The inert Tritone...

[Reg]

Yea... when we play in small ensembles, we can call anything whatever we want and use whatever organization we want... because ... nobody cares. If it works or sounds great... or your just a great player and can make anything sound great etc... it works. (or if one just has it memorized and rehearsed).

But when we arrange or compose music and we want it performed etc... It tends to work better when we use standard notation practice, (spelling), and use bigger harmonic picture and common chord pattern etc... with respect to the style and performers.

And that is where the problems start to show up. Like the altered notes... Even something like Christian mentioned the spelling of alt scale as 7th degree of MM scale. Root and all b notes. Which works great when arranging for large ensemble as long as that is the harmonic reference.... meaning just 1 simple chord. But typically it's not... most of the time there are standard Chord Patterns being implied. And then we get enharmonic spelling thing... is it a scale or a chord tension etc... or just easiest to sightread etc...

Personally... we tend to have note collections and know what are avoid notes in different contexts or know how to use or frame them rhythmically and ... yea it works. (the being a good player thing). Although... earlier this week I had to sight read through a Matt Harris arrangement of Just in time.. ( at about 340 + and take 32 out front... using pn part, and like 10 sec warning about the 32 out front... not a rehearsal... this was gig... and I could have used a little more of the being a better player thing LOL. ...changes were a little different... (it was cool... just too brisk...)

Anyway... I tend to hear altered kind of like Christian... some kind of slang ... like Blues, you open that door and your now your dirty... changed forever. But when you start to hear Chord patterns... you can clean yourself up, get rid of your personal problems and fit right in... LOL. The tritone becomes like a tonic friend, relaxing.

here's some altered tritone BS..

[Christian Miller]

In A minor say - Bb G# A

is bebop for me…

that said you do get that a bit in classical music with the Neapolitan sixth - dominant thing

Bb/D E Am

With a Bb G# A line

But jazz puts it on the dominant

[pamosmusic]

Yea... when we play in small ensembles, we can call anything whatever we want and use whatever organization we want... because ... nobody cares.

Truer words have never been spoken .

[PMB]

Might this be one reason Mike Stern teaches the altered scale as its own thing, not simply melodic minor up a half step I wonder

Ooh another thing before I finally do something else… you can find Abm(maj7) in C harmonic minor… which I find interesting. You get Abm9(maj7) if you combine it with the C natural minor which is a little stretch maybe (I think this note comes from the tritone sub really - subbing a Db13 for G7). Point is - these scales aren’t far apart and a lot of it is in one note. The differentiating sound between a Galtered scale and simply playing C minor on G7 is that b5. If it don’t got it, I don’t hear altered, I hear minor - and it’s kind of interesting how many applications of altered scale don’t have that note…

Do you mean the b5 of G7? I've come across that scale expressed as G altered hexatonic (or Ab melodic minor hexatonic) where the b5/Db is missing. Its most common application over an altered chord would be the 'Cry Me A River' lick although in that instance, the root G is also missing.

[PMB]

Actually, there's also no F leaving us with an Ab-add9. That makes the CMAR lick particularly flexible. Not only can it apply in this case to G7alt, Db9#11 and Fø7 but also to different types of Ab- chord, eg. Ab-6, Ab-7, Ab-maj7 as minor-based scales & chords are generally differentiated by the alterations of their 6th and 7th steps.

Coming back to the G altered or Ab melodic minor hexatonic, here's a common extended version of the CMAR lick where it's prefaced by the missing root and b7 of the V altered scale creating a hybrid diminished/altered sound:

[Christian Miller]

Do you mean the b5 of G7? I've come across that scale expressed as G altered hexatonic (or Ab melodic minor hexatonic) where the b5/Db is missing. Its most common application over an altered chord would be the 'Cry Me A River' lick although in that instance, the root G is also missing.

Yes, and I know that scale.

Yeah it’s interesting. I’ve always found b5 quite a pungent sound compared to the other notes, especially on secondary dominants. Getting rid of it makes the altered more diatonic and vanilla, although you still get that clash between the B and Bb say. Which probably comes from

The lick is one of a number of melodic devices where the minor add9 is played a semi tone up from the dominant- think also the first few notes of ‘Night in Tunisia.’ Honestly the triad with an added 2 is just so common it’s not funny.

There’s also at the same approximate point in history a tendency for guitarists to play for example x x 3 4 4 4 on G7. You can even hear Al Casey and Django do it…

I’m thinking this is a substitution oriented thing, but of course theoretically you can think of it as an altered scale. I would tend to think more tritone’s minor (Barry Harris), which is for the reasons given above, not quite the same thing.

So I think of all of this stuff as more ‘proto-altered’. It’s hard to find out info about how musicians actually thought back then. I think Tristano had melodic minor in his teaching as far back as the late 40s, but his ideas and concepts were by no means universal. I suspect what happened over time is that lots of different ‘tricks’ (like the cry me a river lick, green dolphin street lick and so on) were combined into one overarching system. Now people talk about so and so ‘coming’ from this or that scale.

Now I’m up for debating how much value knowing so and so belongs to the altered scale (I think it can be unhelpful), but I think there’s value in learning these classic moves and substitution formulae individually as one learns the language and AFIAK they are widely taught that way.

[Christian Miller]

Actually, there's also no F leaving us with an Ab-add9. That makes the CMAR lick particularly flexible. Not only can it apply in this case to G7alt, Db9#11 and Fø7 but also to different types of Ab- chord, eg. Ab-6, Ab-7, Ab-maj7 as minor-based scales & chords are generally differentiated by the alterations of their 6th and 7th steps.

Coming back to the G altered or Ab melodic minor hexatonic, here's a common extended version of the CMAR lick where it's prefaced by the missing root and b7 of the V altered scale creating a hybrid diminished/altered sound:

You see, I see that and instantly think ‘tritones minor.’ I don’t really think of altered or diminished. I don’t even really think of melodic minor strange as that might seem, because in that conception you aren’t limited to playing just melodic minor. I would happily play the Gb for example (Ab Dorian) or E (from Ab min6-dim). If the Db appears, it would probably be as a passing tone, so as you say it sort of gets down played. (But the Db dominant - the tritone - obviously stresses it plenty.)

Whcih is to say - it’s a sub. I think about the sub, not the original context in this case which I think is both a more trad way to look at it, but also means it’s not quite the altered scale in the sense I outlined above.

Anyway I play these sorts of things all the time. They are good. But I see them more as ‘applied minor’ and I think the history of that goes back a long way in jazz although maybe less so the tritone application.

[Christian Miller]

TL;DR I hear the 7b9#9b13 and 7b5 as separate things really.

I kind of feel I should tie this in with the OP. Maybe I can neutralise the tritone in the altered by playing

x 4 x 3 4 3
x 3 x 4 5 3

[Bop Head]

[...] It’s hard to find out info about how musicians actually thought back then. [...]

There is an interview with Dizzy Gillespie (I think you know this, I have linked it already one year ago) where he talks about his early experiments with tritone substitution (and half-diminished chords as "minor with sixth in bass" BTW). The "tritone's minor" is the tritone sub of the "important minor" (minor chord on the II for those not into Barry Harris).

For me those altered lines sound best that sound good as minor lines in the minor key whose root lies on the b9 on the dominant. But that's maybe my old-fashioned music taste.

Take Dizzy's intro to "'Round Midnight" (I have stated that already before on this forum as well): Sequence of three minor ii-Vs down in whole steps (typical Diz BTW); C minor line on A-7b5 (a.k.a. C-/A) into an Eb minor line on D7 (Eb- = tritone's minor of D7), repeat twice a whole step down.

EDIT: In this intro those lines end on the b5 of the altered dominant, most of the time displaced an octave higher ("pivot" according to BH).

[Christian Miller]

“Tritone’s minor” is Barry-ese btw.

Well if you are going to dig into Barry, you actually have a whole specific scale on the 7b5 which is the 7b5-dim. It’s a great scale but I haven’t played with it that much (tbf Barry said he hadn’t either lol.)

1 2 3 4 b5 b6 b7 7 1

I construct this three ways
- Barry’s way - 7b5 (1 3 b5 b7) plus dim7 down a half step (7 2 4 b6)
- Two major tetrachords (1 2 3 4) mirrored at the tritone (so 1 2 3 4 then b5 b6 b7 7)
- Whole tone scale with an added 4 and 7

In the second construction I saw this scale in Duncan Lamont’s book. He suggested using it as a ‘outside’ scale and also had a version with the minor tetrachord (1 2 b3 4 b5 b6 ‘6’ 7).

[Christian Miller]

There is an interview with Dizzy Gillespie (I think you know this, I have linked it already one year ago) where he talks about his early experiments with tritone substitution (and half-diminished chords as "minor with sixth in bass" BTW). The "tritone's minor" is the tritone sub of the "important minor" (minor chord on the II for those not into Barry Harris).

For me those altered lines sound best that sound good as minor lines in the minor key whose root lies on the b9 on the dominant. But that's maybe my old-fashioned music taste.

Take Dizzy's intro to "'Round Midnight" (I have stated that already before on this forum as well): Sequence of three minor ii-Vs down in whole steps (typical Diz BTW); C minor line on A-7b5 (a.k.a. C-/A) into an Eb minor line on D7 (Eb- = tritone's minor of D7), repeat twice a whole step down.

EDIT: In this intro those lines end on the b5 of the altered dominant, most of the time displaced an octave higher ("pivot" according to BH).

I would say Barry and Monk let me hear the b5 really. I think I shied away from it for ages esp on secondary dominants. Monk uses it so well, and Diz learned from Monk.

For monk half or more of the time he’s using whole tone scale. Whole tone in tritones is super boppy btw.

Also Peter Bernstein’s interpretations of monk, Peter is a great player of altered dominant sounds….

[PMB]

You see, I see that and instantly think ‘tritones minor.’ I don’t really think of altered or diminished.

I understand your point of view - it's just that those first four notes (descending whole tone step moving up a m3) form the basis for Coltrane's most favoured diminished pattern!

[Christian Miller]

I understand your point of view - it's just that those first four notes (descending whole tone step moving up a m3) form the basis for Coltrane's most favoured diminished pattern!

Well, you know, brothers and sisters :-)

(I always got the impression Barry was a bit sniffy about the diminished scale for some reason.)

I could sequence the whole pattern up m3rds, see if I don’t Nwahahaa!!! (I mean it’s basically an embellished m6 right?)

But then that … ties in with the nature of melodic minor and how close these scales all are. You have four m6s in the dim scale and then you can turn each of those into melodic minors or m6-dim scales. Our melodic minors in m3rds give
Dm on G7 —> lydian dominant
Fm on G7 —> G13b9#9 (Dorian b2)
Abm on G7 —> ‘altered’
all of which are common choices
And then
Bm on G7 —> which is pretty ‘outside’ but it can work if you have a clear pattern and resolution. EDIT - just played Bmmaj7 on a G7 shell and it sounds great to me. I think I might be losing it.

(Again note that the m(maj7) on G7 does not give us the characteristic altered note on G7 unlike every other application of melodic minor. Just to belabour a point.)

Why is it I never remember to practice these things on say, Caravan???? And I will keep writing tunes with these extended altered dominants on, as if im torturing myself haha.

So a lot of this comes out of my own frustration with being locked in on extended altered dominants - there’s a lot you can do.

[Bop Head]

I would say Barry and Monk let me hear the b5 really. I think I shied away from it for ages esp on secondary dominants. Monk uses it so well, and Diz learned from Monk. [...]

From said interview (very beginning):

I'm just trying to go over some of the important things about the development of the music...the development of me personally. It doesn't have to be...the reader or the listener...will have to figure out for himself whether that's important to the music or not. So now the first time I heard a flatted...you know everybody say, "...a flattedfifth... ah... flatted fifth." We were playing flatted fifths. And we were playing in two keys at one time...we'd play in the key of "C"...We'd one phrase in "C" and play the same thing again in "F" sharp...flatted fifth... So, ah, the first time I heard a flatted fifth, I was with Edgar Hayes. It wasn't Monk. Monk and I weren't that close together at that time, you know...until later on.

[emphasis by me]

[...] Also Peter Bernstein’s interpretations of monk, Peter is a great player of altered dominant sounds….

BTW also highly recommended: interpretations of Monk tunes by Mal Waldron (who was always an admirer of Monk) and Steve Lacy (who had played with Monk for some time).

[Christian Miller]

From said interview (very beginning):

I'm just trying to go over some of the important things about the development of the music...the development of me personally. It doesn't have to be...the reader or the listener...will have to figure out for himself whether that's important to the music or not. So now the first time I heard a flatted...you know everybody say, "...a flattedfifth... ah... flatted fifth." We were playing flatted fifths. And we were playing in two keys at one time...we'd play in the key of "C"...We'd one phrase in "C" and play the same thing again in "F" sharp...flatted fifth... So, ah, the first time I heard a flatted fifth, I was with Edgar Hayes. It wasn't Monk. Monk and I weren't that close together at that time, you know...until later on.

[emphasis by me]



BTW also highly recommended: interpretations of Monk tunes by Mal Waldron (who was always an admirer of Monk) and Steve Lacy (who had played with Monk for some time).

nice. Yes, I mean it’s helpful and interesting as a guitar player to hear monks music skilfully interpreted on guitar. We need that sometimes

i don’t know Eddie Hayes music, but it’s worth mentioning that Django was using tritone subs as far back as the early 30s.

[Christian Miller]

I just want to pop up this solo as an example of hip handling of dominants in 1930s music. I learned a tremendous amount from it when I was just getting into swing.

there’s some great moves here. I notice that there’s an ambiguity between whole tone and melodic minor here (which Wes exploits in his soloing too) - specifically the playing of IVm(maj7) on V7 which could also be thought a whole tone line. Lots of augmented generally. The V aug triad is a real pre bop jazz sound, it plays off that b3 blue note (Eb) on the G7. In combination with the nat 6 (A) it’s a very 30s sound.

Also Asus2 on D7 sounds very hip.

i sometimes wonder if Lage Lund transcribed this solo. It has some of his devices and actually his sense of cheeky wit in the way the devices are used (although Lage is a lot drier haha.)

and then at the end, the Db triad going to C and then ending in the note B… that’s going towards altered for sure.

On the outro we have D9 Db13 C6. Early sighting of the tritone sub.

Of Django wouldn’t have had a clue what I was on about lol. He heard it all…

[supersoul]

Yeah, let's just call it the JIC and make it simpler for everyone ...

Speaking of simpler, simpletons like me will probably stick to #9/b9, apologies if that offends anyone!

It makes more sense to me as b9/#9 because that's how those two notes function in a 7th chord.

[supersoul]

you’d probably enjoy the Warne marsh dominant II scale if you haven’t checked it out

do tell! what is the Warne Marsh Dominant II scale?

[Christian Miller]

do tell! what is the Warne Marsh Dominant II scale?

I thought you’d never ask!

[supersoul]

I thought you’d never ask!

Interesting!
Another way I would look at it is that the scale is register dependent; the altered extensions really do work better in a higher register. Something that works in one octave won't necessariy sound the same an octave lower. Which is also why a #11 is called that rather than a #4.

[Christian Miller]

Interesting!
Another way I would look at it is that the scale is register dependent; the altered extensions really do work better in a higher register. Something that works in one octave won't necessariy sound the same an octave lower. Which is also why a #11 is called that rather than a #4.

Yes I think that’s very much how Warne was thinking of it. Which is why the #15 is a note you can sit on on a major chord and the #1 is obviously not.

[Christian Miller]

Entirely relevant meme I made today

[rpjazzguitar]

I thought that 7#9 usually implies the b9 is included. I've seen both together too, but I've never seen b10 that I can recall.

Are we accountants or linguists?

In accountancy things must be correct to the penny..

In language there are idiomatic expressions that native speakers are expected to understand.

[Reg]

Yea we're starting to get silly... Spelling is generally determined by the Reference...Common practice is 9's, 11's and 13th's are for chords and arpeggios 2's, 4's and 6's are scale references... I know the 6th chord. I'm not saying everything... just most.

And also generally, not the register ... but the instrumentation usually determines what one can get away with. Line cliches work in most registers... Trombone sections can get away with very low register writing.

Really what most might think about is being able to use the simple and common practice tritone concepts. Its usually better to become great at a few things.... as compared to lousy at lots of things. I'm not joking.

Also generally once one gets their skills together with the simple concepts... meaning up to the speed of jazz. It's much easier to learn and understand more complicated concepts.

[princeplanet]

Entirely relevant meme I made today

Big and clever! But where's Fmin7b5?