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One thing I notice missing from a lot of students is the ability to convincingly outline harmony in their lines.
The second thing they often lack is an understanding of how to resolve chords or scales from one to the next.
They may know that a half whole scale works on a dominant chord, but have no idea how to connect it to a target chord so that it sounds functional and logical.
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03-05-2018 06:13 AM
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I've seen this formulation in a few of your posts. Why the "sub the sub" idea? Isn't easier to just think of it as altering the E7? I can see the utility in thinking of the E7 alt and Bb7#11 as being subs for one another ("Same chord, different root," as my ensemble leader would say), but thinking E-to-Bb-to-E seems like the long way around.
Originally Posted by Reg
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Me too. Interested to hear as well. Originally Posted by Boston Joe
I don't think he's necessarily saying you HAVE to think about it in that order though (while playing) . Seems more a theoretical justification process.... It always starts with the basic IMPLICIT "reference" and then extends to possibilities. Very akin to the oft heard "m7b5... which gives you access to mel minor" type thing. Once you establish something functional which is relatable to MM, then the ear accepts other MM applications etc...
Anyway, Lydian dominant is more firmly rooted in traditional functional harmony and has a basic chord spelling with extensions which make sense functionally etc. Whereas altered isn't really spelled functionally and is based on 7th degree mm, which is technically a half diminished chord... Reg hears the 2 scales as distinctly different as well, whereas others view it as "same notes either way". I learned a lot from learning to hear the distinction.
Also most jazzers learn to play basic melodic minor arpeggios for altered ....from the seventh , third , fourth, and sixth scale degrees especially ...rather than learning to alter the diatonic V7 chord "extensions" one note at a time, the way many here talk about it. That's really the MUCH MUCH longer way 'round IMO.
It seems to be more about learning to maybe re-spell and relate those arps back to V7 etc. Anyway, doesn't really matter . Once you start playing 7#5b9, you can't help but hear/see MinMaj7, and you have to fill in the other notes anyway to play melodically over it. In the end, they'll all end up relating conceptually anyway.
Long- term you'd just hear all that and know it without "steps" in thought processes etc. A lot of this stuff is more problematic on paper really. Invites typical "just use your ears" comments, but there are plenty who "just use ears" and can also TELL you what they are doing afterward as well. They aren't mutually exclusive.Last edited by matt.guitarteacher; 03-05-2018 at 01:19 PM.
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I'm not sure if I *hear* them differently, but I definitely think about them differently, which is, I think, a side-effect of dabbling in bass. I hear a different movement. Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
One interesting (IMO) note: I have used the m7b5 as a substitute for a 7 since long before I knew anything about the melodic minor scale. I reasoned that you could lower the 3 and 5, thinking of them either as blue notes (at first), or as #9 and #11 (when I learned more). When I started studying the MM scale, I discovered that the "natural" 7 chord was a m7b5, and that 7alt was "faux harmony" (as an old teacher used to call it.)
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Hmmm. I think the exact resemblance between the altered scale and the superlocrian is actually a matter of coincidence.
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I get the feeling that, somehow, using your ears is getting disparaged. Surprising.
My favorite example is the harm min, natural minor, dorian minor and melodic minor issue.
Four names, four sets of scales, five places on the neck, each of which has to be practiced starting from each degree and in sequence, in thirds, in fourths, in broken sequences, etc. I know this is an exaggeration. At least I hope so.
Then, we have the theoretical statements about which minor scale should be used in what kind of harmonic flow, as if a soloist is going to be thinking about such things on the bandstand. Well, maybe.
To me, they're all minor scales and they have every combination of 6 and 7. Four permutations.
So, in the practice room, you can try each one against the harmony of various songs, internalize the sounds and use them as appropriate.
On the bandstand, as I understand it, the goal is not to be thinking about scale math and rely on your internalized knowledge of sound and the mechanics of finding the notes on the guitar.
So, now (and forgive my frustration for emerging) we have a discussion which I had to reread to understand, which turns out to focus on the fact that melodic minor produces both lydian dominant and alt scales. Which is Melodic Minor 101. Mark Levine's Jazz Theory has a nice exposition.
And, of course, it turns out that common practice is to use lydian dominant in certain situations and alt in others. You can certainly study the theory and figure out which to use that way. OTOH, you can find a bunch of tunes with dominant chords and try it both ways, get the sounds in your ears, and pick the one you want by sound, which, in the view of most players, or so I understand, is exactly what you're trying to accomplish.
One post (which, granted, I may not understand fully) seemed to suggest that playing by ear would work for a set, but not for a whole night. I'm not sure why. My experience is that my solos are much better when I play material I have internalized -- and I'm not thinking about theory. In fact, the moment I start thinking about math rather than melody is usually when the solo fails.
I can see an argument for learning new sounds in the practice room, but not trying to manufacture them from theory on the bandstand. On the bandstand, I want to rely on my ear and my repertoire of sounds. And, even then, when I see a post which presents something that could be a book title rather than a specific instruction ... I am reminded that sounds are learned one specific sound at a time -- not by theoretical category.
Rant mode off, with apologies.
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I hope it hasn't come across that I'm disparaging ears. Honestly, "thinking vs ears" isn't really a debate in my mind. I'd actually like to be able to do BOTH. I don't see them as mutually exclusive and don't understand the desire to make them enemies. your fingers teach your ears and vice versa . At least that's been my amateur experience. Of COURSE it's learned in the practice room.
I mean, there are flat-Earth types on non-jazz forums who scream "overthinking... theory" at the mere mention of a Roman numeral or for even knowing what key you're in. It's not a big deal for me to know that I'm playing over a II7 chord. It doesn't hurt or get in the way of my ears. I don't believe it's overthinking, and I'd certainly like to believe that one day I will feel just as comfortable thinking about MORE advanced concepts, which maybe aren't as natural at the moment. I mean what else is there to look forward to ?
I don't understand the need for dichotomy or some adversarial relationship between the two things. I think you need ALL of it, and as much of each as you can get.Last edited by matt.guitarteacher; 03-05-2018 at 08:34 PM.
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But isn't that basically saying that you can "JUST use the chromatic scale "? :-) Originally Posted by christianm77
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A guitarist named Andre Bush wrote a book which, reportedly, makes a case for any note against any chord. You could hear it in his playing too. He played jazz, but also loved metal, and played with the energy of a metal player. Interestingly, he could also play excellent 50's style jazz guitar when he wanted. He insisted that this ability was foundational to his style. Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
I never read the book. I wonder what you can put in a book about the chromatic scale.
Andre, sadly, passed on quite young.
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No Matt, that's not what I meant.
I'll try to re word this paragraph slightly to be slightly clearer:
"The simple harmonic minor scale has enough harmonic content in it to describe a minor ii V I for instance. The improviser needs to attune their ears to the way the different notes in the scale either sound resolved or demand resolution.
This can then be used to create a sense of harmonic movement in combination with the correct phrasing, and in combination with non-harmonic chromatic leading tones and passing tones."
Sounds more complicated than it is lol. I should just write out some examples.
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That smiley face was the main part of my comment.
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Well, many a true word said in jest.
Truth is - you can 'just' use every note chromatically... 'Theory' in the jazz sense is really about finding ways to hear those notes.
Do these chromatic notes behave in the functional way - for example G# moving to A in the Am triad, or is that G# harmonic note in an Am(maj7) chord? And do you then imagine the sound of a whole melodic minor scale?
In general in classical music, these notes are functional, waiting to resolve to a triad of some kind - just sometimes delaaaayed... In jazz, well it's ambiguous. Even if the note is left unresolved.
However, can we hear every note as harmonic? I don't personally, at least not in the sense of hearing a whole chord or scale construction for every note over a chord, but maybe some people do.
In practice, there are also a lot fewer notes in a good jazz line then you'd think given the amount of verbiage we can generate here :-)
I remember when I first heard Miles's solo on So What when I was a kid, I could not hear that phrase on the upper structure he plays as being related the chord. Now I hear the characteristic notes of dorian mode, of course...
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Hell... just do what you do and make it work. I've changed my advice... Good luck.
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Many years ago I learned that Chuck Wayne's approach to chord melody was to play a full chord on every note of the melody of the tune. Then, when soloing, he tried to play on every one of those chords. He could also solo in 4 note voicings. Originally Posted by christianm77
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Just cos you can harmonise a note don't make it harmonic in that way.
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It's hard to explain....
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Ok, so I don’t know how Wayne did this not being a student, but you can see harmonic practices as extensions of melodic practices into many voices.
You have the note B on an Am chord. In this context there are two main ways I would think of that B.
1) The B is a ninth, an upper extension* of an Am chord/scale. I could then play a four note voicing based on that logic. Say:
xx5557
2) the B is a 2nd, an unresolved note wanting to resolve to A or C (triad chord tones.) This is the old fashioned way. A very simple way to harmonise it is to use a dim7 chord, G#o7 say.
xx6767
This is not a chord that extends or colours the original tonality Am, it is a functional moving chord, in this case one with a V7 functionality.
In this case if the chord chart says Am, we would be superimposing moving harmony on the I chord rather than hearing the B in relation to the Am.
Now, on a record, Parker ends a phrase on B. What’s he thinking? 9th of Am or an unresolved E7?
We can't know, obviously.
What do we hear?
So that’s what I mean I guess - do we hear non triad chord tones as sounds related to the underlying chord or superimposed movement that resolves into the target chord?
*Barry Harris would call this a borrowed note BTW, I'm not sure the concept of extensions really exists in his teaching.Last edited by christianm77; 03-06-2018 at 07:54 PM.
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Funny you should mention a B over an Am. That happens in the only chord melody I can remember from the lessons about Chuck's system.
Fly Me To The Mood (In Other Words), first note C, second note is B. Harmonized as iirc xx7558 to xx6557.
This was a common device (and still is). Second chord, Stairway To Heaven.
I don't know what Chuck wanted the bassist to do. I might request an A pedal for the bar.
His thinking about soloing? Would he have thought "Natural minor to harmonic (or melodic) minor"?
My guess is he just figured he'd play a line with a G# in the second beat. To my ear he be more likely to avoid the G than the A in the line, during that beat. Then, depending on the line, he might have to pick between F and F#. I'd probably go with F#. Which means I'd be using melodic minor, but I'd never think about the scale first, at least not for a situation this simple.
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Harmonic minor and melodic minor.
My understanding is that harmonic minor is the functional basis for minor harmony and that melodic minor is basically subtitutions based on it. Melodic minor isn't functional in itself, and scale degrees aren't used the way they would be for their minor or major counterparts in those functional scales.
Beboppers used a lot of harmonic minor and not much melodic minor from what I understand? Modern players and teachers use more melodic minor. It's generally considered the most important scale after major scale. Near consensus.
I know there's been some discussion about melodic minor being maybe an academic thing, a Berklee thing etc., and I could except that as a theory, except for one thing: Reg has consistently over eight years laid out his experience with the evolution of common practice among gigging players, predating the time period in questionup to the present - from the era of common use of harmonic minor, to the addition of an extra note to deal with the augmented second, and eventually to melodic minor as common practice. He has also consistently claimed this to be a BANDSTAND evolution, not an academic or a Berklee thing. Honestly, I can't do anything but take him at his word on this.
I have no personal beef on any of this , seriously. I dig Barry Harris's approach, as well as Bert Ligon and even Jimmy Amadie for a period of time. Those guys aren't as much about the HARMONIC approach to improv or MM, and I don't really have any issue with that. I've also looked at the harmonic approaches of Joe Elliot and then Reg, both of which are based more around melodic minor. There are a lot of other modern teachers who do the melodic minor thing as well. I just haven't seen as many doing things with harmonic minor, but I don't know everything.
I just believe that what Barry Harris is doing is unique , and isn't simply harmonic minor. He has an actual method which gets around most of the difficulty of harmonic minor in a very specific way. Honestly, I would put both what he's doing and other methods based on chromatic approaches in a different category from a basic discussion about harmonic minor.
Anyway, I've gotten a lot out of all of the approaches, honestly . You have to know your arpeggios and chord tones etc. the chromatic targeting stuff , basic neighbors etc. are pretty fundamental for learning to hear tension and release. If you can't target things diatonically, you're probably not going to be able to do it with melodic minor. Deficiency in basic melodic approaches isn't going to be cured with mm, but I would think that should be assumed in the first place.
Personally, beyond the actual melodic material from melodic minor applications, I have found the actual harmonic/comping implications to be equally as compelling. Anyway, I'm not really a player , and this isn't intended for you guys who already know this stuff . No one specific. It's just the kind of thing I would've liked to have heard a few years ago in terms of disambiguation.
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I don’t think it’s an either or. You should know the options. Because they all get used.
A student of bebop language is going to come to these realisations very quickly.
One thing which I would like to repeat is the fact that the V7 altered for instance is not very far away from the diatonic minor scale options. The note to focus on is, in A, Bb.
Also, with the melodic minor mode thing, there is an intimate relationship with the tritone sub.
Take the line from Night in Tunisia - tritone sub or altered? Kind of both!
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But I’ll add to that - as a teacher, why not start with the simple options.
No book taught me that Parker likes ii harmonic minor on a VI7 chord. Parker taught me that.
Other players report the same thing. College was all melodic minor, but when they sat down with that music, they realised there was another way of doing it.
So why don’t we start with that and move on to mm later?
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I never studied Parker all that closely. But, in looking over the Omnibook just now, I saw instances of both, among all kinds of other things, against various VI7's. Originally Posted by christianm77
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So that’s a really good example of a situation that is a little ambiguous. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
We can look at xx6557 and say - we’ll obviously that’s a rootless voicing of an Aminmaj9 chord (ah, mr Bond!)
We can hear the B as blending into the chord particularly because it’s a perfect fifth above the E in the voicing.
OTOH we could also look at G# and understand this to be in some way related to an E7b13.
As a soloist, if I play an E aug triad on Am I can hear this either as a V7 chord or a Im(maj7)
If you go back to my post, the thing which makes the G#o7 go is the F in particular. Combined with the other less stable notes of A harmonic minor, the G#, B and D, the sense is of a chord that wants to resolve into Am rather than being an extension of the Am sound.
That’s because in CST terms the F is an avoid note. I would prefer to say that it is not a sound which acoustically blends with the other notes in the chord.
The melodic minor has no F, therefore it’s sense of resolution is much more ambiguous than the harmonic minor. That didn’t stop Bach using it on V7 chords, but the modern jazz understanding of what constitutes a resolved note is obviously expanded. Any of the notes of A melodic minor can be heard to blend to some degree with the Am triad.
However it’s up to the musician to hear the degree of blend and the colour it creates.
Most of us I think would hear a G# on an Am triad as suggesting melodic minor harmony with or without the F#.
As a result the harmonic minor can be seen as a composite scale that combines the basic elements of the V7b9 (1 3 5 b7
b9) sound and I (1 b3 5) sound. This is how it is harmonic - it suggests movement. No matter how randomly you play its notes you will hear V7-I.
The use of the V7 altered, half whole etc, adds a few more non-resolved notes to that mix to provide more voice leading.
(Another side question is the extent to which we hear that the altered scale has an harmonic identity and to what extent it is purely a function of voice leading.... I tend to hear horizontally in changes playing. If I want an extended COM sound I usually do so when the chord sticks around for a couple of bars or more.)
We can see other scales such as the ionian and harmonic major or for that matter the BH 8-note scales in the same light. I call these dynamic scales.
In contrast scales like MM, Lydian, Dorian are static. They just sit there and colour the chord.
I do not regard any scales on dominant as static.
When I make scale choices on chords I bear this distinction in mind.
Anyway I might have pedantically explained something very obvious but I get a lot going over the fundamentals.Last edited by christianm77; 03-07-2018 at 06:49 AM.
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I don’t want to be too adamant about this. I haven’t transcribed all the Parker lol. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
In the solos and heads I have transcribed Parker (in fact all the boppers I have looked at) heavily favours the mode V minor against VI7b9 chord. Sometimes he expresses this as a straight scale, sometimes as triads (a nice example is the Eb triad D triad thing he plays in the second A of confirmation.)
I don’t have the Omnibook with me so it might be difficult to talk specifics, but might be that what you see as altered scale etc I might analyse in a different way.
So if you have time on your hands (!) what I’d be looking for is specifically Parker playing b5 on a VI7b9 chord - Ab on D7b9 in the key of F for instance. It’s quite possible he does this, but I find that note in particular quite hard to hear in that specific context.
Extra points if it’s an example I will kick myself for missing!
OTOH - on a V7 chord in a minor key - no problem. Segment, for instance. For some reason.
It’s probably just me lol
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I don't see harmonic minor as being necessarily easier. As far as simple options, I'd think chord tones /arpeggios and then chromatic approaches to them etc. are starting points. That's what Bert Ligon lays out anyway, sounds like you do as well? Originally Posted by christianm77
By the time you get to pure scale options. I don't know that harmonic minor is easier. The amount of "handling" that you have to do to evoke a 25 using only harmonic minor means you can basically play it already doesn't? With two melodic minor modes you get those voice movements more by default. Again, I don't really think scales are necessarily the starting point though either. More like arpeggios built from them.
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