The Use of Modal Interchange Chords in Jazz Standards

[Christian Miller]

no youre wrong you are specifically labeling a french 6

True! Should have stuck it in brackets, theory police!

Is it just me or does it seem to be a French sixth most often in jazz standards?

[joe2758]

True! Should have stuck it in brackets, theory police!

Is it just me or does it seem to be a French sixth most often in jazz standards?

Theory police!? all i did was pick up your bs and fling it back at you lol

[Christian Miller]

Theory police!? all i did was pick up your bs and fling it back at you lol

That’s what happens


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[Hyppolyte Bergamotte]

Standards with modal interchange on some bars:

easy living
all the things you are
what are you doing the rest of your life
stella by starlight
autumn leaves
… to name some standards playing some bars outside the vanilla changes

[GuyBoden]

Reg was the expert player of "Modal Interchange".

[Hyppolyte Bergamotte]

Take care with modal interchange !

1)The principle of Occam's razor should be applied :
one should favor the substituded scale containing the fewest altered notes compared with the original scale.
For exemple, a G min chord in a progression in C major most likely comes from a substitution borrowed from the key of F major, since there is only one note different between the two scales

2)If one wishes to preserve the original Key and merely alter the color of the harmony temporarly, it is advisable not to exceed two bars borrowed from the other key.
According to Arnold Schoenberg, stringing more than two bars borrowed from a parralel key ,will inevitably produce a true modulation

[Tal_175]

Days and Wine and Roses is an interesting case. It has some of the most beautiful and coloristic uses of subdominant minor modal interchange chords while staying in the key.

The second chord (in the key of F) is v-6 chord (Cmin6) which is not even in my list but it's basically a subdominant minor chord. It's part of the family of chords belonging to Bb melodic minor (iv minor) which the tune visits in bar 6 and 7. I think of it as Aminor7b5 (*) which then goes to D7. So you get chords from the iv minor family (Bb minor 6, Eb7, Cmin6, Amin7b5) that add beautiful colors within a cyclic diatonic progression. These are voice-lead nicely between the diatonic chords.

The vanilla diatonic changes can be thought of as a full cycle I | IV vii | iii | vi | ii (arriving at G minor) | V ( which is replaced by subdominant minor-backdoor )

*Wes also plays Amin7b5 in that bar after Ebmaj7#11 before getting to D7.

[Christian Miller]

So the way I look at stepwise progressions now it from the perspective of the Rule of the Octave. This is just a bog standard vanilla harmonisation of a major or minor key that gives you the most common options. While it is a concept that comes from centuries before jazz, it actually surprisingly helpful for standards. You find little bits of it everywhere.

So a G minor scale often goes (descending, natural minor bass)

Gm Dm/F Cm6/Eb D D7/C Gm/Bb A-7b5 D7 Gm

Or alternatively
Gm Dm/F Eb7(#11) D D7/C Gm/Bb A-7b5 D7 Gm

You are kind of gluing the 6th degree of II minor (often harmonised with a first inversion IVm6) to the b7 of the I major key. It's a classic move. My favourite example is the verse of All By Myself, which is of course a lift from Rachmaninoff.

The second version of the RO gives you the Real Book version lol.

Music has never been diatonic to one key. And even a song that has a diatonic melody - My Romance - has many suggestions of other key areas within the chords.

[Christian Miller]

Another very common modal interchange in classical music that you don't see much in standards are the so called Neapolitan chords, which we'd probably class as Phrygian.

You do see them sometimes, more so in jazz originals than in tin pan alley tunes. But quite often these are used less as functional chords (in trad harmony they are are predominant chords that sub in for IVm(6) or IIo.)

One exception is Peace by Horace Silver.

You do see Neapolitan chords an awful lot in Manouche jazz repertoire. Django absolutely LOVED them.

[Tal_175]

Y
In any case, the Cm-6/Eb or A-7b5/Eb chord is drawn from the G minor key. You are kind of gluing the 6th degree of II minor (often harmonised with a first inversion IVm6) to the b7 of the I major key.

That's not the most natural way of hearing these chords for me. I hear these chords as thematically connected with the Bb min 6 (and Eb7#11) that arrive at important moments. But then as you said, who cares? One can come up with a large number of ways of interpreting this.

[Christian Miller]

That's not the most natural way of hearing these chords for me. I hear these chords as thematically connected with the Bb min 6 (and Eb7#11) that arrive at important moments. But then as you said, who cares? One can come up with a large number of ways of interpreting this.

That said - there very much is a conventional way to hear these things.

If you listen to a lot of common practice music, both the Cm6/Eb and Eb7(#11) is incredibly common for setting up the D7 - the dominant of G minor. It's called a Phrygian cadence, or sometimes a minor half cadence. People been doing this going way back.

The Eb7#11 is a small alteration aways from Cm6/Eb, right?

C Eb G A
C# Eb G A

It sort introduces a temporary leading tone to the dominant, D. It's counterpoint, basically. Later theorists call it Augmented 6th cos of the funny spelling.

Functionally both chords we would call today subdominant. (Mancini would unquestionably have known all this stuff.)

These days a jazzer would probs plonk a Bb melodic minor on the Eb7#11 and call it quits. Or if they were a bit low brow, maybe a blues scale descending form b5 (I am that low brow.)

But interestingly (probably only to me) - it's not the melodic choice you see in pre-jazz. Chopin for instance would have done something quite different.

[Tal_175]

To me that is not a different way of hearing it, it's just a different musicological explanation for what people hear under the umbrella of subdominant minor these days. That's why I don't like to get much into "my way of explaining how this is heard is objectively the most reasonable one" type of argument.

[Christian Miller]

This is not a different way of hear it, it's just a different musicological explanation for what people hear under the umbrella of subdominant minor these days. That's why I don't like to get much into "my way of explaining how this is heard is objectively the most reasonable one" type of argument.

Nah, it's not musicology or my interpretation - it's standard common practice harmony.

This specific chord progression
F Cm6/Eb D7 Gm

Is going from F to Gm in a rather obvious way. The Bbm6 is an obvious way to come back again to F (at least for that musical language.)

If you want to understand how the harmony of GASB standards behaves, you'll find a lot of common practice harmony, and most of the songwriters were steeped in the music of the 19th century - which is where you see a lot of their moves. For example the thing they do when they put the 13th on the V7 chord and resolve to 1 on the I chord - all over Chopin. This move from DoWR is also found in the music of that time. Mancini studied all of this stuff and was trained in counterpoint and so on.

As Barry said 'the great composers [classical or GASB] did not write II to V to I'.

FWIW I don't think jazz musicians really need to understand common practice harmony that well - and many don't - since as Jack pointed out, we are doing something different. Jazz musicians don't write Tin Pan Alley songs. We adapt them, and part of that comes from hearing them in a different way. And people don't write music like this any more.

[Tal_175]

Nah, it's not musicology or my interpretation - it's standard common practice harmony.

This specific chord progression
F Cm6/Eb D7 Gm

Is going from F to Gm in a rather obvious way. The Bbm6 is an obvious way to come back again to F (at least for that musical language.)

If you want to understand how the harmony of GASB standards behaves, you'll find a lot of common practice harmony, and most of the songwriters were steeped in the music of the 19th century - which is where you see a lot of their moves. For example the thing they do when they put the 13th on the V7 chord and resolve to 1 on the I chord - all over Chopin. This move from DoWR is also found in the music of that time. Mancini studied all of this stuff and was trained in counterpoint and so on.

As Barry said 'the great composers [classical or GASB] did not write II to V to I'.

FWIW I don't think jazz musicians really need to understand common practice harmony that well - and many don't - since as Jack pointed out, we are doing something different. Jazz musicians don't write Tin Pan Alley songs. We adapt them, and part of that comes from hearing them in a different way. And people don't write music like this any more.

Sorry I don't buy your "objective" analysis of the tune as the only way to hear it. Gasb music is just common pop 20th century harmony of course it's evolved from what came before it. People have been writing great music following these harmonic mechanisms without a phd in common practice harmony of 19th century. I understand the GASP harmony more along the lines of people like David Berkman. It's a possible way the hear this music if you open your mind to it.

But anyway, we can go on and on about this type theoretical path. I was trying to avoid this when I suggested that people to be tune centric. Of course for every tune we can go 7 pages on whether particular chord is Neapolitan 6th or Lydian that. There is probably no way to avoid it.

[Tal_175]

I also don't agree with "jazz musicians don't need to understand the harmony of the tunes they play " kinda sentiment. We don't play pre arranged music. A lot of musicianship is how you realize the harmony which requires developing a musical sense of purpose. Moreover many jazz musicians have written original music in the style of gasb or made personalized solo arrangements.

[Christian Miller]

Sorry I don't buy your "objective" analysis of the tune as the only way to hear it. Gasb music is just common pop 20th century harmony of course it's evolved from what came before it. People have been writing great music following these harmonic mechanisms without a phd in common practice harmony of 19th century. I understand the GASP harmony more along the lines of people like David Berkman. It's a possible way the hear this music if you open your mind to it.

Well, at this point I'm not entirely sure what we disagree about and I'm afraid to ask.

But I'm assuming you can see that it's a tonicising II-V-I to the IIm chord. Which, whatever else you choose to bring to the party, is what it is in common practice terms. The inversion adds an emotional quality to it.

I don't know Berkman's work. The internet says he's a jazz guy?

I don't know what else to tell you, jazz theory is different from classical. There's overlap, but there's a lot of fundamental differences.

Tin Pan Alley standards are not really jazz. They have been used as raw materials for jazz, of course, but there's also a tradition of singing these songs as songs - within the music theatre world for example. There's obviously some overlap - Hoagy Carmichael for example - but even many of these songwriters wrote their music in a different era, when jazz was rather different to today. It was the era of Foxtrot piano styles and so on. Early jazz accompaniment was also often harmonically much more straightforward, even where the soloist was hitting what we would call upper intervals today. (Although orchestra practice could be a lot richer - take Ellington for example.) When I play 20s and 30s stuff, I'm mostly on the triadic harmony, Dom7s and dim7s, cadential 6 4's and so on. Maybe the odd 6th for colour. Some people are super specific about this old stuff. I once got a bollocking from one top early jazz stylist for playing minor 6th chords in the wrong place. Horses for courses, as we say in the UK.

The harmony of these songs as originally laid out is a lot more triadic and classical adjacent.

And the songs went on a journey in jazz as well, which are fun to follow. A good example is the Ebmaj7#11 in Wes's version of Days. He heard it as a root position chord of that type. It's not miles away from a Cm6/Eb but it just has a little more of colouristic thing to it. Which is something post war jazz musicians tended to do - give passing chords their own life. For instance they'd look at the classic Romantic appoggiaturas in Stella by Starlight and think not - "oh that F melody note doesn't resolve to the Cm chord until the 2nd beat of the second bar - what a yearning Mahlerian dissonance" - but rather - "oh Cm11, cool colour!"

Another example - when Sondheim analysed ATTYA, he said it doesn't go to the I chord until the last bar. Classically trained, again. Different way of looking at it.

But anyway, we can go on and on about this type theoretical path. I was trying to avoid this when I suggested that people to be tune centric. Of course for every tune we can go 7 pages on whether particular chord is Neapolitan 6th or Lydian that. There is probably no way to avoid it.

No, I reject that any of this is theoretical really. It's just that terms can be technical, but this is all stuff about how we hear and play music. Jazz players don't hear harmony the same way classical composers do - or can flip between the ways of hearing. For example we are quite happy hearing maj7 as a resolved chord. Classical musicians are not. It's not part of their idiom, unless it resolves, and is heard as a dissonant chord.

That's because classical people IMO hear the 7th in reference to the root of the chord, while jazzers hear the US minor triad 3-5-7 as a harmonic entity in its own right. And you can hear Louis doing expressing that musically as far back as the 1920s.

That said, I think it's reasonable, on the evidence of the original sheet music and the upbringing and milieu of the majority of GASB songwriters, to conclude they heard more like classical musicians.

But of course, jazz musicians were never under any obligation to honour the composer's intentions. In fact, sometimes they played against the composer's intention, subverting the meaning - and the harmony -of the song.

[Tal_175]

I see chord symbols and broader notions like modal interchange as a sketch of a tune. There are many ways to create a concrete "painting" from a sketch. Things I learn from tunes exist in two layers; their sketches and how a particular arrangement realizes them.

In the way I understand it, modal interchange is a very broad category. They are temporary excursions that introduce out of key notes/intervals without breaking the sense of the existing key. The are not tonicizations of diatonic targets (unless they have dual purpose) or passing chords. They are points of emphasis. They commonly come from a parallel minor scale but they don't have to. The may not come from minor or be parallel (for example subdominant minor). They can be realized in many ways. Just because a certain harmonic device is a specific contrapuntal idea that's used by many composers doesn't mean that it can't be seen as a particular realization of modal interchange. It's not an either/or kind of situation in my opinion. That's the part I was disagreeing with you.