Barry Harris, interesting, but...

[A. Kingstone]

Alan, am I correct in asserting that the following scales will also sound good on the G7alt:
Abm6o
Dm6o
Fm6o
and
Bm6o (this one sounds a bit out but I think it still works)

Alain: If you can make them work by all means but the Abm6o is the G7alt sound to me.

Dm6o is an unaltered G7 sound.

Fm6o may create a GSusb9 thing that you may want to explore. (I've not but I'm lazy)



Alain. Thanks so much for your comment on the Improvisation thread. It means a great deal to me that I've been lucky enough to meet and study with Barry and Howard and that you and others have benefited from my scribbling about what I've learned from them. Your comment regarding borrowing is very insightful.

77. You have a good grasp of Barry's methods. The separation of harmony and lines for instance.

[AlainJazz]

Thanks very much Alan. When I see G7alt, I just think "dominant". There are so many possibilities but thinking in terms of the possible min6o scales creates a structure for all the possibilities. Yours is the first book I've actually gotten something immediately useful out of. Thanks very much for sharing your insight.

[sjl]

What scale Does he use primarily for improvising over a tonic minor chord?
He doesn't do the ii-V thing, He would play the V7 there, but for a tonic minor chord,..., May be harmonic minor?

[christianm77]

What scale Does he use primarily for improvising over a tonic minor chord?
He doesn't do the ii-V thing, He would play the V7 there, but for a tonic minor chord,..., May be harmonic minor?

My understanding is that the melodic minor would be the scale of choice over a minor tonic chord, with or without added notes as required according to the scale rules.

Over a V7 chord in a minor key, it's common to play to play a minor ii V I in the following way.

Bm7b5 E7b9 Am6

G dominant, raising the G to a G# over the E7 chord, then going into A minor
By raising the G in a G7 dominant scale, you basically get what you would call E phrygian dominant (I think of it as the minor dominant scale), but I find it's much easier and more idiomatic if you start with the G7. I suppose you could also take the phrygian dominant and use the scale rules, which I find quite tricky at present.

The 'raise the 1' trick works fantastically for handling secondary dominants and temporary tonicisations in tunes.

You are also free to use the F minor scale over E7b9, which most people would call the Altered Scale (not Barry.)

Interestingly, I find Bm6 is very common in this context in Charlie Christian's playing, and it also pops up in the melody of Donna Lee (when transposed to C, of course.)

One year Barry showed us some lines constructed from arpeggios of the Am6 o scale, one of which he identified as Coleman Hawkins line. These things sound great and use them to death in my playing over static bits of minor harmony. There's a lot of this type of thing in the Swing repertoire, for example, tunes such as Topsy, I Found a New Baby and Comes Love so it's pretty handy. Also we have a few bop tunes like that as well, Segment, and so on (isn't Segment written on Comes Love?)