"Accepted" Tensions for Maj, Min, Dom Chords (Fewell Book)

[AlsoRan]

I am finally digging into and understanding Garrison Fewell's book "Guitar: Jazz Improvisation, a Melodic Approach."

My question is this. He states that the common diatonic tensions for the Major Chord is the 9th, for the Minor Chord is the 9th and 11th, and for Dom Chord is the 9th, 11th, and 13th.

What does he mean by "common?" Does he mean common as found in more traditional Jazz, as opposed to modern Jazz, which uses 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths much more liberallly?

Thanks.

[Nuff Said]

I have this book, what page is this stated?, so I can read the context of the statement.

Nuff

[AlsoRan]

I have this book, what page is this stated?, so I can read the context of the statement.

Nuff

Page 9 has this.

Thanks.

[RyanM]

I'm not sure about "modern" jazz, but I think he's just giving basic guide lines for using tensions.

This is where I think the whole CST thing is useful; while it doesn't necessarily help with improvising lines, it helps with understanding chord tensions.

The major scale (the I chord) gives you a major 7th chord, with a 9th, 11th, and 13th. the 9th is used a lot, and sounds fairly consonant while the 11th, because it's a half step above the 3rd, can sound ...interesting. The 13th is alright, but is usually used in place of the 7th (as a major 6 chord).
The Lydian mode (the IV chord) gives you the #11 over the major 7th, which is a much more usable sound than the 11th.

What I would do, is spend some time with each possible chord type, and just listen intently to the sounds made by each tension... you have a possible 9th, b9th, #9th, 11th, #11th, 13th, and b13... try to sing the tensions over the chord, to help you learn the sounds. This way you will come to your own conclusions about what is acceptable/useful to you. (It may be better to use a piano for this because multiple tensions can be played easier.)

[AlsoRan]

I'm not sure about "modern" jazz, but I think he's just giving basic guide lines for using tensions.

This is where I think the whole CST thing is useful; while it doesn't necessarily help with improvising lines, it helps with understanding chord tensions.

The major scale (the I chord) gives you a major 7th chord, with a 9th, 11th, and 13th. the 9th is used a lot, and sounds fairly consonant while the 11th, because it's a half step above the 3rd, can sound ...interesting. The 13th is alright, but is usually used in place of the 7th (as a major 6 chord).
The Lydian mode (the IV chord) gives you the #11 over the major 7th, which is a much more usable sound than the 11th.

What I would do, is spend some time with each possible chord type, and just listen intently to the sounds made by each tension... you have a possible 9th, b9th, #9th, 11th, #11th, 13th, and b13... try to sing the tensions over the chord, to help you learn the sounds. This way you will come to your own conclusions about what is acceptable/useful to you. (It may be better to use a piano for this because multiple tensions can be played easier.)

Awesome answer. Thanks!!

[whatswisdom]

...the whole CST thing is useful...it helps with understanding chord tensions...spend some time with each possible chord type, and just listen intently to the sounds made by each tension... you have a possible 9th, b9th, #9th, 11th, #11th, 13th, and b13...try to sing the tensions over the chord, to help you learn the sounds.

Cool post. Very clearly explained. Thanks from me too.

[AlsoRan]

I'm not sure about "modern" jazz, but I think he's just giving basic guide lines for using tensions.

Is not "modern" Jazz characterized by the more liberal use of more dissonant notes, and altered chords when compared with Jazz from the 40's and 50's? Am I off base? (I just know that I don't really like a "too much" dissonance, even in functioning chords that resolve to the I chord - I am stuck in the 50's and early 60's Jazz, but I am satisfied with it.)

[RyanM]

Well I guess I meant that, like you, I don't listen to enough modern stuff to know much about it. But I think you're right in that unresolved dissonances are more common.

[AlsoRan]

Well I guess I meant that, like you, I don't listen to enough modern stuff to know much about it. But I think you're right in that unresolved dissonances are more common.

(Exhale) I feel a little better now.

[JonR]

Is not "modern" Jazz characterized by the more liberal use of more dissonant notes, and altered chords when compared with Jazz from the 40's and 50's? Am I off base? (I just know that I don't really like a "too much" dissonance, even in functioning chords that resolve to the I chord - I am stuck in the 50's and early 60's Jazz, but I am satisfied with it.)

There's a difference between functional harmony (pre 1960) and modal harmony (post-1960).
After Miles's "Kind Of Blue", modal sounds didn't exactly take over (except for a brief period), but they did get combined with the old functional systems, and jazz was never the same again. (And later, free improv and rock had their impact too.)

In functional harmony, dissonance has a meaning. It's a tension that requires resolution. In modal harmony, there is no progression (or hardly any), and dissonance is used freely, as local colour only. It has no functional meaning, no job to do in leading anywhere.

Eg, in functional harmony a 7sus4 chord is an extended dominant, a V chord, a tension waiting to resolve to I. In modal harmony it's just a mixolydian colour or groove.
(BTW, I prefer the word "extension" when referring to added chord tones - which is traditional AFAIK. "Tension" is more useful, IMO, in another sense. Some extensions are "tense" - relatively dissonant - and some are consonant, hardly tense at all.)

However, as I say, in modern jazz it's hard to separate the two ways of thinking. All kinds of strange extensions and alterations can be used, often with ambiguous meaning - maybe both modal colour and function.

Eg, in functional harmony it's a big no-no to add an 11th to a dom7 chord, unless the 3rd is omitted - in which case it becomes a sus4, not an 11. (Even worse would be to add an 11 to a maj7 chord. Leaving the 3rd out will do no good because the 11 makes a tritone with the maj7, which is the tension present in the V7 chord - ie the opposite function to a tonic maj chord.)

So, if your chords have a clear job to do as cogs in the machine of a key-based chord progression (as in all jazz before the late 50s) - then you need to be careful which extensions you add, in case the flow is disrupted.
Dom7s are the ones which attract all kinds of extensons and alterations, because their business is tension (ie dissonance). Even so, the dissonance is functional - generally it's about providing additional opportunities for half-step moves on to the tonic chord (or to consonant extensions on the tonic chord). So things like b9, #9, b5 and #5 on a V7 chord ramp up the tension (adding colour), but only in order to find resolution on the I.

The function of the tonic, meanwhile, is stability - and 6, maj7 or 9 will all contribute to the richness of the chord without disturbing that function. (To classical ears, however, all three notes would actually distract from tonal stability, especially the maj7. Only a major triad is fully stable tonally - it's just that jazz musicians find triads boring.) The one note that will upset the apple cart is the 4th/11th. It's an "avoid note" - because it makes a disturbing interval with the 3rd.
"Avoid interval" would be a better phrase really, referring to the nasty minor 9th between 3 and 11. The b9 can have a place in a 7b9 chord - duh! - but elsewhere it's uncomfortable, with no clear functional meaning.
Then again, in modal jazz, a b9 is fine (eg on a phrygian susb9 chord), because functional meaning is irrelevant.

11ths are fine on minor chords because they don't clash with the 3rd.


For comparison with Fewell (who I haven't read), William Russo - in this book: Amazon.com: Composing for the Jazz Orchestra (9780226732091): William Russo: Books - gives a list of acceptable extensions, which all apply to functional harmony (his main interest was big band jazz). He calls tensions "additions and alterations" and lists the following for six basic chord types (which he's given his own labels to):

MAJ (I or IV in major key): major 6th, major 7th, major 9th

MIN (I in minor key): major 6th, major 7th, major 9th, perfect 11th

MS (Min7, ii or vi in major key, iv in minor key): major 9th, perfect 11th (minor 7th included as standard)

DS (dom7, V in major or minor key): major 9th, perfect 11th, major 13th. Plus alterations: raised or lowered 5th, raised or lowered 9th, raised 11th.
(He says "the raised 11th is usually preferred [to the P11]" on these chords.

DIM (dim7, vii in minor key usually): major 7th, major 9th, perfect 11th, minor 13th. (IOW, any note a half-step below a chord tone.)

LTS ("leading tone 7th", half-dim or m7b5 to you and me): major 9th, perfect 11th, minor 13th. "The 9th may be lowered", he adds (ie to make locrian mode).

Naturally (as he points out) one wouldn't pile all these extensions on at once, or even mix them at random. There are rules (sort of) but the ear is usually the best judge. Plus of course an awareness of what job the chord is doing in a sequence: what's its function, and what kind of voice-leading does it allow or imply?

[JakeAcci]

Cool post Jon thanks for the historical perspective. Really well stated.

[AlsoRan]

Thanks from me, too, Jon R.

This was going to be a long response post, but it was made up of personal thoughts that probably no one would want to hear anyway so let me just say that your post is consistent with all that I have studied and experienced in Jazz so far. And, it helped me go a step further in understanding the mechanics of what is going on with Jazz in different eras.

[pauln]

+1 JonR
Very thoughtful and incisive.

[Mario Abbagliati]

I'll add a few points that complement JonR's very good reply:

1. We need better definitions of Tonality and Modal Jazz. For instance, let's take the following from two recent books by Dmitri Tymoczko and Keith Waters.

Tonality

1. Conjunct melodic motion. Melodies tend to move by short distances from note to note.

2. Acoustic consonance. Consonant harmonies are preferred to dissonant harmonies, and tend to be used at points of musical stability.

3. Harmonic consistency. The harmonies in a passage of music, whatever they may be, tend to be structurally similar to one another.

4. Limited macroharmony. I use the term “macroharmony” to refer to the total collection of notes heard over moderate spans of musical time. Tonal music tends to use relatively small macroharmonies, often involving five to eight notes.

5. Centricity. Over moderate spans of musical time, one note is heard as being more prominent than the others, appearing more frequently and serving as a goal of musical motion.

Modality

1. Modal scales for improvisation (or as a source for accompaniment).

2. Slow harmonic rhythm (single chord for 4, 8, 16 or more bars).

3. Pedal point harmonies (focal bass pitch or shifting harmonies over a primary bass pitch).

4. Absence or limited use of functional harmonic progressions (such as V-I or ii-V-I) in accompaniment.

5. Harmonies charasteristic of jazz after 1959 (Suspended fourth-sus-chords, slash chords, harmonies named for modes: ie., phrygian, aeolian harmonies).

6. Prominent use of melodic and/or harmonic perfect fourths.

__________

2. The demarcation line between Tonality and Modal Jazz is sometimes not very clear, within a single composition there can be elements of both. Dolphin Dance is a good example of that.

3. There is a different underlying concept of time: linear/narrative in Tonality; circular/cyclical in Modality. Chord extensions and alterations affect that sense of time because they weaken harmonic function. Schoenberg's distinction between progression and succession on Structural Functions of Harmony moves along the same lines:

A succession is aimless; a progression aims for a definite goal...A progression has the function of establishing or contradicting a tonality. The combination of harmonies of which a progression consists depends on its purpose - whether it is establishment, modulation, transition, contrast, or reaffirmation. A succession of chords may be functionless, neither expressing an unmistakable tonality nor requiring a definite continuation.

4. Musicians develop their harmonic and melodic vocabulary within a tonal framework and they bring that knowledge/experience with them when dealing with Modal Jazz. For instance, McCoy Tyner's comping over Softly as in a Morning Sunrise (Coltrane, Live at the Village Vanguard) employs quartal harmonies mixed with II-Vs and secondary dominants. Those new practices also influence the way musicians deal with tonal repertoire, introducing new levels of ambiguity that weakens harmonic function.

[JonR]

Thanks, Mario - nice post.

I'd only demur slighty with the assertion that in tonality "consonant harmonies are preferred to dissonant harmonies". Both are enjoyed, because dissonance is required as the energy that gets a progression moving, and which heightens the stable effect of consonance. In a way, without dissonance, we wouldn't really appreciate consonance.

But it is true that only certain kinds of dissonance are acceptable, within well defined limits. They have to have a perceptible meaning, a direction in which they point (towards the tonic ultimately). It's rather like a fairy story narrative, where ugly things might happen in the middle, but we know it's going to end happily ever after. The formulaic nature of the conflict becomes exciting rather than scary.
In tonal music, any dissonance which lacks that familiarity becomes "discord" - clearly unpleasant, rather than just intriguingly tense.
Of course, the difference between "dissonance" (acceptable) and "discord" (unacceptable) has shifted over time.
The whole problem with tonality historically, in fact, was that dissonance needed to remain strong for music to stay exciting - but over time (like a drug) we get used to it and its impact diminishes. So new tensions kept having to be sought, until eventually the whole system ran out of road. That's basically what happened to classical music in the late 19th century: its palette was exhausted.

That isn't a problem for popular music, because it thrives on familiarity, and doesn't deal in the kind of depths or lengths classical music did. Exciting tensions in pop music - eg rock - tend to be achieved by timbre, dynamics and rhythm, not harmony.
Tonal harmony is played out, essentially, at least as a source of surprise or emotional power. To modern ears, its effects generally come across as either cheesily sentimental or - if one is in the right mood - reassuringly warm and nostalgic. (Which of course means those effects still have value!)

[AlsoRan]

Conversations such as these are what keep me hooked on this Jazz Forum. I don't hang out with any Jazz musicians, mostly because my life is pretty much full of other things and probably also because their lives are full too. I would feel a little foolish walking up to one of the Jazz guys at one of our local jams and saying, "Let's hang out."

Also, I am kind of doubtful that they can, or would even want to talk about the things a Jazz dabbler such as me would want to talk about.

So thank goodness I have you guys to "hang out" with, even if I don't have much to add.

Keep it comin'

[Mario Abbagliati]

JonR,

The problem with dissonance is that too much of it introduces levels of ambiguity that make music incomprehensible. Leonard Bernstein makes that point on his lecture series titled The Unanswered Question and suggests that that’s a reason why composers such as Schoenberg have lost their audience. Like a drug, dissonance can kill you.

We also need to take into account that tonality brings to the music a sense of moving forward (linear/narrative sense of time). In that case tonality cannot be exhausted if we want to keep developing “musical stories” that have that narrative quality.

[JonR]

JonR,

The problem with dissonance is that too much of it introduces levels of ambiguity that make music incomprehensible.

Oh, I agree totally.

Leonard Bernstein makes that point on his lecture series titled The Unanswered Question and suggests that that’s a reason why composers such as Schoenberg have lost their audience. Like a drug, dissonance can kill you.

We also need to take into account that tonality brings to the music a sense of moving forward (linear/narrative sense of time). In that case tonality cannot be exhausted if we want to keep developing “musical stories” that have that narrative quality.

Sure. My point - and I think the feeling that existed after Wagner - was that the narrative "engine" of tonality had run out of steam. The dissonance it needs to tell its stories was no longer tense enough, because the functional tensions were all too familiar. They were almost starting to sound consonant!
There was nowhere left to go to keep up the levels of drama that serious composers wanted to be able to draw on.
The only place left was atonality - which wasn't really a "place" at all, in the sense of a useful source of narrative dissonance. Atonal dissonance is meaningless. It's just dissonance. Either you like the noise, or you don't. (As we've seen, most people don't.) Schoenberg et al struggled to impose other formal elements, but they didn't seem to work - at least not for the general public.

Tonality was kept alive by popular music, because familiarity is not such a problem there. Dissonance doesn't need to be startling, just a gentle tension whose solution we know. But even in popular music, our acclimatization to most forms of functional dissonance can cause problems. If that's all we we rely on to give music movement and narrative form, we end up with cliche, with muzak, sentimentality and cheese - precisely because conventional functional harmony is so predictable. (Surely we've all been bored to death by ii-V-Is... )
Naturally, there would still be the more rarefied regions of late Romantic harmony, or advanced jazz harmony, that are not too familiar as yet to a popular audience. But generally, when popular music wants to energize or surprise, it turns - very successfully - to rhythm or timbre.

[fumblefingers]

JonR,

The problem with dissonance is that too much of it introduces levels of ambiguity that make music incomprehensible. Leonard Bernstein makes that point on his lecture series titled The Unanswered Question and suggests that that’s a reason why composers such as Schoenberg have lost their audience. Like a drug, dissonance can kill you.

We also need to take into account that tonality brings to the music a sense of moving forward (linear/narrative sense of time). In that case tonality cannot be exhausted if we want to keep developing “musical stories” that have that narrative quality.

Leo Brouwer came to the same conclusion after beating his head against the wall, compositionally speaking of course. he made a proclamation along the lines of "atonalism is dead" (or something like that). then he turned to composing much more interesting things. guitar music fans are much the richer for it, IMO.

[Mario Abbagliati]

JonR,

Sometimes I find we need to look somewhere else to find answers for musical questions. Why does the tonal system starts to be developed around 1600 in Europe and not anywhere else? Could a Buddhist, which has a conception of time that is cyclical, feel that the tonal system is part of his view of the world?

Can a parallel be drawn between abstract painting and atonality? The conventional story is that tonality ran its course and that atonality was the natural next step. Is there a similar process in painting, figurative painting moving towards abstract painting? I feel there's something wrong with that story, otherwise atonal works would have an audience.

We are making a distinction between tonality and atonality, but where does non-functional harmony and/or pandiatonicism fit into that picture, not to mention that within a single composition functional and non-functional harmony can coexist side by side. Copland's Quiet City could not have been written in the XIX century, neither Hindemith's Mathis Der Maler. I haven't analyzed either of them, but they don't sound neither atonal nor old fashioned. There are also different shades of tonality: on one hand what Rudolph Reti summarized in the formula I - x - V - I, x being where the real composition is taking place; on another harmonic formulas that portrayed a weaker sense of tonality where the leading tone is absent.

[JonR]

JonR,

Sometimes I find we need to look somewhere else to find answers for musical questions. Why does the tonal system starts to be developed around 1600 in Europe and not anywhere else? Could a Buddhist, which has a conception of time that is cyclical, feel that the tonal system is part of his view of the world?

Nice question.
My feeling - I'm no expert - is that it was a long, slow gradual process towards tonality. Someone didn't just wake up in 1600 and invent it . The modal system lasted an incredible 1000 years (tonality - at least in its western classical form - ran its course in 300 or less) - and over that time it evolved, and it seems to me that major and minor keys were something that was going to emerge from it sooner or later, at least as composers started developing harmony.
IOW, it's the notion of harmony, of simultaneous voices singing different notes (beginning with organum and then counterpoint) that contained the seeds of tonality. Once it was accepted that it was a good idea to have voices singing 2,3 or even 4 different notes at the same time, then the growth of such an idea was inevitable.
When Ionian was finally admitted to the ecclesiastical pantheon, it was clearly suited to the growing use of triadic harmony, in a way no other mode had been - not without alteration, that is, which modes had been subject to for centuries. The way I understand it, the old major modes of Lydian and Mixolydian were frequently altered at cadences in ways that made them resemble what we call the major scale. (The practice survives in the minor key, which alters aeolian to harmonic or melodic minor in order to strengthen cadences.) So it was as if an instinct to write in the major key, to push scales in that direction, existed before the major scale itself was invented. It was an idea waiting to happen, IOW.

IMO, the other thing special to European Christianity that I think is relevant is the spaces in which the music was performed. In the huge reverberant caverns of cathedrals, it had to be a refined craft to get dozens of monks all singing together in a way that didn't sound like mush.
Obviously, unison works well! Which is how it was for some time. But then it must have been discovered that a drone with a melody on top was very effective too. And hey - don't two voices singing in 4ths or 5ths blend nicely too! (I'm aware that Islam also had giant mosques which must have had similar acoustic properties - I don't know how or if that affected its musical practices.)
Harmony had to be tightly controlled, limited to "perfect" intervals, for the blending to work in such spaces - and for the words not to be lost. Hence the art/science of intervals and (eventually) of counterpoint.
By the time of Guido (1000 AD), modes were already starting to resemble major scales, in his formulation of hexachords (6-note scales) that could be transposed. Our "do-re-mi" dates from that time - not from 1600 (although the 7ths of the scales were the missing, variable note of the hexachord system).

Can a parallel be drawn between abstract painting and atonality? The conventional story is that tonality ran its course and that atonality was the natural next step. Is there a similar process in painting, figurative painting moving towards abstract painting? I feel there's something wrong with that story, otherwise atonal works would have an audience.

I think that's a perfect parallel.
Abstract painting does have more of an audience than atonal music, but it's still a small minority who appreciate it. (Most people still believe a painting has to be "of" something, ie representational.) And it's probably only a minority of those who appreciate who truly "get it" - I suspect most just see it as rather nice interior design, pretty shapes and colours. Atonal music is rarely "pretty" in the same way. (A better parallel in music might be ambient or New Age music: the same superficial appeal as background as abstract painting has come to have.)

It would be interesting to compare the other social and technological forces at work in the arts around 100 years ago (give or take 30-40 years).

For art, there was the camera. That freed painting from the need to always be representational. It actually forced painters to look for something else that painting could do, that a camera couldn't.

For music, there was sound recording. (I think few of us stop to think about how fundamentally sound recording affected music, how it shook it to the core. It's hard now to imagine a time when, if you wanted to hear some music, you had to go somewhere to watch someone playing some - or pay them to come to you and do it. Or play it yourself of course .)

Of course, sound recording isn't exactly analagous to the camera. Music was never "representational" in the way pictures were. In a sense, music was always "abstract", in that it represented nothing but itself: the things it expressed could not be expressed any other way. A painting and a photograph are both solid artefacts; equally subject to being held, bought and sold, reproduced, viewed at leisure. A piece of live music is ephemeral - it only exists while it is being performed. A recording turns it into an artefact which can then become a commodity. (Of course, before recording there was notation - another unimaginably explosive invention - but while notation can preserve information about the music, it can't properly represent it, in the way sound recording does; or in the way a photo of a painting represents the painting.)

The equivalent in music of representation in art is tonal narrative. Just as your average guy in the street wants to know what a picture represents (what does it depict?), so he wants a piece of music to tell a clear story, through melody and chord sequence.
What sound recording did was to expand the audience for popular music far more than it did for serious music. The crowds were drawn away from the concert hall by the pied piper of the gramophone, around the same time as composers seemed to be driving them away with "outrageous" new sounds.
You almost get a sense of snobbish petulance from the early 20C composers, like Schoenberg or Stravinsky. "The hell with the public" seemed to be the attitude. (The same attitude emerged in jazz with bebop in the 1940s: self-indulgent elitism, perhaps arising from a sense of artistic constriction experienced in big band popular music. And then again in pop music in the late 60s, as album-based prog rock split off from the single-oriented pop charts.)

We are making a distinction between tonality and atonality, but where does non-functional harmony and/or pandiatonicism fit into that picture, not to mention that within a single composition functional and non-functional harmony can coexist side by side. Copland's Quiet City could not have been written in the XIX century, neither Hindemith's Mathis Der Maler. I haven't analyzed either of them, but they don't sound neither atonal nor old fashioned. There are also different shades of tonality: on one hand what Rudolph Reti summarized in the formula I - x - V - I, x being where the real composition is taking place; on another harmonic formulas that portrayed a weaker sense of tonality where the leading tone is absent.

Well, I know even less about that music than you . But clearly, throughout the 20thC, serious music began to draw influence from all over. With the old major-minor key system worn out (according to them), composers looked back to the modal era, or sideways into the music of other cultures (or the undervalued folk music of their own culture), or forwards into other ways of organising musical sound - not only 12-tone serialism, but other divisions of the octave (doomed to even bigger failure than 12-TET atonality), electronics - and eventually, of course the "conceptual" music of John Cage, which perfectly parallelled the conceptual movement in visual art, with which it was contemporaneous. (IOW, the essence of the artwork being in the idea in the head of the artist, not in its creation, which is merely a matter of craftsmanship. Cage even tried to exclude the composer from the process, by using chance methods. Art never went quite that far.)

We are in a "post-modern" era, IOW. Anything goes. That's possible because of global media, and a broad awareness of other cultures, more knowledge about history, constant questioning of established systems, breathtaking acceleration of technology, etc etc. Music has to express that kaleidoscopic world we inhabit.

And I haven't even mentioned political and social forces over the last 100+ years, in particular the collapse of the old orders, the breakdown of the extended family (at least in the west), increased migration, psychology and the growth of individualism.... Whether composers consciously intend to or not, they can't help but express some of that in their music, because those forces have shaped their personalities and worldviews.
However, it's interesting that music is probably the only artform that often represents a reactionary rebellion against those kind of forces: harking back nostalgically to supposedly simpler (more harmonious) times. You don't really hear people saying "they don't paint like that any more" in the same way they say "they don't write songs like that any more". Most people don't actually expect art to perform the same supportive role they want from music.

[fumblefingers]

I am finally digging into and understanding Garrison Fewell's book "Guitar: Jazz Improvisation, a Melodic Approach."

My question is this. He states that the common diatonic tensions for the Major Chord is the 9th, for the Minor Chord is the 9th and 11th, and for Dom Chord is the 9th, 11th, and 13th.

What does he mean by "common?" Does he mean common as found in more traditional Jazz, as opposed to modern Jazz, which uses 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths much more liberallly?

Thanks.

Berklee currently teaches that 9, #11, and 13 are "available" tensions on the Maj7 chord. I'm not sure why Fewell only includes the 9th.

[AlsoRan]

Berklee currently teaches that 9, #11, and 13 are "available" tensions on the Maj7 chord. I'm not sure why Fewell only includes the 9th.

Thanks for your input, but let me first clairfy that the book was teaching natural tensions that come from stacking thirds ( 9th, 11th, and 13th) so that #11 would not qualify and would be classified as an altered tension and not a natural tension.

But as far as the natural tensions of 11ths and 13ths go and why he did not include them in his list of tensions to be added to major triads, I can only conclude (primarily from the great responses to this thread) that Garrison was teaching what he sees as the most "commonly" used tensions in his idea of Jazz. That does not keep one from going ahead and using 11th and 13th natural tensions or even #9ths and #11ths (altered tensions).

I might add that we Jazzers are a diverse group with many ideas of what constitutes Jazz music, and while it can add a little confusion, it does help keep our numbers strong. Could it be called a case of strength in numbers...?

[JonR]

Thanks for your input, but let me first clairfy that the book was teaching natural tensions that come from stacking thirds ( 9th, 11th, and 13th) so that #11 would not qualify and would be classified as an altered tension and not a natural tension.

Well, "natural" tensions needs defining. Just because a perfect 11 belongs to the major scale of the root doesn't make it a "natural tension". It's one of the most dissonant notes you can add to a maj7. (As I explained in my earlier post.)
The #11, on the other hand, has a better acoustic ("natural") relationship, at least with the other chord tones. It harmonizes better and doesn't disrupt the chord function.

But as far as the natural tensions of 11ths and 13ths go and why he did not include them in his list of tensions to be added to major triads, I can only conclude (primarily from the great responses to this thread) that Garrison was teaching what he sees as the most "commonly" used tensions in his idea of Jazz. That does not keep one from going ahead and using 11th and 13th natural tensions or even #9ths and #11ths (altered tensions).

See above for what should keep you from adding a P11 and why you might go for a #11.

As for the 13th, it does seem an odd omission. It would indeed be unusual to add a 13 to a maj7 chord, but only because the whole thing would be a little too rich. It sounds consonant, but also perhaps a little mushy - too much going on.
The 13 (as the 6th) is normally used as an alternative to the maj7 (with or without the 9), eg on occasions where the melody note is the chord root, which risks clashing with a maj7 in the harmony. (It would be called 6 and not 13, of course, because the 7 would be missing. Not because of any voicing position in the chord)

I might add that we Jazzers are a diverse group with many ideas of what constitutes Jazz music, and while it can add a little confusion, it does help keep our numbers strong. Could it be called a case of strength in numbers...?

Maybe it's a little like what someone said about the British and the Americans: two people divided by a common language.
IOW, there are common jazz conventions, but jazz musicians often disagree about what they are.

[AlsoRan]

Ha! Ha! I was both educated and entertained by your post. Thanks. Good food for thought.