Modal Jazz Definition

**StanG** · 07-29-2016, 01:16 PM

That's all cool for a dictionary definition, but if you want see what modern modal music feels like, listen to the tunes on princeplanet's list. The great players do a lot more than stay on one scale for a long time.

Or, for a project, find as many versions of Impressions as you can, same changes as So What, but tends to be done with a more modernistic flavor, and see if you tell what sort of devices, beyond dorian scales, that the soloists are applying.

My favorite of the moment is a version on a Cedar Walton record called Reliving the Moment, with Freddie Hubbard and Bob Berg. They really tear that tune a new one, in my opinion, anyways.

**DS71** · 07-29-2016, 06:14 PM

Great turnaround on this thread. I'll checkout everything.
Watched the So What video many times.

**christianm77** · 07-29-2016, 07:30 PM

This is what I wrote for some educational materials I put together.

---- Lots of words -----

There are two main types of harmony found in modern Western music:

Modal
Functional

Modal harmony generally involves a static drone, riff or chord over which you have melodies with notes chosen from various scales. It’s common in rock, modern jazz and electronic dance music. It predates functional harmony, too.

In some types of modal music – for example in jazz - you get different modes/chord scale sounds over the course of a piece. Chords and melodies can be drawn from these scales.

This kind of harmony is suited to the guitar due to its open strings and retuning possibilities. We see the guitar take over as a songwriting instrument at about the same time as the modes become popular in pop music. Loop based music also encourages this kind of harmony.

It has become very common in all areas of music since the late 20^th century under the influence of rock and folk music, composers like Steve Reich, modal jazz pioneered by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and influences from India, the Middle East and pre-classical Western music.

Functional harmony is a development of the kind of harmony used by Bach and Mozart. Jazz up to around 1960 was primarily based on this kind of harmony, and jazz improvisation was concerned with the improvising over songs written by the classically trained songwriters and film composers of the era. These composers all played the piano, so in a sense functional harmony is piano harmony. It’s not really guitar shaped.

When I talk about functional harmony I’ll mostly be talking about ways we can improvise and compose on pre-existing jazz standards rather than making up new progressions. This is what jazz musicians refer to as playing changes.

While you can find a modal tinge in a lot of older jazz AFAIK jazz musicians were not consciously improvising with modes until the 60s.

Functional progressions have a lot of stock cliches the most famous of which is probably the ii-V-I. An experienced improviser in the jazz tradition will learn to recognise these structures by ear and on the page at a glance.

Since the ‘60s there’s been a strong move in jazz to combine the two things and play functional chord progressions modally. I would suggest learning to play changes first. Many jazz players learn bop language (Charlie Parker etc) for this reason. In order to play jazz you have to learn to deal with functional chord progressions, which means that people often make the mistake jazz = chords. In fact, jazz = rhythm.