The inert Tritone...

[Christian Miller]

Big and clever! But where's Fmin7b5?

thats in the shallows ya n00b (also I forgot it)

[AaronMColeman]

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!

[pamosmusic]

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.

[PMB]

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.

...and then there's the melodic minor ii-V-i cliche where the line is sequenced up a m3 followed by a M3:

[Christian Miller]

...and then there's the melodic minor ii-V-i cliche where the line is sequenced up a m3 followed by a M3:

Indeed this is kind of the ‘entry level’ version of this that you see out in the wild. It’s quite theoretically neat.

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 C

[Christian Miller]

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

[Christian Miller]

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.)

[princeplanet]

..
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

Might be well known, but I never knew of it, cheers! Here I'd usually use the pent from Dm7b5/11, which is the same note group but swap the root (1) for a b9.
But there's something about your "hack" that sounds cool!

[princeplanet]

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.)

Maybe because the symmetry disguises the tension of all tritones, none of them feel exposed. Same thing goes for the Dim scale. You can use them as "modal" vamps against a single suitable chord, and they sound stable. It's one of the things I find cool about a lot of early 60's post bop.