Melodic Minor Courses Online? or Favorite Book Must Have

[GuyBoden]

All of those options have to become so internalised that you no longer need to give them a moment's thought. So you can spend a good few months just ingraining one of these things on every tune you can think of. You know, take number 2 and just apply to every dominant chord you see in a tune. Rinse and repeat every day for several months until you know longer have to do the mental conversion, and so on.

To me, this is TRUTH about how to practice anything new.

[princeplanet]

I mean, George Shearing has in the second bar of the bridge of conception the notes D C B A G F Eb D C. The chord of the moment is B7.

It seems perverse to not call that the C melodic minor scale, and therefore by extension the altered scale in this application (I'd probably say tritone's minor).

Stephan Grapelli played this also. I don't know what you'd call it, I expect Shearing knew what a melodic minor scale is, after all they've been in existence for centuries at this point (and the ascending form was used for descending runs too - the Solfeggietto has it.) In any case it's a neat way of handling the IV7 chord and the VII7 is tritone sub for that?



Now your talking my language haha,

So the Augmented 6th chords are predominant chords in classical era music. They set up the V or the I6/4. In the Romantic era they seem to be used more freely. Beethoven uses this type of chord to set up a I chord in his 9th Symphony and Brahms in his 4th Symphony.

As to what scales go on these - Mozart and his era of composers what we might call today a sort a minor scale with the raised 4th and spicy leap from b3-#4, which is actually a pretty nice sound even in jazz.

It's probably much more sensible just to view this as diatonic minor key passing tones in between the chord tones of the chord, one of which is chromatically raised by a half step (F to F#).

This makes sense if one understands that the Augmented sixth is a chromatic enhancement of IV7b V in minor, the so-called Phrygian cadence (e.g. Fm/Ab G or Fm6/Ab G in the key of Cm) where we raise the F up a half step to add a leading tone into the chord.

I would say by the early jazz era that chord - and this chord is EVERYWHERE in the pre war era - gets associated with a sort of lydian dominant or whole tone tonality. I'll Never Be the Same uses a whole tone tetrachord 1-2-3-#4 on the chord that belongs to both the whole tone and lydian dominant scales. The intro seems to reference the whole tone, not that unusual in pre war jazz. On the solos the line is always 1-2-3-#4... so attributing a scale quality to this becomes a matter of metaphysics lol.

OTOH Out of Nowhere has 3-#4-5. So that is interesting.

The other thing is we can respell that #4 to a b5 - and - BLUES. So instead of #4-5 we now have b5-4 leading from bVI7 V7 directly, straight bussin' no cap (although Richard Wagner also uses this descending voice leading of this chord in his prelude to Tristan which is cool).

As to the tritone sub, Django is using it very explicitly as a triadic sub in this solo.

I very much doubt this had a scalic implication to him. What I would relate it to is to the Neapolitan chord, played here in root position, that you find everywhere in Django's music. I see this as layering effect of improvisation - while in classical music the Neapolitan chord usually precedes the dominant (as with the Aug6) in improvisation it can end up be superimposed on it - kind of like how you might superimpose a II-7 V7 on a V7 when soloing. And of course Django also liked Aug6th. So that's my guess as to the origin.

Then you see it in the Night in Tunisia melody, for instance, written on the dominant.

If you listen to Monk though, the preferred 'weird dominant' sound is usually the whole tone scale again. That's what he has going along with the 7b5. Bud too liked this sound.

That said, IIRC I caught Al Casey using the 'minor up a half step' thing on a 40s Fats recording. But this is present in the harmonic minor scale, if you misspell the bVIm(maj7) chord (eg Ab B Eb G in C minor)

As to how that tritone sub turns into scales... well that's not something I think I can comment on yet.



Well if you have nice things to play in minor, you can play them on dominant chords. I would suggest learning some nice things to play on minor chords, and then as a cheeky bonus you get lots of other chords thrown in.



The fixation on the MM to the exclusion of all else is unhelpful for bop IMO - the other minor scales can be incorporated into this sort of application and if you listen to real music, that's often what they were doing. So I like 'important minor' and 'tritone's minor' as terms because they seem to suggest more freedom and an invitation to introduce more chromaticism if desired. HOWEVER - there are definitely examples.

I think you can do something like 80-90% of bebop without using what I prefer to call 'applied minor.' But in some cases it seems a bit silly to avoid using the concept completely.

Who needs Chat GPT when Christian's in the house! You're a bloody marvel.

[Mick-7]

Who needs Chat GPT when Christian's in the house! You're a bloody marvel.

Christian-GPT

[GuyBoden]

The fixation on the MM to the exclusion of all else is unhelpful for bop IMO - the other minor scales can be incorporated into this sort of application and if you listen to real music, that's often what they were doing. So I like 'important minor' and 'tritone's minor' as terms because they seem to suggest more freedom and an invitation to introduce more chromaticism if desired. HOWEVER - there are definitely examples.

I think you can do something like 80-90% of bebop without using what I prefer to call 'applied minor.' But in some cases it seems a bit silly to avoid using the concept completely.

[Christian Miller]

Who needs Chat GPT when Christian's in the house! You're a bloody marvel.

So you are saying I have an authoritative confidence of expression and a need to be carefully fact checked?

Given the missus says Chat GPT is her best friend, it's all starting to make sense.

[Christian Miller]

I must be a bit dim, I can't see the connection to what I said

[dasein]

The single best teacher I've found for "melodic minor/altered" scale stuff is Kenny Werner

The irony is that in "Effortless Mastery" he specifically says you shouldn't bother going to college for jazz until you can play changes. But then he didn't write his method for playing changes! You had to take some lessons with him or one of his students.

The basic idea is this. Say you have a ii-V in C.

- First you learn how every note in C Major (D dorian if you want to think about it from the ii chord, whatever easier) voiceleads to Ab melodic minor. You can also think of it as G altered, or Db lydian b7. Doesn't really matter, whatever is easiest for you. I tend to think of it as Db7 because it's the tritone sub and Dm7 - Db7 - Cmaj is easy.

- then you learn how to voice lead every note from Abmm back to C major

- the other crucial thing is that he basically views G half whole diminished as a variation of the altered scale. You choose one vs the other because of the sound, the voice leading makes sense, etc. Use your ears. By the time you start adding chromatic approaches, the line between the two gets very blurred.

Practice this until your ears/fingers just automatically hear where to go.

I want to emphasize: this is really not a bebop sound. This is very much a Bill Evans and his followers sound. If you want a bebop sound, listen to Barry Harris (and Christian).

[GuyBoden]

I must be a bit dim, I can't see the connection to what I said

"The fixation on the MM to the exclusion of all else is unhelpful for bop IMO"

Concerning your Bop statement directly above in quotes, does this example below make things more clearer:

Edit: Probably not.

[princeplanet]

.....

- the other crucial thing is that he basically views G half whole diminished as a variation of the altered scale. You choose one vs the other because of the sound, the voice leading makes sense, etc. Use your ears. By the time you start adding chromatic approaches, the line between the two gets very blurred.

...

A lot of my "altered" language is just HW Dim, sometimes against a chord with the b13. I still don't understand why I ( think I ) get away with it. Tone deafness maybe.

[AllanAllen]

I'm still focused on how to organize this stuff mentally.

I'm not keeping up on this thread, but wanted to let you know, I made that chart of MM chords and used some of the grips at last nights gig. I've just be shoehorning them in for any old minor when the trumpet is soloing, he likes when things get harmonically spicy.

[rpjazzguitar]

I'm not keeping up on this thread, but wanted to let you know, I made that chart of MM chords and used some of the grips at last nights gig. I've just be shoehorning them in for any old minor when the trumpet is soloing, he likes when things get harmonically spicy.

That's great. It's particularly gratifying when a new idea quickly gets into your actual playing.

[AllanAllen]

I practiced the chord scale before the gig and then used the grips as my sound test. So it would be on my mind.

I force myself to play things on the gig instead of trying for a flow state. I’ll leave that for the second decade.

[rpjazzguitar]

I found that some stuck in my brain better than others.

My current goal is to get the 7 voicings (starting with stacked 4ths) memorized in order, so I can make a melody with the top notes while playing the chords. 12+keys and no thought. Work in progress.

Getting that down, along with already having the same sort of thing for major and relative minor, means that I can easily find ways to move the harmony on every beat, if desired, for most chords.

And, I've also found another approach based on the chord patterns that Reg talks about, if I understand him correctly. I can't get it from the verbal description so readily, but Reg has lots of lesson videos posted on youtube (Reg523) where you can hear and see exactly what he's doing on a number of tunes. He gets a very classic kind of jazz harmony sound (to my ear) for comping.

[AllanAllen]

From what I got from Reg you basically stop thinking about chords all the time and Autumn leaves
goes from

|C- F7 |Bb Eb |A-7b5 D7 |G-6 |

to
|C- | with | movement to | G-6 |

[AllanAllen]

My current goal is to get the 7 voicings (starting with stacked 4ths) memorized in order, so I can make a melody with the top notes while playing the chords. 12+keys and no thought. Work in progress.

Better to start with one head in one key right?

What’s your system for Major and relative Minor?

[rpjazzguitar]

From what I got from Reg you basically stop thinking about chords all the time and Autumn leaves
goes from

|C- F7 |Bb Eb |A-7b5 D7 |G-6 |

to
|C- | with | movement to | G-6 |

Interesting. What I gathered was not about leaving chords out, but adding more in. And, time feel.

[rpjazzguitar]

Better to start with one head in one key right?

What’s your system for Major and relative Minor?

More than one thing. Like maybe two.

1. Warren Nunes Type I and Type II.

So, Cmaj7=Em7=G(maybe with a maj7, I can't remember how he taught this one) = Am7. All interchangeable.

Dm7=Fmaj7=G7=Am7=Bm7b5. Also all interchangeable.

Am7 is in both Types. But, I usually think of it as relating to Cmaj,

2. Start with xx7788 (C69) and move it through the Cmajor scale. That leads to 4 grips to make seven chords. I use them all more or less interchangeably in C tonal center. To make that work you have to keep them moving or the avoid notes will take over. This is not theoretically precise. It may require some adjustment by ear.

3. Well maybe another. I do use tritone subs.

I just watched Reg's How High The Moon video. What he does is real substitution, to my way of thinking. So, for 8 beats of Gmaj, he'll put in a quick D7#9, and back to Gmaj. It's often workable to throw in the dominant in that sort of situation. That usage is not predicted by my approach, as stated above. Then, for Gm7, he uses several different voicings, including C9sus C7b13 and Gb13. That's more consistent with the stuff above.

I wouldn't say that any chord consistent with this theory will work. And, it might be better to get this stuff from transcribing rather than theoretical journeys. Maybe pick the top 50 jazz standards and work through the various devices on record. Or, start with one A section of one tune.

Caveat: I don't recommend my approach. I don't insist that everyone else make the same mistakes I do. I think like many, players, it was built haphazardly over time based on what I was exposed to and what I could and couldn't do.

[AllanAllen]

Interesting. What I gathered was not about leaving chords out, but adding more in. And, time feel.

That’s the opposite of what I meant. I probably took too much liberty with simplifying the concept.

You got it in the next post. Reg makes Gmaj7 into a G6 D9 vamp, or you could do F- D7 over the whole thing or I VI ii V. But it’s still just Gmaj7 in his head.

[rpjazzguitar]

That’s the opposite of what I meant. I probably took too much liberty with simplifying the concept.

You got it in the next post. Reg makes Gmaj7 into a G6 D9 vamp, or you could do F- D7 over the whole thing or I VI ii V. But it’s still just Gmaj7 in his head.

My point, which may have been rooted in a misunderstanding is that Reg doesn't trace a path from a starting chord to a target two bars later without regard to the chords in the middle. When he does it, to my ear, you hear the original harmony, but jazzier.

[Christian Miller]

The single best teacher I've found for "melodic minor/altered" scale stuff is Kenny Werner

The irony is that in "Effortless Mastery" he specifically says you shouldn't bother going to college for jazz until you can play changes. But then he didn't write his method for playing changes! You had to take some lessons with him or one of his students.

The basic idea is this. Say you have a ii-V in C.

- First you learn how every note in C Major (D dorian if you want to think about it from the ii chord, whatever easier) voiceleads to Ab melodic minor. You can also think of it as G altered, or Db lydian b7. Doesn't really matter, whatever is easiest for you. I tend to think of it as Db7 because it's the tritone sub and Dm7 - Db7 - Cmaj is easy.

- then you learn how to voice lead every note from Abmm back to C major

- the other crucial thing is that he basically views G half whole diminished as a variation of the altered scale. You choose one vs the other because of the sound, the voice leading makes sense, etc. Use your ears. By the time you start adding chromatic approaches, the line between the two gets very blurred.

Practice this until your ears/fingers just automatically hear where to go.

I want to emphasize: this is really not a bebop sound. This is very much a Bill Evans and his followers sound. If you want a bebop sound, listen to Barry Harris (and Christian).

My “lies to children” history is that I’d say that altered dominants started life as dissonant and have become regarded as sounds in their own right as time wore on.

The reality is more messy and it’s hard to make generalisations. A lot of the players of the mid 50s focused on applying Birds vocab, but the first generation bop players and the post bop musicians were more individual in their approach I would say.

what I think of as Bill Evans era devices have a sneaky way of showing up a good decade earlier.

Billy Strayhorn is a huge figure. But there’s other things.

Shearing’s conception has the locrian #2 expressed via an Amaj#5 arp against Ebm7b5 in the first bar. Amusingly, Evans missed out this sound (he plays E and not F) when he played the head of Conception which is funny because I always thought of the m9b5 sound as a real Bill Evans thing.

So going back to dominants the most voice leading one can have in a key is the most ways of voice leading by half step to the I chord. This turns out to not in fact be the G altered scale but the Db mixolydian. But the Db mixolydian is not of itself a harmonic sound built on the G7 as it contains that major seventh on the dominant.

And this makes sense if you look at bop lines this appears to be what’s going on. A Night in Tunisia for example

A very good tune to study the bebop treatments of altered dominants is Hot House. There are many hip devices that perhaps got retroactively incorporated into melodic minor harmony theory later. (Although maybe he was thinking in those terms, Tristano seems to have, so honestly I don’t know) And the tune can be understood in these terms - Tadd Dameron is perhaps unfairly neglected as an important guru figure in bebop.

the contemporary way of handling the altered scale eliminates a lot of the dissonance and focusses on things like major and minor triads and pentatonic scales found within the scale. This has its roots in the bop era, but in general modern chord scale like lines are more colouristic/harmonic and less hungry for resolution than bop lines.

(I post this here in case anyone is interested in this concept.)

Really, a lot of what people call modern post modal jazz harmony is what Herbie Hancock played on Wayne tunes haha. This makes sense as modern jazz theory was invented by piano players.

Wayne Shorter for his part seemed to almost perversely avoid the altered scale even where it would seem a very obvious choice, his solo on ESP for instance has no use of this scale and of the Wayne solos I’ve looked at the scale doesn’t surface at all - he seems to have preferred chromatic and symmetrical scale options, including Monk’s favourite the whole tone.

Both Wayne and McCoy tended to play half-whole, as of course did Trane.

The post bop era is very diverse in terms of approach.

Now everyone is taught the same ‘go
to’s so it’s more samey.

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[Christian Miller]

More than one thing. Like maybe two.

1. Warren Nunes Type I and Type II.

So, Cmaj7=Em7=G(maybe with a maj7, I can't remember how he taught this one) = Am7. All interchangeable.

Dm7=Fmaj7=G7=Am7=Bm7b5. Also all interchangeable.

Am7 is in both Types. But, I usually think of it as relating to Cmaj,

2. Start with xx7788 (C69) and move it through the Cmajor scale. That leads to 4 grips to make seven chords. I use them all more or less interchangeably in C tonal center. To make that work you have to keep them moving or the avoid notes will take over. This is not theoretically precise. It may require some adjustment by ear.

3. Well maybe another. I do use tritone subs.

I just watched Reg's How High The Moon video. What he does is real substitution, to my way of thinking. So, for 8 beats of Gmaj, he'll put in a quick D7#9, and back to Gmaj. It's often workable to throw in the dominant in that sort of situation. That usage is not predicted by my approach, as stated above. Then, for Gm7, he uses several different voicings, including C9sus C7b13 and Gb13. That's more consistent with the stuff above.

I wouldn't say that any chord consistent with this theory will work. And, it might be better to get this stuff from transcribing rather than theoretical journeys. Maybe pick the top 50 jazz standards and work through the various devices on record. Or, start with one A section of one tune.

Caveat: I don't recommend my approach. I don't insist that everyone else make the same mistakes I do. I think like many, players, it was built haphazardly over time based on what I was exposed to and what I could and couldn't do.

It took me about a decade to realise that despite the chord scale talk, Reg is a subs guy

Subs can be understood in theoretical terms, or they can be ‘collected’ and applied just because they sound good.

The Nunes things you cite are like rules of thumb. The Levine Theory book is more, well, theoretical.

Either way, they have to be practiced. Whether or not you see playing an Abm chord on G7 as a manifestation of the Galtered scale or just a rule of thumb that sounds good, you have to practice seeing dominants in all twelve keys and playing the minor a half step up. I do wonder if that’s a mistake people make - I know I tended to overvalue the theoretical framework rather than the really important thing which is the specific practice.

My assumption is the historical way is more that people learned these things as rules of thumb and less as manifestations of underlying chord scales. (Also some classic subs are not understandable in a vertical way. D7#9 on G is what I think of as movement or functional sub.)


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[pamosmusic]

My understanding of this sort of thing—not related to Reg—is that simplifying changes almost always enables me to play more stuff, rather than less.

Caveat is that you have to know the purpose of the chords you’re playing.

If youre in Rhythm Changes in Bb, then those turnaround chords can really be anything that gets you from one Bb to the next and all the movement you do will be color and tension and it’s extremely liberating not being bound to specific chords, two to a bar, at an up tempo, so probably you play more than you would’ve otherwise played.

If you’re in the first eight of Stella that’s a very different way of getting to Bb and you’d need to be a bit more specific … though you could unclutter some of those secondary cadences

[pamosmusic]

My assumption is the historical way is more that people learned these things as rules of thumb and less as manifestations of underlying chord scales. (Also some classic subs are not understandable in a vertical way. D7#9 on G is what I think of as movement or functional sub.)


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I feel like this is almost certainly true … you’ll hear things like a C#o over an F7 or an Ebm over an Eo in a four and back … and those are things that can’t really be made to make sense in a strictly theoretical, chord plus chord equals big chord sort of way

[Christian Miller]

I feel like this is almost certainly true … you’ll hear things like a C#o over an F7 or an Ebm over an Eo in a four and back … and those are things that can really be made to make sense in a strictly theoretical, chord plus chord equals big chord sort of way

“Chord plus chord equals big chord” that’s basically modern jazz theory in a sentence haha. Maybe “Chord plus chord equals big chord that can be tidied up into a scale and given a clever sounding name”


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[pamosmusic]

“Chord plus chord equals big chord” that’s basically modern jazz theory in a sentence haha. Maybe “Chord plus chord equals big chord that can be tidied up into a scale and given a clever sounding name”


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I edited to “can’t really be made to make sense” but I think you got that