The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #1

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    From a paper I'm looking at - Jazz Analysis as Cultural lmperative (and otherurban myths) - Barry Kenny (1999) I think about covers it:

    Chord Scale Theory

    Whether jazz improvisation strongly adheres to a referent structure (i.e. song form) or constructs its own self-contained referent, there nevertheless exists in most forms of tonal jazz a direct relationship between improvised melody and some overarching structural form, the most common of these being harmonic cycle or chord "changes." The chord-scale methodology, first successfully outlined by Mehegan (1959),8 consists of relating certain categories of chords to certain categories of scales. Although the method has achieved widespread popularity within practical and scholarly jazz circles, it has also received much recent criticism. As Birkett (1995) explains, "While it certainly gives students notes to play, it does not seem to offer any reasons for playing anything in particular"; (Birkett, 1995, vi). Offering a knee-jerk approach to each successive chord within a series, the methodology’s randomness seemingly negates the "tension and resolution relationships" suggested by extended harmonic passages and is therefore viewed by many jazz theorists to be "anti-tonal; (Birkett, 1995, p. 25). More serious, however, is the uncritical manner in which it is so readily applied in jazz education, providing beginners with too many note choices before they are able to fully grasp the full implications of improvising within the tonal system.

    Interesting, and also provides a lot of references including one for the first codification of CST (!), which is great for getting into the history of this approach... The article itself goes on to cover many types of jazz analysis.

    Needless to say many of the critiques and defences offered here of CST have already been debated in the scholarship, but I'm interested to what extent, and how well evidenced contemporary jazz pedagogy is in general.

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    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #2

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    There's nothing wrong with CST. When I heard people knocking it constantly I wondered what they were on about. Then I read an article or two and realised that CST wasn't the culprit, it was the way those people were thinking that was wrong.

    They were using some sort of blueprint to choose notes with and generally doing it chord by chord, like a jigsaw. So Dm7-G7-CM7 must be, and can only be, the usual dorian-mixolydian-ionian. Except that, over each of those chords, CST actually prescribes a possible number of scales/modes and other means of improvisation. So it's no wonder they were lost.

    The educated musical mind can employ what notes it likes over chords to produce the effects it wants. The inexperienced mind needs to be told what to do and copies without insight. It's not the fault of CST. Outcomes depend on the mindset of the pupil, and that depends on knowledge and experience. If CST is to be taught, that should be borne in mind. So a lot depends on the instructor.

    CST gives you the ingredients but not the recipe. It's not trying, or supposed, to provide any recipes. How the ingredients are mixed and cooked together determines the dish, not the ingredients by themselves.

    Also, with experience, any good cook can happily add, subtract or alter the ingredients once they know what they're doing. Musical improvisation is not a thing set in stone. When CST becomes a fundamentalist ideology then one has misunderstood its purpose entirely.

  4. #3

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    I agree that people think that it's more than it is. Maybe they're intellectually lazy and don't want to bother with more. For example - just look at the number of enthusiast jazz musicians that can't be bothered to learn ANY theory, CST or otherwise, lol.

    CST is pretty superficial, but important. To a significant extent it's just some guard rails of matching tonality (scales) to chords and vice versa.

    But as the author said, it's not the jazz language. It's not a motif, phrase, sequence or section.

    I'll have to review Mehegan's works, but I don't recall anything that approached what say, Bert Ligon teaches when it comes to the jazz language. So yes, Jazz Ed. has evolved, and it has evolved to the point of teaching something in a way that could have been done day one, had it been decoded better.

  5. #4

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    Before I started studying Barry Harris, I liked Barry Greene's stuff. From what I remember he taught cst in a more practical way. Just a handful of modes, like dominant with a #4, and let them be default. Then you learn language in those handful of modes. in each lesson he just spews out jazz language and has it notated.

    Anyway, I liked the idea of selecting practical modes and sticking to those.

  6. #5

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    On the below point that I made earlier I would pose a question:

    If you wanted to arrange or improvise on some ALREADY COMPOSED HARMONICALLY SOPHISTICATED MUSIC, how would you start to break down that challenge? You could play some arpeggios to get started, yep. But after you ran out of chord tones only, what other notes would you choose to play, and how would you choose them? You would need a full pool of notes (we can't say "scale" it's taboo!)


    Would you always play:
    Major for Maj7 chords?
    Minor for Mi7 chords?
    Mixolydian for Dom7 chords?
    Locrian for Mi7b5 chords?
    Whole-Half for Dim chords?
    Half-Whole for Dom7alt chords?

    And would that always work? If so, why? If not, WHY NOT?


    "CST is pretty superficial, but important. To a significant extent it's just some guard rails of matching tonality (scales) to chords and vice versa. "



  7. #6

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    OK, I just reviewed Mehegan's works and their are harmonic/scale relationships and rhythmic breakdown explanations. But the approach to a significant extent involves applying the right scales, arpeggios and some chromatics, playing reasonable exercises and lines without understanding everything about their harmonic and melodic DNA (like voice leading for example), and then - Imitation, i.e. learning transcribed solos from the masters.

    So yes, there is more to jazz improvisation pedagogy. Even an update of the classic text "Improvising Jazz", by Jerry Coker includes a lot more material, and it's good stuff. (version only available on Kindle? Meh.).
    Last edited by Jazzstdnt; 03-04-2019 at 10:58 AM.

  8. #7

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    Thanks, Christian.

    Two things stood out for me on first reading:
    1) "While it certainly give students notes to play, it does not seem to offer any reasons for playing anything in particular."
    2) ...providing beginners with too many note choices before they are able to fully grasp the full implications of improvising within the tonal system.

    Carol Kaye makes the second argument well: too many choices paralyze a novice. You end up thinking about what can be played rather than listening to the music in your head and getting it out on the guitar. She also thinks that scales don't develop the ear as well as triads. If you learn the triads, your "home base notes" as she calls them, you are developing your ear and fingers at the same time. Then you learn to connect them. And you learn "extended triads" and how to make lines off of those. You learn PATTERNS, which one hears all the time in Wes, Clifford Brown, Joe Pass, Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker, Pat Martino et al.

    The first point was my experience with my first jazz teacher---it was overwhelming. In a way it was like a test in school where you realize you need to put the points the teacher stressed into your essay to show you paid attention. And that's okay in school where you need to demonstrate you learned your lesson. But it is different in music, where you are trying to MAKE music rather than show you did your homework. (There is a time for showing you did your homework, such as learning chord inversions or getting the melody right or learning this or that scale.)


    At this link there's a gif showing how the same data may fit several theories.
    Simple Gif Shows How People Can See the Same Thing Entirely Differently <<TwistedSifter

    I think this is important here so as to make something very clear (at least from my limited, hack perspective.)

    One need not argue whether CST is right or wrong. As Pat Martino said in "Linear Expressions", he thought it was correct in its way but that it wasn't as practically useful for him as a less cumbersome way he found to organize the fretboard and generate improvised lines (-in a nutshell, convert to minor, though that fine book does not capture all that Pat does.)
    This approach (CST) has worked for many players.
    It has also, um, not produced the same results for many other players who found a different way to get good jazz out of their instruments.

    In a way, it's like organizing the fretboard. It can be done in more than one way. But it's good to have some way...

  9. #8

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    I looked into the Mehegan book BTW, it's out of print AFAIK, but available here

    Armonia - Tonal and Rhytmic Principles- Jazz Improvisation i - John Mehegan (112 p)

    It represents CST in a state of infancy. There's no mention of melodic minor modes for instance, but the idea that the fundamental jazz chords are seventh chords is present already, and the basic concept of pairing a chord with a scale is indeed present, as are the mode names.

    His ideas on the minor key are interesting.

    I was hoping this book might help me place the concept of the jazz minor scale chronologically, but sadly not the case. The unbelievably nerdy quest which no one else is interested in continues ;-)


  10. #9

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    I'm not really up for arguing anything personally here... Just reporting on interesting stuff I find, which may or may not agree with what I already think, and may change my mind. This is simply the first paper I read on the subject.

    What I would say is that there's not a huge amount of scholarship available easily to me on jazz pedagogy. The papers referenced in that footnote included - a PhD thesis unavailable without a visit to the British Library and an out of print Jazz method. Papers referenced elsewhere in the paper were not easily obtainable.

    I'll need to research further to see if that reflects a general lack of scholarship, but I wonder to what extent jazz education has been the subject of academic study? There's obvious a body of general literature out there.

    Furthermore, there's going to be a huge wealth of material out there IRL - old teaching materials from Berklee and so on and so forth, as well as oral accounts.

    Jazz itself generates plenty of academic literature - I know a guy who's doing a PhD on Django for instance. Academic analysis of jazz music is pretty common.

  11. #10

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    I looked into the Mehegan book BTW, it's out of print AFAIK, but available here

    Armonia - Tonal and Rhytmic Principles- Jazz Improvisation i - John Mehegan (112 p)

    It represents CST in a state of infancy. There's no mention of melodic minor modes for instance, but the idea that the fundamental jazz chords are seventh chords is present already, and the basic concept of pairing a chord with a scale is indeed present, as are the mode names.

    His ideas on the minor key are interesting.

    I was hoping this book might help me place the concept of the jazz minor scale chronologically, but sadly not the case. The unbelievably nerdy quest which no one else is interested in continues ;-)

    Mel. Minor? Have you read Improvising Jazz, by Coker?

    A foundational book.

  12. #11

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jazzstdnt
    Mel. Minor? Have you read Improvising Jazz, by Coker?

    A foundational book.
    That's from the late 60s IIRC?

  13. #12

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    When jazz becomes a term paper, I lose all interest.

    Man I hate parenthetical citations.

  14. #13

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    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    Thanks, Christian.

    Two things stood out for me on first reading:
    1) "While it certainly give students notes to play, it does not seem to offer any reasons for playing anything in particular."
    2) ...providing beginners with too many note choices before they are able to fully grasp the full implications of improvising within the tonal system.

    Carol Kaye makes the second argument well: too many choices paralyze a novice. You end up thinking about what can be played rather than listening to the music in your head and getting it out on the guitar. She also thinks that scales don't develop the ear as well as triads. If you learn the triads, your "home base notes" as she calls them, you are developing your ear and fingers at the same time. Then you learn to connect them. And you learn "extended triads" and how to make lines off of those. You learn PATTERNS, which one hears all the time in Wes, Clifford Brown, Joe Pass, Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker, Pat Martino et al.

    The first point was my experience with my first jazz teacher---it was overwhelming. In a way it was like a test in school where you realize you need to put the points the teacher stressed into your essay to show you paid attention. And that's okay in school where you need to demonstrate you learned your lesson. But it is different in music, where you are trying to MAKE music rather than show you did your homework. (There is a time for showing you did your homework, such as learning chord inversions or getting the melody right or learning this or that scale.)


    At this link there's a gif showing how the same data may fit several theories.
    Simple Gif Shows How People Can See the Same Thing Entirely Differently <<TwistedSifter

    I think this is important here so as to make something very clear (at least from my limited, hack perspective.)

    One need not argue whether CST is right or wrong. As Pat Martino said in "Linear Expressions", he thought it was correct in its way but that it wasn't as practically useful for him as a less cumbersome way he found to organize the fretboard and generate improvised lines (-in a nutshell, convert to minor, though that fine book does not capture all that Pat does.)
    This approach (CST) has worked for many players.
    It has also, um, not produced the same results for many other players who found a different way to get good jazz out of their instruments.

    In a way, it's like organizing the fretboard. It can be done in more than one way. But it's good to have some way...
    This may be well intended but is off topic and also confused. The same thing happens every time we discuss CST.

    This is not about scales. It's about CST, a harmonic theory that benefits composers, arrangers, and improvisers.

    It does not tell you what to play beyond the overall ballpark. If that is a criticism, then it goes both ways, it neither suggests that you play less material, or more material.

    If one is going to ascribe CST to John Mehegan and claim that it's all scales, then I double dog dare them to play his first book. Their fingers will be bleeding from arpeggios out the wazoo.

    There are two points of confusion regarding CST in the public domain. What it isn't (the source material for its critics), and what it is (this is the part that most are ignorant about/too lazy to investigate, so they just assume).

  15. #14

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    Quote Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
    When jazz becomes a term paper, I lose all interest.
    I think if someone had made me study bebop I would have resisted it.

    Jazz should never be driven by an undergrad mentality. You should always be driving your own research ;-)

  16. #15

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    I looked into the Mehegan book BTW, it's out of print AFAIK, but available here

    Armonia - Tonal and Rhytmic Principles- Jazz Improvisation i - John Mehegan (112 p)
    Mehegan's books (-I believe there are 3 volumes in the series) had a big influence on Jack Wilkins. I think for a time he wished he had taken up piano instead of guitar. Glad he got past that!

  17. #16

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    Quote Originally Posted by Jazzstdnt
    This may be well intended but is off topic and also confused. The same thing happens every time we discuss CST.

    This is not about scales. It's about CST, a harmonic theory that benefits composers, arrangers, and improvisers.

    It does not tell you what to play beyond the overall ballpark. If that is a criticism, then it goes both ways, it neither suggests that you play less material, or more material.

    If one is going to ascribe CST to John Mehegan and claim that it's all scales, then I double dog dare them to play his first book. Their fingers will be bleeding from arpeggios out the wazoo.

    There are two points of confusion regarding CST in the public domain. What it isn't (the source material for its critics), and what it is (this is the part that most are ignorant about/too lazy to investigate, so they just assume).
    Sure.

    Yeah that Mehegan book is like super arpeggios lol...

    A big thing I have as an educator is students who come in knowing all the scale relationships and can't play chord tones through a chord sequence or outline chords at all.... Often they have had guitar teachers who taught them CST relationships and they just go up and down the scales.

    Presumably their teachers are getting it from somewhere thinking this is the way to teach jazz. We might know better here, but there's a lot of people teaching who do not.

    (So in what I would consider good teaching practice, you can introduce the idea of CST through rules of thumb for chord subs and then introduce the theory later. Of course if all you ever do is go up and down arpeggios you are going to get some pretty boring lines. Nothing wrong with scales....)

    I always feel the missing link in this is 'ways to build language.' For me, that's fundamentally to do with rhythm first and foremost and the notes are an expression of rhythm. There's definitely no papers coming up on the search for that.

    But the point remains - people are getting it from somewhere, this CST/scales trope. It's a real thing....

    On the positive side I usually don't need to worry about teaching students much theory.

  18. #17

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    I think if someone had made me study bebop I would have resisted it.

    Jazz should never be driven by an undergrad mentality. You should always be driving your own research ;-)

    Agreed...

    I'd also argue the educational material of the music is...the music...

    But I get that you can't hear or explain everything right away, so books can have their place...heck, 20 years into it, there's still a lot of stuff I can't hear...I try not to use slower downers and stuff too much...I just try to hear what I can, take away what I will...

    I think the "productive struggle" is a big part of getting better. When everything is written down and taught and regurgitated, where's the struggle for the student? Arriving at their own answers, even if they're not textbook "correct" might be better than getting it "right." At least that's my 2 cents...

  19. #18

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    Quote Originally Posted by christianm77
    I always feel the missing link in this is 'ways to build language.' For me, that's fundamentally to do with rhythm first and foremost and the notes are an expression of rhythm. There's definitely no papers coming up on the search for that.
    Bingo!
    One thing Willie Thomas does is stress rhythms. Take just a couple notes and make music with them. That requires attention to rhythm and phrasing. He puts rhythm earlier than most guitar instructors (that I am familiar with) do. It's notes that are gradually added, while rhythms are stressed from the start.

    This is a neat little video from Willie's (recently deceased) "Tunes to Know & Blow" series. "Perdido" is a simple tune--the riff couldn't get much easier---yet irresistible. (There's a lesson in that...)

    Willie knows all his scales and he knows jazz harmony. But he also knows how to get someone to START playing jazz without having already learned that. He starts with music, and gradually helps students to draw more out of it.

  20. #19

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    Quote Originally Posted by mr. beaumont
    Agreed...

    I'd also argue the educational material of the music is...the music...

    But I get that you can't hear or explain everything right away, so books can have their place...heck, 20 years into it, there's still a lot of stuff I can't hear...I try not to use slower downers and stuff too much...I just try to hear what I can, take away what I will...

    I think the "productive struggle" is a big part of getting better. When everything is written down and taught and regurgitated, where's the struggle for the student? Arriving at their own answers, even if they're not textbook "correct" might be better than getting it "right." At least that's my 2 cents...
    Well I quite agree as you know. So you are summarising the debate between top down and self directed learning. The latter is actually pretty trendy among music educators.

    Self directed learning is key for jazz.

    It's interesting the extent to which classical educators think jazz players are entirely self directed learners getting stuff from records and teaching themselves, playing gigs and learning from each other and apprenticeships so on, and some of them want to adopt more of that model for classical music education.

    Good idea I think... but I think they have a somewhat idealised folksy idea of how musicians learn jazz these days.

    Furthermore - I can't think of anything more top down than a Barry Harris workshop. And generations of jazz musicians have been through his workshops.... Including many of those we would consider the 'greats.' If Trane was happy to pop in and get some information, I don't think we need to feel too bad about seeking out things that we can't get from the records...

  21. #20

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    I think it comes down to, as in most things, balance is key. And that balance might differ student to student...

    I still refuse to ever bash CST. I've found it incredibly useful...in CERTAIN SITUATIONS.

  22. #21

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    Assume a trumpet player. He can't blow a harmony in one puff. But he can play a pattern of the notes making a harmony. If I was blowing the horn, I would swear by CST. I would collect patterns.

    I am very fond of instruments that can do sustaining harmony; like the guitar and the piano. I don't have to collect patterns. I prefer to collect chords, arpeggios and licks (sometimes it's a pattern).

    I don't mind a guitar player that plays patterns over the changes, but so far it's not for me. Practicing scales and/or patterns is ear training that eventually will guide the fingers when improvising, not robotics (even though muscle memory is part of the equation too). That's the way I see it, no criticism of CST even though I see where the critics come from.

  23. #22
    Wow. 21 posts in like an hour...

    Only CST. :-)

  24. #23

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    Quote Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
    Wow. 21 posts in like an hour...

    Only CST. :-)
    And ONLY on the JGF!

    I still enjoy these discussions, mostly because they remind me to look at my own processes.

  25. #24

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    Quote Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
    Bingo!
    One thing Willie Thomas does is stress rhythms. Take just a couple notes and make music with them. That requires attention to rhythm and phrasing. He puts rhythm earlier than most guitar instructors (that I am familiar with) do. It's notes that are gradually added, while rhythms are stressed from the start.

    This is a neat little video from Willie's (recently deceased) "Tunes to Know & Blow" series. "Perdido" is a simple tune--the riff couldn't get much easier---yet irresistible. (There's a lesson in that...)

    Willie knows all his scales and he knows jazz harmony. But he also knows how to get someone to START playing jazz without having already learned that. He starts with music, and gradually helps students to draw more out of it.
    Yeah that's solid basic stuff.

    I think what a lot of people don't quite get - if the endless bloody threads about whether or not people should practice bebop scales etc - is that there is a really strong relationship in bebop and other traditional jazz languages between where you put chromatic tones and chord tones in a line. The bop scales are appropriate because scale passages tend to be rhythmically neutral until they resolve - that is to say, they don't imply any accents in the line.

    Accents in the line tend to be harmonically significant, which unaccented notes are usually filler, like ghost notes on a hand drum.

    For instance, it's most common to put passing tones on a connecting upbeat, by which I mean a upbeat followed by a note on the beat. If you put a LNT there, it will always work.

    If you displace the whole line by an 8th note it will completely shift the feeling of the line, it will feel off centre.

    OTOH if the note is upbeat anticipation you can treat it as a downbeat, so it needs to be chord tone of some kind... But if you have a beat before, that will feel like a downbeat, and actually a passing tone won't feel right there.... There's some strong rules that are observed by and large...

    One really good way of understanding this is taking a line and mucking around with it rhythmically, take a line, start it an 8th earlier - where do you add a note, and how?

    This is incidentally the reason why so many players who have gone through CST but haven't addressed older jazz have trouble swinging. It's not that they have bad time or anything - it's that the lines they are playing have no inbuilt groove.

  26. #25

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    That's one reason why starting by varying the melody is such a good idea - you have the chord tones built in to the melody....