The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #76

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    As a reflection of bop practice I like simple chord symbols. I might treat that first chord for instance as F7, Fmaj7 or F6…. F6 is a nice, open choice.
    Simple is good. FMaj7 suggests C6, which is another cool choice here.

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  3. #77

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    As a reflection of bop practice I like simple chord symbols. I might treat that first chord for instance as F7, Fmaj7 or F6…. F6 is a nice, open choice.
    Or even just F. If you follow the voice-leading, the opening progression has an implied, mostly chromatic descending line until it reaches the IV chord: F(F), Fmaj7(E) / Em7(D), A7b9(C#) / Dm7(C), G7(B) / Cm7(Bb), F7#5(A) / Bb7(Ab). I say implied as the line is broken halfway through here but as Thomas Owens points out in his book, "Bebop: The Music and its Players", this type of of scalar descent is a common characteristic of Parker's improvisations and it's often quite clearly stated. Here's Owens' take on the first chorus of Bird's solo from The Closer (JATP 1949):

    Blues for Alice is wrong in the RB?-cp-jpeg

  4. #78

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    Quote Originally Posted by PMB
    Or even just F. If you follow the voice-leading, the opening progression has an implied, mostly chromatic descending line until it reaches the IV chord: F(F), Fmaj7(E) / Em7(D), A7b9(C#) / Dm7(C), G7(B) / Cm7(Bb), F7#5(A) / Bb7(Ab). I say implied as the line is broken halfway through here but as Thomas Owens points out in his book, "Bebop: The Music and its Players", this type of of scalar descent is a common characteristic of Parker's improvisations and it's often quite clearly stated. Here's Owens' take on the first chorus of Bird's solo from The Closer (JATP 1949):

    Blues for Alice is wrong in the RB?-cp-jpeg
    True, a lot of Parker's lines seem to be built around rhythmically irregular embellishments of descending line cliches. As I mention above, Confirmation has a bit of a whole tone vibe going on in the second A section.

    but here's where I feel a bit uncomfortable about a lot of analysis and where I get into the woods with the whole idea of what chord symbols are meant to represent and what they often represent in published charts, which is something quite alien to the process of Parkers music.(I'm influenced by Steve Coleman here)

    I would think of the harmonic content Parker as being separate from, but connected to the underlying chords so its. Bird isn't actually playing Fmaj7 is he? He's playing Am there. The Fmaj7 is the composite harmony; what you get when you add piano and sax together and look at it through the lens of modern jazz theory where we think of extensions on the root.

    But this doesn't reflect the organisation of the music - jazz (at least at this point in history) is layered, the combined result of a number of improvising musicians working from the same basic template (a blues with a detour to minor in bars 2-3) but not always with total congruence and certainly not vertically conceived in one thought as classical music is (by a single composer).

    And yet we treat it and analyse it as if it were, which is were we get 'the Phantasies of chord scale theory' as DB put it.

    So, if I improvise using that sound I think 'Am on F' not Fmaj7; I might be aware theoretically that is a sub based on the third of the chord, but that is not how I am hearing it.

    Actually, as Jordan K demonstrated (this completely changed my life), when you hear it that way, the F becomes a dissonant tone, because you are hearing the Am as a superimposed tonic sound and that F is now dissonant in the Am context. Same sorts of crazy things with tritone subs etc (the 3rd on a 7#9b13 chord is dissonant for example). But we don't hear extended chords (even ones as mild as Fmaj7) from the root up, we hear them from the top down. Conventional western theory has this dead backwards because thats the way 18th and 19th century musicians heard them, but not us...

    This example is as mild as you can get, but when you get into passing 'weak side' chords and so on that don't have any clear relationship harmonically, people can really get into the woods when they expect to see that. This creates all sorts problems further down the line...

    What is Bird actually playing there harmonically, if we knew nothing about the chord symbols of Blues for Alice?

    F Am | Em7 A7b9 | Dm (G9?) | Ebmaj7 F+ etc

    on a basic template of
    F | Em7 A7 | Dm G7 | Cm7 F7
    or even
    F | A7 | Dm | F7 |

    As opposed to
    F Fmaj7 | Em7 A7b9 | Dm7 G9 | Cm9 F7+
    Which tells a lie about the process of the music IMO

    If that makes any sense
    Last edited by Christian Miller; 11-06-2021 at 06:56 PM.

  5. #79

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    But if you distinguish the harmony implied by Parker’s line from the harmony expressed by the accompanists - piano and bass - then the changes are not a “lie” (assuming they are correctly notated) but a statement of what Lewis et al played under Bird’s line.

    That implied Am is what makes C6 a cool choice btw.

  6. #80

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    Quote Originally Posted by pcjazz
    But if you distinguish the harmony implied by Parker’s line from the harmony expressed by the accompanists - piano and bass - then the changes are not a “lie” (assuming they are correctly notated) but a statement of what Lewis et al played under Bird’s line.
    I’m not sure if I quite understand. Are you saying that the chords I said were ‘a lie’ (hyperbole is my strong point) are in fact what the accompanist is playing?

    If it is, fair enough (I haven’t transcribed the comping). However, what charts often represent is the current conception that soloing ideas represent upper extensions of the chord that need to be honoured in the comping chords. Ethan Iverson relates this to Bill Evans. I’m influenced by his telling.

    At this point in jazz history - the early 50s - the music was still very much in the ‘two hands seperate’ paradigm, by which I mean we can take the piano style of Hines, Wilson going into Tatum and Bud as a general model for what was going on in ensembles.

    So what unites all these players is a division between left hand and right hand. Left hand plays simple voicings and right hand plays all the jazz, which can be all sorts of stuff harmonically even on early records.

    If you are wondering what piano has to do with this, this is reflected in the rhythm sections, where accompanying chords were pretty simple and vanilla for the most part (although often embellished with passing chords), with a slow move towards more colourful comping harmony during bebop (esp 7b5 chords.) So even early on, Pops might play extensions/sub chords, but the banjo was going to stick to plain chords, for example. Bud freed up the comping rhythms but his voicings are famously simple- shells, and the connection to stride era players is pretty apparent as it is for Monk.

    Anyway, I find this a useful way of conceptualising stuff like Parker. Ethan Iverson observes that players like Red Garland came out of this approach and often there could be clashes between the two hands. It was quite normal. Probably the left hand was quite automatic for Red as it was for James P Johnson - the ‘groove hand’ over which you could layer other stuff.

    Later Bill Evan’s popularised a more classical approach where the two hands were working together more, and this is where we start to see the beginnings of the modern harmonic concept, where we would start to see the melody of the song reflected in the chordal choices (and lead sheet chord charts) and the two hands starting to work together harmonically. This is the background of modern chord scale theory as opposed to the old way of using scales to make up melodies on existing progressions in the bebop way.

    (That to me is one reason why Barry teaches improvisation and harmony in separate classes.)

    Anyway, might be a little neat, there’s a lot of stuff in the middle, like Barry, but it explains a lot.

    Anyway I play a lot of 30s/40s style music, and it strikes me the view into Bird from before - of him as the cumulation of a period of music - is different and complementary to the much more often told view which takes Bird as the foundation of modern jazz. Of course, Bird is both. I learned a lot about bop by playing swing…there’s a lot attributed to him which has more to do with what stories people wanted tell about his music rather than what’s on the records.

    That implied Am is what makes C6 a cool choice btw.
    The Am is not implied. It is literally what Bird is playing at this point. The Fmaj7 might be implied ….

    Anyway, C6 on F, that’s the gateway to what we might call extended major chords in Barry’s approach. It’s a ‘rich Lydian’ if you use the maj-6 dim.
    Last edited by Christian Miller; 11-07-2021 at 05:05 AM.

  7. #81

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    I’m not sure if I quite understand. Are you saying that the chords I said were ‘a lie’ (hyperbole is my strong point) are in fact what the accompanist is playing?

    If it is, fair enough (I haven’t transcribed the comping). However, what charts often represent is the current conception that soloing ideas represent upper extensions of the chord that need to be honoured in the comping chords. Ethan Iverson relates this to Bill Evans. I’m influenced by his telling.

    At this point in jazz history - the early 50s - the music was still very much in the ‘two hands seperate’ paradigm, by which I mean we can take the piano style of Hines, Wilson going into Tatum and Bud as a general model for what was going on in ensembles.

    So what unites all these players is a division between left hand and right hand. Left hand plays simple voicings and right hand plays all the jazz, which can be all sorts of stuff harmonically even on early records.

    If you are wondering what piano has to do with this, this is reflected in the rhythm sections, where accompanying chords were pretty simple and vanilla for the most part (although often embellished with passing chords), with a slow move towards more colourful comping harmony during bebop (esp 7b5 chords.) So even early on, Pops might play extensions/sub chords, but the banjo was going to stick to plain chords, for example. Bud freed up the comping rhythms but his voicings are famously simple- shells, and the connection to stride era players is pretty apparent as it is for Monk.

    Anyway, I find this a useful way of conceptualising stuff like Parker. Ethan Iverson observes that players like Red Garland came out of this approach and often there could be clashes between the two hands. It was quite normal. Probably the left hand was quite automatic for Red as it was for James P Johnson - the ‘groove hand’ over which you could layer other stuff.

    Later Bill Evan’s popularised a more classical approach where the two hands were working together more, and this is where we start to see the beginnings of the modern harmonic concept, where we would start to see the melody of the song reflected in the chordal choices (and lead sheet chord charts) and the two hands starting to work together harmonically. This is the background of modern chord scale theory as opposed to the old way of using scales to make up melodies on existing progressions in the bebop way.

    (That to me is one reason why Barry teaches improvisation and harmony in separate classes.)

    Anyway, might be a little neat, there’s a lot of stuff in the middle, like Barry, but it explains a lot.

    Anyway I play a lot of 30s/40s style music, and it strikes me the view into Bird from before - of him as the cumulation of a period of music - is different and complementary to the much more often told view which takes Bird as the foundation of modern jazz. Of course, Bird is both. I learned a lot about bop by playing swing…there’s a lot attributed to him which has more to do with what stories people wanted tell about his music rather than what’s on the records.

    The Am is not implied. It is literally what Bird is playing at this point. The Fmaj7 might be implied ….

    Anyway, C6 on F, that’s the gateway to what we might call extended major chords in Barry’s approach. It’s a ‘rich Lydian’ if you use the maj-6 dim.
    Sure, I agree with all that and proposed the 'Urlinie' as just one possible path through the harmonic framework (perhaps I was thinking of how one may go about connecting chords, a topic you alluded to earlier). Ultimately, I feel great improvisers build up a whole store of approaches that continuously mediate between the general and specific. An obvious instance of this is Parker's uncanny ability to almost negate the changes completely by playing blues lines or oblique popular song quotes and then move imperceptibly into nailing every passing chord.
    Last edited by PMB; 11-07-2021 at 08:41 PM.

  8. #82

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    Quote Originally Posted by PMB
    Sure, I agree with all that and proposed the 'Urlinie' as just one possible path through the harmonic framework (perhaps I was thinking of how one may go about connecting chords, a topic you alluded to earlier). Ultimately, I feel great improvisers build up a whole store of approaches that continuously mediate between the general and specific. An obvious instance of this is Parker's uncanny ability to almost negate the changes completely by playing blues lines or oblique popular song quotes and then move imperceptibly into nailing every passing chord.
    I sometimes wonder if most of Parker is quotes we've forgotten. It's evidently how he studied music; you can hear his playing here is heavily built on a string of Prez quotes. (But Bird is coming out in some of those double time runs - man!)


    A classic example is the old Alphonse Picout 'High Society' line. Generations of sax players have grown up just assuming it's a 'Parker Lick' (and it's a useful thing to play on a major chord, or a turnaround.)

    Watching old Tom and Jerry cartoons from the same era, I'm struck by the level of quotation of all sorts of things including snippets of classical music, many popular melodies of the time such as 'All Gods Children' and so on. This kind of stuff is part of the fabric of the popular culture of the era....

  9. #83

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    I sometimes wonder if most of Parker is quotes we've forgotten. It's evidently how he studied music; you can hear his playing here is heavily built on a string of Prez quotes. (But Bird is coming out in some of those double time runs - man!)


    A classic example is the old Alphonse Picout 'High Society' line. Generations of sax players have grown up just assuming it's a 'Parker Lick' (and it's a useful thing to play on a major chord, or a turnaround.)

    Watching old Tom and Jerry cartoons from the same era, I'm struck by the level of quotation of all sorts of things including snippets of classical music, many popular melodies of the time such as 'All Gods Children' and so on. This kind of stuff is part of the fabric of the popular culture of the era....
    There are probably a bunch of others that didn't even make this list:

    Quotes in Bird's performance

  10. #84

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    Notes to self - practice more quotes!

    I like how it can all become melodies in the end. That’s what Dizzy said Parker’s gift was IIRC.

  11. #85

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christian Miller
    Notes to self - practice more quotes!

    I like how it can all become melodies in the end. That’s what Dizzy said Parker’s gift was IIRC.
    Works for Jim Mullen!