Help to understand a Django Reinhardt ( Am7 arp over d7)

[pawlowski6132]

Many thanks for all the replies, slight correction on what I said in the first post, the lick in question is not Amin7 but to me just a straight Aminor based thing... anyway from all the replies I'm comfortable with this now and have got to grips with this one.

I've another one if anyone wants to help out...

Bar 48 of the same vid, he's on the G7 moving to a resolution back to C.

Notes played are:
Eb, Db, A, B, C,D, E ( hits this E on bar 1 of the C chord).

How would you rationalize this one? The ABCDE bit I'm interpreting as a simple scale run to hit the E in time for nice harmony with the C chord. ( E is the 3rd of C of course.)

But the Eb and Db, why pick these notes? They don't match with anything I know at the moment about picking notes go go over a 7 chord.

Thanks for any constructive help, it really is appreciated.

(If you feel the need to flex and tell me this is some kind of fundamental/elementary thing as opposed to actually engaging with my curiosity.... if it boosts your ego then why not).

Any note not in the key is simply chromatic movement between two diatonic notes. Some times that's all they are or, you label them as an alteration or color tone of a chord.

Keep it simple.

[RickyHolden]

Any note not in the key is simply chromatic movement between two diatonic notes. Some times that's all they are or, you label them as an alteration or color tone of a chord.

Keep it simple.

Thanks, I corrected myself btw, it's a Gb not a Db. No offence but this one doesn't do it for me, it's a bit generic and not really about the notes in the lick. Although as a general idea yes, I agree.

What I am kind of seeing is a diminished thing, the Eb, Gb, A are all intervals of 3 semitones, so maybe outline a Gb diminished arpwggio... whereas the books say use a G# diminished over a G7, its those 3 notes that I'm curious about.

[pawlowski6132]

Thanks, I corrected myself btw, it's a Gb not a Db. No offence but this one doesn't do it for me, it's a bit generic and not really about the notes in the lick. Although as a general idea yes, I agree.

What I am kind of seeing is a diminished thing, the Eb, Gb, A are all intervals of 3 semitones, so maybe outline a Gb diminished arpwggio... whereas the books say use a G# diminished over a G7, its those 3 notes that I'm curious about.

It doesn't do it for you because you want to be pedantic about all this. But why? There is no point. And there is no right answer. You'll NEVER get the right answer because there isn't one. Music, especially jazz, can be analyzed many ways and its an art form with a little science and theory there too.

[RickyHolden]

Any note not in the key is simply chromatic movement between two diatonic notes. Some times that's all they are or, you label them as an alteration or color tone of a chord.

Keep it simple.

Thinking again on this... yeh, maybe the Eb and Gb are just 'pick some non diatonic notes to create a bit of tension / dissonance before the nice pretty major scale run to the resolution on the E'

I may have been too hasty to dismiss.

[pawlowski6132]

Thinking again on this... yeh, maybe the Eb and Gb are just 'pick some non diatonic notes to create a bit of tension / dissonance before the nice pretty major scale run to the resolution on the E'

I may have been too hasty to dismiss.

Yes!!!

Half of what Joe Pass played were chromatic approach notes from below or above.

[RickyHolden]

It doesn't do it for you because you want to be pedantic about all this. But why? There is no point. And there is no right answer. You'll NEVER get the right answer because there isn't one. Music, especially jazz, can be analyzed many ways and its an art form with a little science and theory there too.

I don't want to be pedantic, just to have some kind of personal rationalization for the note choices. It's a personal journey for all of us, it's only rock 'n' roll.

[Tal_175]

Notes played are:
Eb, Gb, A, B, C,D, E ( hits this E on bar 1 of the C chord).

How would you rationalize this one? The ABCDE bit I'm interpreting as a simple scale run to hit the E in time for nice harmony with the C chord. ( E is the 3rd of C of course.)

But the Eb and Gb, why pick these notes? They don't match with anything I know at the moment about picking notes go go over a 7 chord.

The way I hear this is that he plays a Dmin7 arpeggio in the previous bar, then plays a D# dim (D# F# A) or Eb Gb A as you spelled above. This is the same phrase up a step. It creates a nice sequence pattern that the listener picks up.

Functionally its like playing Dmin7 D7 G7. Note D#dim is a way to outline D7b9. So D#dim is acting as a secondary dominant of G7. Inserting a dominant approach chord like this is very common in comping and soloing.

[RickyHolden]

The way I hear this is that he plays a Dmin7 arpeggio in the previous bar, then plays a D# dim (D# F# A) or Eb Gb A as you spelled above. This is the same phrase up a step. It creates a nice sequence pattern that listener picks up.

Functionally its like playing Dmin7 D7 G7. Note D#dim is a way to outline D7b9. So D#dim is acting as a secondary dominant of G7. Inserting a dominant approach chord like this is very common in comping and soloing.

Liking this one, thanks! Yep I totally hear that half step up repeat that you describe.

[snoskier63]

I don’t have the theory knowledge of many out here, but when younger I took lessons for many years from Eddie Hazell (jazz, not the Parliament Hazel).

I often questioned note selection when improvising, and he always told me the same thing, which was to worry about what sounds good, and don’t worry about why. I never did ask why this was his advice, but perhaps it was because most of the people listening to music have little to no understanding of scales, modes, or rules of substitution. But they do know what sounds good. Obviously, that doesn’t mean it isn’t helpful to know the theory behind what we play, but many musicians do very well while knowing little to no theory. Just two examples in jazz guitar are Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery.

[sully75]

I don't want to be pedantic, just to have some kind of personal rationalization for the note choices. It's a personal journey for all of us, it's only rock 'n' roll.

That's fine, and depending on where you are with your playing, it can be constructive, but it took me a long time to get the concept: just learn a lot of stuff that sounds good, copy that over and over and minimize the analysis while you are developing a style.

When you're playing a solo in a live setting, you really can not be thinking "am I going to play that eb here against the G7?" at least at any early stage of learning. You're not making note choices, you're playing fragments of things or actual licks (or sometimes, even solos).

It is helpful to remember that Django, AFAIK, didn't read music and didn't speak in these terms. And Gypsy people playing Django's music in Europe today on a high or professional level would ask you "what's Eb?". Seriously, a lot of them wouldn't have a clue unless you pointed to the note on your guitar. But they can shred in inventive ways for hours and hours. It's sort of the opposite of Western analytic thinking and I think it provides a really valuable insight into the roots of jazz and music in general. (for the record, this is pretty well verified: people like Birelli Lagrene, Stochelo Rosenberg and Paulus Schaeffer have close to zero knowledge of formal theory and sometimes limited knowledge of the names of the notes on the fretboard or chord types, which in no way impacts their genius).

It has taken me a long time to just think about how to play stuff that sounds good and let go of that Western sort of analytic thing. It's very much a work in progress but I wish I'd picked up on it earlier.

Dennis Chang has a lot of good videos on youtube about the gypsy way of understanding music.

You can do whatever you want, you can write the scale degrees over the notes, etc, etc, but I think it's important to remember that the people who invented the tradition and the people who keep it alive in large part are diametrically opposed to that type of learning.

In other words, learn a lot of licks and improvise with and on them...

[Christian Miller]

just to have some kind of personal rationalization for the note choices

Why?

[Tal_175]

Why?

The answer is within you You are no slouch when it comes to fitting musical concepts within a mental framework based on what I've seen in your posts. It must not have been completely useless in your musical journey, no?

[Christian Miller]

The answer is within you You are no slouch when it comes to fitting musical concepts within a mental framework based on what I've seen in your posts. It must not have been completely useless in your musical journey, no?

That’s different to rationalising choices though?

My understanding of the important minor (Am on D7 say) is pretty much - it sounds good, and everyone does it. Sure you can talk about the #11 or something but that’s just applying labels to sounds.

Saying Am(maj7) sounds good on D7 because it gives the #11 and other cool notes isn’t really an explanation or rationalisation anyway - it’s a verbal description of what the thing is.

It sounds good because it sounds good.


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[Tal_175]

Describing musical events with abstractions like "Am(maj7) over D7 brings out the #11 over D" is the mental framework most people consider part of music theory. There is another part of music theory that inevitably emerges out of these observations. People are tempted to ask: Are these good-sounding patterns just a collection of silos, or is there an overarching mechanism that predicts their effect? In the case of the example above, one may observe that Am(maj7) contains some of the chord tones and extensions of D7 that give it a certain color and different voice leading options etc.

So, Christian, is this impulse to understand these common vocabulary patterns with a unifying theory of harmonic mechanisms what you consider an unnecessary indulgence with theory?

[Christian Miller]

Describing musical events with abstractions like "Am(maj7) over D7 brings out the #11 over D" is the mental framework most people consider part of music theory. There is another part of music theory that inevitably emerges out of these observations. People are tempted to ask: Are these good-sounding patterns just a collection of silos, or is there an overarching mechanism that predicts their effect? In the case of the example above, one may observe that Am(maj7) contains some of the chord tones and extensions of D7 that give it a certain color and different voice leading options etc.

That’s like chunking things down to modules and making descriptive observations about music.

So, Christian, is this impulse to understand these common vocabulary patterns with a theory of unifying harmonic mechanism what you consider an unnecessary indulgence with theory?

I think this is a different thing to asking ‘why does this sound good’?

‘Why does Am work over D7?’ for instance. I’m not sure if sure I have a very satisfying explanation for this from music theory.

And it doesn’t always. It doesn’t sound good in common practice harmony. It does sound good in jazz.

It sounds good in jazz because jazz musicians like to do it and it has become normalised as part of the language and it’s good to practice it for that reason. That’s the rationale.

You may observe that it gives you “hip” extensions of the related dominant chord, but that’s just another thing that happens to sound good because jazz musicians use those sounds - which is what makes them “hip”.

It’s good to learn the sounds musicians use within your chosen music of interest.

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[fep]

I like to think of just extending the chords by thirds (major 3rds and minor 3rds whichever works). So, D7 is:

D F# A C E G B

which doesn't require much thought once you get use to doing that. You can take any piece of it and embellish it with other notes. And you can see in the middle of that you have the Am7 or A C E G but I'm not conciously thinking Am7, rather it's just D7 stuff.

[Christian Miller]

I like to think of just extending the chords by thirds (major 3rds and minor 3rds whichever works). So, D7 is:

D F# A C E G B

which doesn't require much thought once you get use to doing that. You can take any piece of it and embellish it with other notes. And you can see in the middle of that you have the Am7 or A C E G but I'm not conciously thinking Am7, rather it's just D7 stuff.

I was about to do a video on that - I didn’t steal your idea honest

Thirds always sound good


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[jameslovestal]

Describing musical events with abstractions like "Am(maj7) over D7 brings out the #11 over D" is the mental framework most people consider part of music theory. There is another part of music theory that inevitably emerges out of these observations. People are tempted to ask: Are these good-sounding patterns just a collection of silos, or is there an overarching mechanism that predicts their effect? In the case of the example above, one may observe that Am(maj7) contains some of the chord tones and extensions of D7 that give it a certain color and different voice leading options etc.

So, Christian, is this impulse to understand these common vocabulary patterns with a unifying theory of harmonic mechanisms what you consider an unnecessary indulgence with theory?

Isn't one of those "is it,,,," observations related to the creation of tension or the inverse, the release of tension?

As I advanced, I put "sounds good" into the tension\release paradigm.

[sully75]

I still go by trying to think of things (or not think of things) the way the person you are trying to learn about thought of things. Django didn't think in terms of notes in this way, it's not clear he thought of notes much at all. He was hearing stuff in recordings and thousands of hours of experience playing pre-jazz and not jazz music and playing stuff he thought sounded good. He was afaik musically illiterate in a big way.

So whatever he played, he played it because it sounded good to him, end of story. It may be helpful to analyze stuff to understand it but ultimately if the goal is to understand and imitate in the path to learning, a lot of analysis might be counterproductive.

[fep]

I was about to do a video on that - I didn’t steal your idea honest

Thirds always sound good


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And I sure didn't invent that. Larry Carlton and Garrison Fewell have both given instruction on that idea.

[Christian Miller]

And I sure didn't invent that. Larry Carlton and Garrison Fewell have both given instruction on that idea.

Of course, Wes Montgomery conducted many masterclasses on the subject in the form of jazz solos.


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[Picker]

My kinda guy


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Agree. And to quote some other guy "If it sounds good, it is good."

[wolflen]

[QUOTE=Christian Miller;1429263]That’s different to rationalising choices though?

My understanding of the important minor (Am on D7 say) is pretty much - it sounds good, and everyone does it. Sure you can talk about the #11 or something but that’s just applying labels to sounds.

Saying Am(maj7) sounds good on D7 because it gives the #11 and other cool notes isn’t really an explanation or rationalisation anyway - it’s a verbal description of what the thing is.

It sounds good because it sounds good. /QUOTE]

Yes..and then the explanation could just be "context" or "implied" or for strict theory buffs

The harmonized melodic minor AmiM7 has a D7 in its scale

A B C D E F# G#

you could find many examples of scale fragments with target chord tones in them

harmonize the diminished and augmented scales see chord/scale relations and application in progressions -- now you have some real explaining to do!

[Christian Miller]

[QUOTE=wolflen;1440789]

That’s different to rationalising choices though?

My understanding of the important minor (Am on D7 say) is pretty much - it sounds good, and everyone does it. Sure you can talk about the #11 or something but that’s just applying labels to sounds.

Saying Am(maj7) sounds good on D7 because it gives the #11 and other cool notes isn’t really an explanation or rationalisation anyway - it’s a verbal description of what the thing is.

It sounds good because it sounds good. /QUOTE]

Yes..and then the explanation could just be "context" or "implied" or for strict theory buffs

The harmonized melodic minor AmiM7 has a D7 in its scale

A B C D E F# G#

you could find many examples of scale fragments with target chord tones in them

harmonize the diminished and augmented scales see chord/scale relations and application in progressions -- now you have some real explaining to do!

I mean that’s not an explanation of why it sounds good but everyone acts as if it and gets on with their lives so it’s probably for the best.

You know and Beato can say ‘that melody has a #11 in it and that’s incredibly good melody writing’ and continue to flog his book.

Music is sort of normative really. Things that jazz people think sound good are also not always things that normal people who listen to normal music think sound good. We think jazz things sound good because we hear jazzers playing them.

When young jazzers get told ‘this sounds good’ in jazz school it becomes a self fulfilling cycle.

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[pauln]

Different chords sound different.

As Christian Miller hinted above,
Best guitarists were Objectivists.