Please explain fusion modal harmony using Mr. Clean by Weldon Irvine as a case study

[Grigoris]

Help demystify for me the harmonies I hear on 1970s tunes such as Mr. Clean by Weldon Irvine - to give an example.

To be more specific, please kindly explain how is Herbie Hancock thinking about these chords for both comping and single line soloing.

You can hear his modal comping on the theme, against a static Fm7 chord.

And then from 06:50 onwards those licks/patterns he plays, sounds like he's moving a triad a whole step down or something.

Here is the sheet music, the only thing that gives some indication to the harmonic weirdness is this Db Dorian against F in the bass



If there are any videos online or books that analyse these sounds, I am really interested. I would like to incorporate that into my comping.

But really, any help is much appreciated.

Cheers

[Tomcat]

I guess he is changing playing inside and outside, on static chords it works great. Playing outside means you choose, for instance, Db melodic minor - or Db Dorian in this case - over static Fmin7 comping.

[Grigoris]

I had an idea, correct me if I’m wrong.
could it be that he switches between F Dorian and Db Dorian and for the comping he’s also alternating between harmonising the F and Db Dorian in fourths?

[supersoul]

Check out this article "Chromatic Harmony in the Music of Herbie Hancock and Clare Fischer" by Michael Kahr
(PDF) Chromatic Harmony in the Music of Herbie Hancock and Clare Fischer

Herbie has mentioned Clare Fischer in various interviews as being a big influence on his harmonic sense. Clare Fischer has done a lot of arranging and orchestrating, for himself and others, and a large part of his sound was chromatic movement instead of circle of 4ths.

One thing I've read (perhaps not in the article above, but on Clare Fischer) was that if you keep the outer voices consonant, it's easy to move around the inner voices to create dissonant colors, and it will still make sense. That was part of his approach, at least, and I think Herbie borrowed some of those ideas.

For Fm -> Dbm(dorian)/F -> Fm, the C and F in Fm move down a half step to Fb and Cb for the Dbm/F chord. Depending on if you include the minor 7ths, you get all sorts of parallel and contrary chromatic movement, and that Dbm6/F ends up being a rich and ambiguous Fm-5+7 sound (F, Cb, E, Ab, or F, Cb, E, Bb).

[GuyBoden]

You need this book:

Ron Miller: Modal Jazz Composition & Harmony

[grahambop]

I only listened to a bit from 6.50, but to me it sounds like some of it is based on the kind of circular pentatonic patterns used by e.g. McCoy Tyner, which he is shifting around chromatically.

[Bob_Ross]

This probably won't help anybody -- frankly, I barely know what point I'm trying to get across here (!) -- but fwiw, when I studied George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization in grad school with Russell as the professor, someone in the class asked him if he could elaborate on what the difference between inward-going horizontal tonal gravity and outward-going horizontal tonal gravity was

...so Russell sits down at the piano and says "Chick Corea is outward-going" (and then he plays 30 seconds of jazz that sounds exactly like Chick Corea) "...and Herbie Hancock is inward-going" (and then he plays 30 seconds of jazz that sounds exactly like Herbie Hancock).

:shrugs:

[Christian Miller]

I don’t know if this answers the query but Isn’t the Db Dorian/F sound simply an altered dominant sub over the tonic pedal (derived from a II V relationship with the tritone sub)?

I’m definitely not a Herbie-scholar but I noticed Herbie uses the Dorian up a half step in his solo on Speak no Evil over the A7alt.

Btw with pedals the harmony can be considered independent of the bass note and can include false relations. This has been the case for hundreds of years. Go check out Bach BWV999 prelude (played in Dm by guitarists) for example; there’s an F7/E chord* in that one!

Conversely, you don’t need to consider the inclusion of the pedal tone when playing polychordal stuff on it. And remember the piano has complete control of the harmony apart from the bass. Guitarists tend to be much more ‘in’ than pianists.

So - I’ll need to listen carefully to Herbie on this one to comment any further. I’m meaning to do a proper survey of post bop modal improvisation techniques at some point and this would be a good solo to examine.

But you can start with the understanding that you can in fact lay all kinds of polychords on a pedal using this logic and this is what it sounds like Herbie is doing here at a casual listen. I think there’s some symmetrical scale stuff too.

Ultimately you are going to have to transcribe the solo. Good luck!

*there’s some disagreement in the various sources with some moving up to F (Eb in the original key), but it is only playable on guitar with the A bass. Rob might be able to comment on its playability on lute.

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[Christian Miller]

Btw I think there’s an element of ‘intuitive chaos’ to post modal improv and composition. There wasn’t a road map for any of this stuff.

According to legend Debussy was asked ‘by whose logic do you play the piano?’ and he answered ‘the pleasure of my ears.’

(Musicologists aren’t having it, by the way.)

It’s worth pointing out that the 60s of course saw a great explosion of interest in Non Western and Esoteric traditions which emphasised the importance of what we might term unconscious processes. Non functional harmony offers a doorway into that realm.

Herbie himself became a Mahayana Buddhist.

Of course Bird had already emphasised the importance of forgetting and letting go.

Just because a musician knows theory does not mean that theory dictates their actions. Sometimes the theoretical impulse is to be opposed. OTOH it is the path of the musicologist, not the artist to try to unpack some of these mysterious pathways. Nerds.

While chord scales can tell you what notes create a certain colour they don’t have much to offer on why one chord might move to another in a Wayne Shorter composition.

On the other hand it’s never been that important to understand the ‘why’ of chord movements to improvise on a post modal tune if you practice your scales over the tune until they are flowing. Much more than Wayne, for example, whose approach is quite idiosyncratic, Herbie is for me one of the archetypical players that informs the modern approach to playing so called non functional changes and to me (and others) this seems to be how he does it. What I think of as the ‘post modal common practice.’ Henderson on Inner Urge is another classic example.

In actual, specifics aside, I don’t think this is that different from jazz tradition overall. Jazz musicians have never been over concerned with the mechanics of common practice European tonality. However, jazz standards contain many more standardised movements than the modern approach. This is what jazzers usually mean by ‘functional changes.’

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