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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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11-06-2021 08:45 AM
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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Originally Posted by PMB
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 senseLast edited by Christian Miller; 11-06-2021 at 06:56 PM.
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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.
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Originally Posted by pcjazz
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.
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.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Last edited by PMB; 11-07-2021 at 08:41 PM.
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Originally Posted by PMB
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....
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Quotes in Bird's performance
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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.
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Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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