the note choices in Bop solos and heads are pretty simple much of the time, but what makes them work is the prosody, accentuation and so on. So there's no replacement for transcription and that's generally the bit that students IME have been most intimidated by. One place where I have found quadrads/quadratonics useful is as an analytical tool to examine music, which of course is what you have done here. And it may be helpful to encourage a student to show them how simple many jazz ideas are in terms of the note choices. We have a tendency to massively complicate the discourse around 'notes on chords.'

Many of the more complicated seeming and hard to hear elements such as chromaticism arise directly from rhythmic considerations.

The process of learning confirmation with all its rhythmic subtleties and twists and turns is not something you would get from a pitch-centric analysis, obviously. What makes confirmation sound like jazz is mostly in the rhythm. The harmony is is not particularly jazz in my view. The chord progression itself can be found in Bach (aside that bluesy Bb7 chord, which is a very jazz thing) and Parker's note choices are, as you say, surprisingly triadic (aside the odd blues lick) - at least if you've spent a lot of time with your nose in a jazz theory book.

Anyway, I think this is all broadly in line with what you've always said.

[jordanklemons]

Yes and one advantage you've often identified with the limited selection of notes is that they allow the student to concentrate on playing rhythms, as an extension of the classic 'improvise on one note' exercise. I really like this aspect, and IMO if someone can't get something good out of the quadratonic approach reasonably quickly, it's a sign there's a deeper skills issue. But that basic skills issue is the exact thing that most jazz education materials sort of skirt around.

Very much agreed. I encourage all of my students to learn X number of bebop heads and play along with the original recordings as perfectly as possible every day as a sort of "warmup" but focus as much of their practice time as possible on "skill development" and then "skill application."

I think it's possible to learn to play simply by learning tunes and shedding traditional theory concepts and approaches. But having taken that path once already AND seen it play out for students... it tends to take SO long. And oftentimes doesn't work out for students who inevitably give up on the process before they can get where they want to.

The process of learning confirmation with all its rhythmic subtleties and twists and turns is not something you would get from a pitch-centric analysis, obviously. What makes confirmation sound like jazz is mostly in the rhythm. The harmony is is not particularly jazz in my view. The chord progression itself can be found in Bach (aside that bluesy Bb7 chord, which is a very jazz thing) and Parker's note choices are, as you say, surprisingly triadic (aside the odd blues lick) - at least if you've spent a lot of time with your nose in a jazz theory book.

Yeah... that's actually one of the many reasons I teach the way I just mentioned above... encouraging simply learning and playing along with a set of bebop heads every day and then following up on that with skill development. Not only does it function as a warmup and build repertoire for when we're ready to put all of the puzzle pieces together...

It also starts getting the rhythm, space, phrasing, repetition, and all the human ish into our ears and our souls.
Quadratonics (my personal approach to practicing and teaching) then just give us a simplified framework to apply all that stuff to. No noodling or looking for anything cool. Just plug and play.

Anyway, I think this is all broadly in line with what you've always said.

I think so... probs lol