The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #26

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jonah
    And one practial idea. You know what I thought about when I saw this post with changes I qoute below... I thought: I would love to see/hear a melody.

    Melody is personifcation or any harmonic solution. Harmony is always a general thing.
    (It works at least within European tradition).

    Could it be that frustration and attempts to find some other solutions in the case that you describe come from the fact that we often 'construct changes' instead of 'composing a melody'.

    Note that I do not mean a simplicity of a melody! I don't mean: write a recognizable pop-tune. It can be very sophisticated melodic idea.
    I believe that even complex classical symphonies - good ones - are based on ability to melodicize the idea, to express all the complex movement of artictic ideas in melodic thinking.
    (And again it is not about pop attractiveness of a tune which is common for pop songs)

    Basically I am almost sure that great composers thought in terms of melody as the harmony already was incorporated in their hearing to such an extent that they did not need to refer to it conciously.

    I am saying this becasue I beliee that any kind problem with organization of impro through changes - be it simple standard tune or complex moder changes - is directly connected with that: harmony has no melodicpersonification in players mind.
    I am fascinated that my simple question has led to such thoughtful responses. It's been a pleasure reading through them. Especially the above quote. I have a confession to make. When I compose music, I hear harmonies. Melodies come after the fact. This is not universally the case, but it is most of the time. I find that I can usually fit a workable melody within the boundaries provided by the harmonic structure, but that sometimes stepping outside of it briefly can wind up with interesting results.

    Jonah, you wanted to see/hear a melody. Well I can provide a sound file now. If you like I can send you a copy of the score, so you can read through it. I've spent the last few days on some additional arrangements and writing a melody to this piece. I don't consider what I have now to be the final form of the piece. Anything can be subject to change if I find something I like more. But this is what I have so far. I've rendered another mp3. My phone still won't open it, but my computer does without issues.

    Evening Stroll Final.mp3

    One thing I noticed pretty much right away after adding a melody to this piece was how it managed to shove the harmony into the background, where it was no longer playing such a dominant role. I was kinda surprised by this. To me, that means it's doing its job.

    In case you're interested in this piece's structure, it's in a rather conventional aaba format. Two choruses, a bridge with a half time tempo shift (from 110 bpm to 55 bpm), then back to the original tempo for a final chorus.

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  3. #27

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    Quote Originally Posted by cooltouch
    I am fascinated that my simple question has led to such thoughtful responses. It's been a pleasure reading through them. Especially the above quote. I have a confession to make. When I compose music, I hear harmonies. Melodies come after the fact. This is not universally the case, but it is most of the time. I find that I can usually fit a workable melody within the boundaries provided by the harmonic structure, but that sometimes stepping outside of it briefly can wind up with interesting results.

    Jonah, you wanted to see/hear a melody. Well I can provide a sound file now. If you like I can send you a copy of the score, so you can read through it. I've spent the last few days on some additional arrangements and writing a melody to this piece. I don't consider what I have now to be the final form of the piece. Anything can be subject to change if I find something I like more. But this is what I have so far. I've rendered another mp3. My phone still won't open it, but my computer does without issues.

    Evening Stroll Final.mp3

    One thing I noticed pretty much right away after adding a melody to this piece was how it managed to shove the harmony into the background, where it was no longer playing such a dominant role. I was kinda surprised by this. To me, that means it's doing its job.

    In case you're interested in this piece's structure, it's in a rather conventional aaba format. Two choruses, a bridge with a half time tempo shift (from 110 bpm to 55 bpm), then back to the original tempo for a final chorus.
    Thank you!
    I listened to the track and I need some time to answer, so please do not think I ingnored that. I just want to do it properly.
    I will come back later today or tomorrow.

  4. #28

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    I look forward to your response. I think it bears repeating that the melody right now is pretty much v1.0, and subject to change. Especially in the bridge section.

  5. #29

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    Hi,

    it is not that simple to formulate.

    You see I come from classical background, I grew up with classical music and rock music like The Beatles and something similar.
    To me it all belongs to the same tradition... and that tradition trained my ear and made it some sort of natural musical enviroment for me.
    And I believe this tradition has that specific harmony/melody relationship which I described above. Where almost any melody contains information about posssible harmonies behind, and any harmonic setup is potential source for melodies.
    But in musical relaization it is always melody that has priority, harmony is only possiblities, a fundamental plan.
    Like if you take many renaissance churches which have more or less similar structure but their peronality shows up in the 'melodies' - in how it was finally realized in real material and design.
    That means that both harmony and melody are extremle important but it is almost impossible in taht tradition that 'music starts from composing harmony' -- harmonic plasn - yes maybe, some harmonic ideas - also possible.. but not real music...
    Harmony is too general, it just does not bring in enough individual information.

    But things change - that great tradition I seem to relate to is almost totally gone and we live in teh world where there are lots of different approaches --- last years (even decades but I noticed it only last years) I noticed that searches and composing music in pure harmonic thinking show up quite often.
    I have a friend who does it as you say - from chords and harmonies and I alwys have problems with hos music to be honest..
    Partly it was in academic music too - in American minimalism (which I often have problem with too)...

    What I am trying to say is when I listened to your track I heard it more as ambient music or backing track and it does not surprise me that there on might need some supportive system to somehow relate these harmonies one with anoither...
    Though basic harmony sounds quite traditional to me... I still feel like the choices are a bit arbitrary to me.
    I mean it sounds like if you change this or that chord for something there is a chance i would not have noticed that...

    The same concerns melody - even more probably... I myself am very sensitive to intonation and phrasing.

    You know recently there was an interesting case - I gave a lesson and the guy had to pick a melody of "My One And Only Love".. and the who is playing rock musician and who composes quite interesting songs could not pick up the beginning ascending pentatonic phrase correctly.
    He could not catch that G (in C major) and tried to begin with C... to me it is compination of a few reasons (he tried to imitate pickup cliche phrasing too)- but the most important is that he hears the overall chord (C major) and for him G or C sound the same.
    There is some truth in it... for him (in his musical world) harmonic sound sound has such a strong priority that both G and C can represent it in melodic sense - the difference is insignificant.
    But the problem was that this song was written in the tradition where this difference is important.

    With your tune my problem is I am trying instinctively to look for realtions and details that are not supposed to be there.

    I want to stress that it is only my hearing. I can understand quite well taht for you and some other people that could sound very strongly individual.

  6. #30

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    I don’t know about anyone else but I find it quite difficult to define what a key is.

    in GASB standards the melody is very firmly on one key, frequently diatonic with maybe with a modulation or two. For instance, Stella moves to the dominant and the parallel minor briefly.

    of course no one thinks that way when soloing on it, because the tune is harmonised with a lot of chromatic chords, and we have to play the changes...

    jazz musicians when writing tend to go chords out (because that’s the way they improvise mostly). So then, things are very different.

  7. #31

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    Also this is an analysis and pedagogy thing, and the way jazz is taught:

    for instance Lester Young on Lady be Good is clearly mostly thinking in the key G major with blue notes and so on, but you can find analyses which detail each interval over each chord as it was a Bill Evans solo or something.

    Even modern musicians use key centric thinking more than you might expect. Miles was the sort of big comeback for that type of thinking in the 50s. Sco when asked about how to solo on Protocol said he thought if it as a sort of ‘Weird G blues’ not of chords at all.

    But, in general, jazz has moved away from melodic key centred soloing and composition, and towards chordal thinking.

    but yes I’m getting sucked back
    in haha

  8. #32

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    Only 15 posts since you left the forum, you’re being very restrained.

  9. #33

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    Lol

  10. #34

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    Very interesting, guys. I'm deeply intrigued by the way you process your music. Jonah, I was fascinated by your description of this fellow who had trouble distinguishing between a C and G in C Major. One would think that anyone who comes from a Western music background could distinguish between the tonic and the dominant. But I think one has to examine a person's individual musical background if one hopes to understand how such a situation can arise.

    Most of my formal education is actually in Linguistics (BA and MA from Cal State Fullerton), and this reminds me of how a person, who's native language does not contain certain phonemes, or whose native language contains phonemes that are allophones of each other, can't distinguish between them. It's a matter of one literally not being able to hear the foreign phoneme or can't distinguish between a pair because they're allophones. Sorry about tossing about these linguistics terms. A brief set of definitions is in order. A phoneme is a perceived speech sound that a given language contains. Such as /a/ or /s/, etc. Allophone pairs are pairs of phonemes that, under certain phonemic rules, sound the same to the speaker. For example, in Taiwanese, the /l/ and /n/ are allophones in certain circumstances. In both British and American English, the glottal stop and the /t/ are allophones in certain situations. Using a double apostrophe to indicate the glottal, you'll hear in some British dialects the word 'bottle' pronounced as /bo''l/ and in American English, you often hear 'football' pronounced as /fu''bal/ ("short u", not "long u"). We don't consciously hear the substitution that's made.

    So I find myself drawing a parallel between this linguistic condition and this fellow's inability to distinguish the C and G, and I can't help but wonder if, in his musical language, the two tones are musical allophones. If something like that even exists, that is. I suppose it can. I can remember my early schooling, which was in music, and how we would have ear training drills. And how, when we first started out, I had trouble picking out the individual notes in a simple chord when my professor would play it on the piano. It took practice, but eventually I was able to dissect fairly complex chords. After a while, 11ths and 13ths, half-diminished and augmented chords, etc., were a piece of cake. But it took practice.

    Getting back to the topic for the moment, though, I've been thinking about this some more these past couple of days, and I've gone back and analyzed a few of my own compositions to see if I can piece together my thought processes when I wrote them. And in a few cases, I definitely had a melody rattling around inside my head that I got down on paper (or plugged into my DAW) to which I was able to harmonize. But in a number of other instances, I wrote out a chord progression in its entirety, massaged it until I was satisfied with the changes, and only then did I begin to work on a melody. Now, perhaps in some of these pieces, the melody does not rate anything better than "background music," but I really don't think that's the case with most of them. My attitude is this: if I've written a good, solid chord progression, there should be an infinite variety of quality melodies that I should be able to extract from it. I've done this on more than one occasion, that is, writing multiple melodies for a given chord progression -- melodies that show absolutely no relationship to each other. In fact, in a couple of situations, I developed different musical styles for each melody and went ahead and named them as separate songs -- or piece of music, if you will, since they are instrumentals, and songs have words.

    I'm also very aware of historical context. Take the infamous Pachelbel's Canon, for example. How many hundreds of songs have been written on this canon's chord progression, many of which were major hits? It seems to me that just this one instance indicates how critically important a solid chord progression is, in order to develop a memorable piece of music. Whereas, if one creates a memorable melody -- that's it. That's the only piece of music that exists with that grouping of phrases and chords, since the melody is sorta the final expression of basic creative output. (I write 'basic' because I'm neglecting any sort of arrangements that may add flourishes and the like to a piece to spruce it up, so to speak.) The melody locks a piece into place -- certainly melodically, and, to some extent, harmonically. Although I'm always intrigued with the way a good arranger can alter a piece's chord progression, often for the better. Musical examples such as "Amazing Grace" and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" are great examples of this.

    So it would appear to me that, in the final analysis, both approaches are correct, since they both can lead to memorable pieces of music. Which is ultimately what it's all about. Right?

  11. #35

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    One would think that anyone who comes from a Western music background could distinguish between the tonic and the dominant. But I think one has to examine a person's individual musical background if one hopes to understand how such a situation can arise
    It was not tonic and dominant. This is very important.. tonic and dominant are functions and I am sure he would hear it in respective context where they show up as functions.
    It is important that it was in context of just a C major - the chord was tonic, and C and G were just a root and 5th of the chord... so he heard a chordal sound as a mass and for him both sounds 'represented' the chord.


    You know it is like I can hear very quickly difference between Haydn and Mozart but poeple less involved into it hear both just like the representatives of the same style.
    The way we percieve and distinguish things is really important.

    A bit of phylosophy: it may sound strange but I always focus on things in some subject that are different from other subjects, not the things in common.

    I notice people tend to find things in common first.

    Of course dialectically we always generalize but I understand that it is just a convention (not truth).

    Because I believe through difference we can understnd deeper the individuality, and percieveing individuality teaches us to respect it.

    'Things in common' lead to the point whne everything can be anything. By the way this one of the things in music (and especially in jazz) that I like - anything can be anything in the context but the context is the artistic choice we make. We - as musicians - appoint the sounds or chords what they would be.
    Last edited by Jonah; 01-15-2020 at 07:03 AM.

  12. #36

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    Quote Originally Posted by Eck
    Jonah, I like what you say but will need some time to get it. Is it that modulations in classical music are heard as relating to the key where in jazz the key shifts with the progression?
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    I also like what Jonah said, in my (free) interpretation, in classical, usually modulation is part of the big form, I mean architecture, and not part of theme segment, in jazz many times modulation (or the non diatonic chords) is the music itself, or the expression way, color, or actually the essence of the musical idea. Non diatonic events occur more often and more fine grained into the theme both harmonically both melodically. Of course there are explicit examples to break this observation, like Satin Doll, where the modulation more similar to classical.

    But say in Day of Wine and Roses, or Tenderly, or Autumn in New York, or Along Came Betty interpreting the the non diatonic chords as modulation is not specially useful. Tension and release interpretation could work for both diatonic dominant tonic movements and both for non diatonic events.
    Last edited by Gabor; 01-15-2020 at 05:45 AM.

  13. #37

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    Quote Originally Posted by Gabor
    I also like what Jonah said, in my (free) interpretation, in classical, usually modulation is part of the big form, I mean architecture, and not part of theme segment, in jazz many times modulation (or the non diatonic chords) is the music itself, or the expression way, color, or actually the essence of the musical idea. Non diatonic events occur more often and more fine grained into the theme both harmonically both melodically. Of course there are explicit examples to break this observation, like Satin Doll, where the modulation more similar to classical.

    But say in Day of Wine and Roses, or Tenderly, or Autumn in New York, or Along Came Betty interpreting the the non diatonic chords as modulation is not specially useful. Tension and release interpretation could work for both diatonic dominant tonic movements and both for non diatonic events.
    you basically said what I said but much shorter)))

    I think I can add... I noticed that national 'classical schools' have a bit different terminology and aproach to teaching and analysis.... after baroque period music became almost totally German... this is more or less still living tradition and probably the only link with great pre-classical traditions... we can of course speak about Berloz, Verdi, Puccini, Elgar, Debussy and others but they were eeither too specific like Italian opera vera or impressionists or also rooted in German school fundamentally like Grieg, Sibelius and Russian chool (except Musorgsky).

    When I was at school we had two terms 'modulation' and 'deviation' - obviously borrowd from German... modulation mostly meant that there was at least too cadences to the new key: first is more soft and was there to introduce new kew, and the second one was stronger to establish it. It is too formal of course - in every case it could be a bit different...
    'Deviation' meant any - even slightest appearance of new key... for example it could be in one sentence that it starts in major and shifts in relative minor even of a measure or just two beats... if it is C major - the move to A minor chord through any inversion of E major would mean deviation even if it just flies by for 1 beat and goes back to C...
    In jazz harmony it of course often makes no sense..


    Though on the other hand sometimes I appreciate how classical hearing helps me to hear standards as a whole form immidiately, how I can appreciate 'compositional' merits of the songs - not just their poetenstial as changes or motives...

    Even My One And Only Love mentioned above has interesting beginning... it has pentatonic ascending line that sounds like a 'pickup' line - it sounds as if it goes in a bar that is precedent ot the main section of the form but if we look at harmony it is not like that, the section is already begun.
    The line goes from tonic I chord to IV chord subdominant - only there it stabilizes...
    That creates some kind of littly plymetric (polysemantic) effect/shift - we do not notice it conciously even but we feel it - and pentatonic move increases it -- actually I think it is where it comes from
    (by the way I think this is another reason why my student friend could not pick it - he tried to imitate regular diatonic asending pickup line going from dominant to tonic chord).

    Some time ago I made a post about Autumn In New York - also trying to approach it as a song with form not as standard with chords... occasionally I did in some thread something similar with Bye-bye Blackbird... In many songs I like to notice the relation of chorus-bridge (often chorus is stable and more individual, and bridge is modulating and more conventional - less recognizable , but sometimes it si quite the opposite like in Darn That Dream or Sophisticated Lady and bridge brings in the feel of relax and release)
    I like to analyze what the meaning of section is - how it affects out perception - is there an intro? or maybe an intro is integrated into teh section?
    Stella By Statlight seems like a 'AABA' in disguise - but still it is not AABA... very subtle case.
    and Cole Porter's 'I Love You' seem a bit similar but still different form.


    By the way I mostly think of AABA as of AB where sections have different beginnings but similar engings. I think from pov of form it is more productive to see it that way... in AABA secod A is not quite a repeat (even if technically it is) it is rather a conclusion (the repeat in teh form is something you can throw away without much problems for overall efect - but here you cannot do it!)


    I think all these songs as original compositions have very interesting subtle features that can help improvizers, what tricks the author uses, how he decieves our excepections - and how we can use it?. But I noticed it does not evoke much interest in jazz enviroment... people are mostly focused on how to play around chords or changes and sometimes in separate motive and intervals/

  14. #38

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    It seems like in classical music the chords look back/forward to the key-chord, whereas in jazz a chord mostly looks at which chords is before and after it?


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