The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
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  1. #26

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    Quote Originally Posted by nevershouldhavesoldit
    these out of bounds notes are usually accidentals that work because they lend an exotic flavor to the more consonant harmonies into which they resolve. The big question is how long you can hold a dissonant tone before its resolution fails to validate it as a pleasing enhancement. This is a matter of taste and judgment, not music theory.
    Thank you for saying or verifying what is my number one beef with "jazz" theorists.

    In the first place, there is no "jazz theory." It's called "music theory."

    In the second place, name one....no, go ahead, I'll wait...one, even just one person.

    No.

    Nobody has *ever* used that verkakte "alt 7" "scale." Never.

    Name one solo, or one player.

    Doesn't exist.

    Prove me wrong.

    Maybe as a synthetic scale somebody like Sco did as a joke, but nobody, including Wayne or Herbie, they never used that.

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    The Jazz Guitar Chord Dictionary
     
  3. #27

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    No, I'm going to call that one solved.

    You don't "create" tensions in a line without having any tensions in a dom7 chord.

    The "alt" scale is just a fiction.

    Nobody ever actually played it: approach tones, chromatic tones, yes. Absolutely.

    The W-H octatonic scale?

    Absolutely. It's been around forever. It sounds good, and it is good.

    The "alt 7"? Nope. Certainly nobody in bebop or postbop ever used it.

    It's a lazy person's way to avoid calling it a +5 or #9 or b9 dom7.

    Anyway, all dominant 7 chords are always having all the tensions, so it's a bit redundant. b9#9+.

    It's more how they're voiced.

    Yeah, I'm not kidding.

    Give me "Lonely Avenue" in C or Bb.

  4. #28
    Well that's for another thread, but to this intermediate/beginner a lot of altered scale lines seem intimately related to the b5 substitution and at least to me easily understood in that context.

    But what do I know.

    Anyway, thanks for all your input. I'll take in what I can and return to the rest later

  5. #29

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    Quote Originally Posted by Average Joe
    a lot of altered scale lines seem intimately related to the b5 substitution
    …aka 11th, Lydian, diminished, etc. It doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is that you know how it will sound in context before you play it.

  6. #30

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    Glove box plays light jazz... sounds like Take Five in F.

  7. #31

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    I don't think we're missing the point....passing tones are one possibility of using what you called out of bounds notes and resolution is again a possibility of use... but not the only one.

    If you get into arranging etc... alt. is just a term for defining a source for using dom. Chords derived from MM. It's a common usage for musical organization within Jazz Harmony. It's not anything new... When I was kid... we just added #9 to Harmonic Minor... But the real difference was just what 5th (or 11th) was used or implied.

    There are different approaches for using that music organization... Jazz harmony can be different from Maj/min functional Harmony.

    Everything isn't just about soloing...with single notes. It can also be about what's being harmonically implied. Musical guidelines which can have implied results... don't need to be followed, but they do exist and have jazz common practice usage.

  8. #32

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    Quote Originally Posted by Reg
    I don't think we're missing the point....passing tones are one possibility of using what you called out of bounds notes and resolution is again a possibility of use... but not the only one.

    If you get into arranging etc... alt. is just a term for defining a source for using dom. Chords derived from MM. It's a common usage for musical organization within Jazz Harmony. It's not anything new... When I was kid... we just added #9 to Harmonic Minor... But the real difference was just what 5th (or 11th) was used or implied.

    There are different approaches for using that music organization... Jazz harmony can be different from Maj/min functional Harmony.

    Everything isn't just about soloing...with single notes. It can also be about what's being harmonically implied. Musical guidelines which can have implied results... don't need to be followed, but they do exist and have jazz common practice usage.
    Yeah, if you check the melody of Blue Bossa for instance you see that #9 that comes form a descending C natural minor over the G7… really simple despite people’s tendency to want to complicate things.

    my working model is players went for the minor key options as default, after Bach etc etc, but it was all abir relaxed; melodies did not need to fit exactly over the chords all the time, so you have these notes. In music theory terms this is a cross relation, and cross relations aren’t allowed in common practice harmony.

    But we are not of course classical musicians… A b3, really. b3 on a dominant chord? Should that surprise us?

    (Is it not kind of … errr … Blue? As in a Blue… errr…. Bossa?)

    presimably not, but recent jazz theory has been a bit obsessed with rationalising cross relations vertically, to the extent of absurdity imo. So we call it ‘#9’ and invoke the altered scale by implication.

    (Incidentally David Leibman suggests the blues as an original source for altered dominant harmony and I think there’s a lot of truth to this, certainly in the specific case of 7#9; you only need to look at Ellington or for that matter Jimi, although there are also obviously plenty of altered dominants in the European tradition. A lot of bop harmonically speaking is Bach + Blues)

    Anyway, to my mind it’s the b5 that gives the Altered sound as Reg says, it’s the 5th/11th that separates it from diatonic choices. To hear that b5 on the V7 chord, go to tunes like Hot House and Segment (pretty old tunes right?); we may today call those altered scales, although I think the understanding that was more common back then would have been flat five sub.

    Altered scale is like a tidied up tritone sub… does it exist in the 40s/50s music? Well I think that’s a difficult question to answer so long after the fact. But I would say from
    interviews and so on musicians back then probably thought more in subs than in modes.

    In terms of it being the melodic minor rather than altered; well there’s plenty of things like melodic minor in that music…. And given melodic minor is used in ascending form descending in 18th century music, the term ‘jazz minor’ is a misnomer. We should call it Bach minor lol. In terms of using it source chords that’s a jazz conception, and I would say it likely grew out of substitution rules.

    Anyway, Peter Ind says Tristano was teaching melodic minor as far back as the late 40s, so probably depends who you talk to.
    Last edited by Christian Miller; 08-03-2021 at 04:13 AM.

  9. #33

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    Yea... that Bb of Blue Bossa being the b3 of The Diatonic III- chord, Gmin. It's functional and pretty straight ahead. But if you were voicing a sax section... How you treat that melody note... and how you organize that note and the following melody notes to get back to the C- tonic... there are choices. The obvious choices can become a little boring etc...

    Making things work... isn't always the goal for everyone. Sometimes it's fun and entertaining to make different musically organized choices. The term altered can imply anything I guess. But from a composition or arranging point of view... it's implied a musically organized reference for 50+ years in the states working in studios and gigs.

    I like the Bach Blues thing, It does seem easier to play in a bop style using maj/min functional approach with Blue notes. ( Har. Min.). It is fun to see how we get from playing a pent a 1/2 step down from a Maj7 chord to musical organizational source of Alt.

  10. #34

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    If someone writes A7alt on a chart I’m assuming A altered scale unless I have a good reason not to? I mean, the altered scale is the most altered scale you can get, after all ;-)

    But there are also some cool and idiomatic sounds that are a bit neglected in the current pedagogy because they don’t quite fit with the current theoretical paradigm, which seems to be this idea that we understand pitches in relation to the root notes of chord symbols…

    i think we are similar in that we both prefer to think of subs.

  11. #35

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    Now that it has been mentioned I must conclude
    I also think in terms of subs; although, I actually
    do not think of them as subs, but somehow I do.
    Certainly never think of scales or modes of such.

  12. #36

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    If I see A7alt going to Dminor(something), I'm likely to think A7#5#9, if I'm thinking at all. If I'm comping I'm likely to play something like xx5668. Sounds better to me than putting an Eb in the chord, although, technically, it's there.

    A, C# and G make the sound of A7 - as a foundation. F and C give me the extensions that I tend to like. A C C# F G -- and if I want more notes, I hear a b9, typically, if I hear a #9. So that's 5 or 6 notes for which I don't have a scale name. I can call it an A7#5b9#9 arpeggio. But, who says you have to name it?

    Of course, it's within the alt scale, but if I think that way, I'm less likely to focus on the sound of the chord and the specific extensions I like.

  13. #37

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    I agree with the posts that there isn't really a theoretical explanation for it but I thought of one lol. Don't know why I didn't post, I thought of this back in college.

    Stack an altered major chord all the way up. 1-3-5-7-9-#11-13-#15.

    It's the #15 or the 4th extension lol. A maj 7 chord stacked a whole step away from the root of the first major 7 chord. Sounds plenty major, just altered.