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Originally Posted by princeplanet
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07-04-2023 06:54 PM
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I read all of this and was very confused, until suddenly I wasn't. I realized I play a lot of these things without knowing what they are, or calling them the wrong thing. So theory simultaneously confuses, clarifies, and becomes matter of routine all in a 5 minute span. This is one of the million reasons I love music
Honestly, most of this I have a tenuous grasp on...in my head it makes sense but I can't articulate it like you guys do. Thanks for all of the knowledge!
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I usually tell students that, at least practically speaking, theory is just pattern recognition.
The thing sounds good.
Name the thing so you can find it again.
Find it again.
If it makes sense to you and the people you’re playing with, then it’s probably good enough.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Originally Posted by PMB
It gets interesting when you realise are not limited to using purely scalar material in this way. Any language that works on II can be treated in this way whether it’s melodic minor or not. So a line on vanilla
Bb7 Db7 Cm in this context (you could even but F7 on the last chord)
Or you could start with Dm7 which is common in bop minor ii V Is and have
G7 Bb7 Db7 Cm or
Dm Fm Abm Cm
provided you have enough time
This is what Barry means by ‘brothers and sisters’. More modern educators might get hung up on how well the chords and lines agree (and these textbook uses of melodic minor have that characteristic of being neat and tidy), but not Barry. That’s one of the big differences actually - Barry didn’t tend to relate the substitution in neat terms back to the original chord, whereas modern educators tend to see lines based on substitute harmony as spelling out various chord tones and extensions on the vanilla chord.
Some players do seem to play that neatly, obviously many post - jazz edu boom players but also Blue Mitchell springs to mind, he just seems to hear it like that.
However many of the classic players can be heard playing less diatonic to this or that scale and more lines that mix it up. The original recording of Nica’s Dream is great for this contrast regarding what 60s players did on a m(maj7) chord. The Wes version too. melodic minor use in jazz in general has an interesting prehistory that is probably worth a phd lol.
If you do that ‘up a minor third trick’ in major you get the backdoor over dominant which is big and clever and extremely common in bop lines, eg
G7 Bb7 C
or
Dm Fm CLast edited by Christian Miller; 07-07-2023 at 04:03 AM.
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I doubt anyone is interested but in the world of pointless pedantry I define:
Superlocrian - seventh mode of melodic minor or a scale in which every note is flattened except the root.
The 1 3 5 and 7 of the scale give a half diminished chord with an upper structure that’s a m(maj7) chord a half step higher.
Altered scale - an enharmonic respelling of the superlocrian to allow its application on dominant chords. We rename b3 to #9 and b4 to 3. However this does have the result of messing up the tertian structure of the chord scale which means it doesn’t really behave like other melodic minor modes.
most jazz musicians couldn’t give a stuff about the distinction but it does work as far as I can see.
Another way of looking at the same entity - take a natural minor and flatten the second and the root. (This is one reason why I see/hear the chromatic enclosure on the root of the I chord as characteristic to the sound of the altered scale.)
There is a well known hack on the minor pentatonic - flat the root and you get a useful altered pentatonic.
A C D E G
Ab C D E G
or, respelling and converting to intervals on an E bass
3 b13 b7 1 #9
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To get back to the OP for a sec - it’s kind of interesting that the whole tone scale contains 3 tritones (1-b5 2-b6 3-b7) and yet is often thought a ‘colouristic’ scale (eg in Debussy.)
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
But there's something about your "hack" that sounds cool!
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Moffa Mithra
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