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Well, it’s frustrating the way it comes out so wordy, partly because sometimes we feel a need to justify this or that specific way of doing things. It’s actually really simple (if I understand it right) just a set of rules of thumb for simplifying progressions into a few familiar chords.
Originally Posted by Irishmuso
My experience is that intermediate players actually worry way more about harmony than advanced ones; advanced players can make use of harmonic concepts if they want but they don’t see a chord progression as a prison, instead an opportunity.
I always enjoy the story of Jamie Aebersold telling off a student for playing the right scales too much haha.
The long and the short of it is practical skills; recognise common chord progressions and practice them; learn block a tune down to a few key elements; learn to weave in and out of simple chords; convert less familiar chords into more familiar forms and so on. This can be communicated as music theory, but flavours will vary from person to person.
I think most it not all experienced players run a version of this software, so to speak.
In terms of the details and specifics; that’s something that has to be learned direct from the music. I’ve not found theory books to be any use here.
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12-27-2021 05:09 PM
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At the risk of ranting, I'll add this.
Take, for example, dorian, harmonic, natural and melodic minor.
Taken together, it amounts to this ...
Play C D Eb F G.
Then pick Ab vs A and Bb vs B.
That's four combinations and each one has a name, if you care to use it. There are even names for some of the combinations (resulting in 8 note scales), where you use both Ab and A. or Bb and B.
If you ask great players "what were you thinking when you played that great line?" they never give an answer referring to theory. The closest you come to that, in my experience, is a great player who will say that he discovered a sound in the practice room by pursuing a theoretical line of thought.
Another example is lydian sounds. Sharp the 4th, flat the 5th in the non-lydian sounds, and that's about it. It either sounds good to you or it doesn't. In the practice room you try it every which way. On the bandstand, you're better off not thinking about it.
It reminds me of the gray area between mathematics and numerology.
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Look everyone ther is a very simple sort of confusion we want to avoid:
songbook harmony is so simple one can operate with it as comfortably as one operates with the simple sentences involved in everyday life -
no one has to be able to talk about subjects and predicates - noun phrases - adjectives - adverbs etc in Oder to ask someone to open the door or to tell someone to get lost
but this does not mean an adequate description of what is going on when someone says ‘get lost’ and another understands, has to be as simple to operate with!!!!!
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Always like to look for my friends in most scales. Originally Posted by BigDaddyLoveHandles
That's the Eb6 dim scale ala Barry Harris.
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G Ab Bb B C D Eb F. Originally Posted by BigDaddyLoveHandles
Or, in other words, against G7, we're going to use both altered ninths and leave in the 3rd. Also, the natural 5 and the #5 (or maybe better called b13). This might reasonably be called a G7b9#9b13.
Or, continuing my earlier rant, start with G7 and pick the 5ths and 9ths you want to hear.
If that doesn't work, go back and omit, or adjust, the notes that didn't sound good.Last edited by rpjazzguitar; 12-27-2021 at 07:03 PM.
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it is amazing how much of an issue is made of the question whether playing involves the skilful application of technical harmonic concepts - whether playing requires/involves understanding and application of specialised harmonic knowledge.
good jazz improvisation (I haven't got any recordings I listen to of bad jazz improvisation - that is, I'm not setting some eccentrically high bar here) - no more involves the conscious application of a knowledge of harmony than good speech (and I've never - or very very rarely - heard bad speech in this sense - 'competent speaking' is the idea) involves the conscious application of a knowledge of grammar and syntax.
but there is nevertheless a sense in which competent playing/speaking shows or manifests mastery of harmonic/grammatical concepts. (e.g. the noises parrots make don't show this....)
the easiest and best picture here (Wittgenstein's) is that speaking a language does not consist in the application of learned rules - as if it were a sort of super-intense intellectual process we learn to complete very quickly and without noticing. No, speaking a language is a matter of joining in with an established social practice - and we don't spend a period of time studying rules (e.g. as young children) in order to be able to do this. We just try to join in - and get corrected by already competent speakers, when we go wrong. we start football by trying to join in with games of football not by being told what the rules are and trying to learn them....Learning to speak e.g. English is like that for people growing up in an English speaking cultural space; learning to improvise is also like this.
of course we sometimes try to learn a second language by learning a bunch of rules and then trying consciously to apply them in ordinary speech situations. But notice - as long as we are still doing this sort of thing with a language (remembering how to do a past tense in the third person singular, and whether 'chat' is masculine or feminine etc. etc.) this is a mark of our not yet being fluent in the language.
and there's a cliche about how immersion in a culture is the only way really to learn how to speak the relevant language
All this 'theory' stuff is stuff I've noticed going on in my playing more and more the better I get at it - I am finding that my playing is moving, so to speak, quite dramatically away from 'playing over' one or other of seven (or 12 if you include 'alt. doms' etc. etc.) sounds and towards something else that seems to be better in all sorts of ways (and closer to what I hear people doing on 'the records') - and is more like using two big-sounds and focusing on rhythmical issues rather than harmonic ones.... (because the harmonic issues are starting to seem so straightforward, and it is when you play stuff that seems to make all the difference).
now that is not to say that this process of trying to say what it is one is noticing going on in the way one is playing cannot have huge value in helping you to advance the playing. not as much value maybe as finding yourself doing different things because you're playing with different people. but still some valueLast edited by Groyniad; 12-27-2021 at 08:46 PM.
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exactly .... Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar;[URL="tel:1168320"
try playing Nature Boy while thinking about
all the implied minor scales
”they say he wandered very far” etc etc
exploding head time ....
no you just play the sounds on that tune
or at least I do ....
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Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
I think what was meant was that the B becomes the b5 or #11 of F.
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Joe Pass said he thought of two sounds: I and V, and that all the other chords can be considered as subs for one of those. I = iii = vi = vii and V = ii = IV. Seems like that could be applied to this discussion. (IVmaj7 is ambiguous in this arrangement, IMHO, since it shares three notes with vi but is also a sub for ii).Pat Martino converted to the minor when playing lines, e.g., subbing vi9 rather than Imaj7, ii7 rather than V7, etc. Then he had that whole thing with diminished and augmented "parental" forms for which the geometry is obvious but the practical utility less so (to me, anyway). His elliptical explanations are hard to follow. But somehow his conversion to the minor seems apropos here; maybe I am looking for something more significant than is really there. It may have just been something he intended as a jog to creativity.The simplest construction is that every key has 12 notes, just play the ones that sound good!
I said that just slightly tongue in cheek; it's basically something Jeff Beck said in an interview that I read many years ago.
Last edited by Cunamara; 12-28-2021 at 02:42 AM.
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I think that's what he meant too, but I can't figure out why he's switched from Cmajor to Fmajor, or how it might inform an improvisation. Originally Posted by Irishmuso
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Thats also how Peter Bernstein explained it Originally Posted by Cunamara
People have said this? I think his explanations make sense. Relate everything to minor, use diminished symmetry etc. could write it down on the back of an envelope. Practicing it is something else.Pat Martino converted to the minor when playing lines, e.g., subbing vi9 rather than Imaj7, ii7 rather than V7, etc. Then he had that whole thing with diminished and augmented "parental" forms for which the geometry is obvious but the practical utility less so (to me, anyway). His elliptical explanations are hard to follow. But somehow his conversion to the minor seems apropos here; maybe I am looking for something more significant than is really there.
The idea of ‘good sounding notes’ is one of the least helpful ideas for jazz improvisers. Notes do not sound good. Phrases sound good; whether a note works or not depends on a good many things apart from what pitch it is. Which is one reason to use the ears and listen to what the masters do.It may have just been something he intended as a jog to creativity.The simplest construction is that every key has 12 notes, just play the ones that sound good! I said that just slightly tongue in cheek; it's basically something Jeff Beck said in an interview that I read many years ago.
Music theory always has too much importance in these sorts of discussions on JGO etc as justifications for what sounds good. That’s a waste of time. Use your ears to decide.
A better use of theory is to take things that sound good somewhere and put them somewhere else. Make use of the good sounding stuff you know.Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-28-2021 at 05:50 AM.
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I find the entire issue to be difficult. I actually think there's some merit in the notion that you start with 12 notes and leave out the ones that don't sound good. I don't take it to mean to play notes at random. There have to be in good sounding phrases. If you can find them by ear, the way Andres Varady can, and that's what you want to do, you're there. If you need to supplant your skills with some more linguistic or categorical type thinking, that's either the edge of an abyss or the beginning of knowledge, or both.
I find the bulk of what I read about theory to be unhelpful. That's not a comment on posts on this forum. Nettles and Graf did not change the way I play.
But, I continue to read things about theory because I've gotten a handful of things that I use constantly.
These nuggets were buried in a much, much larger pile of non-nuggets, if you get my drift <g>.
Nuggets:
Warren's two sounds (apparently the same thing Joe Pass said).
The concept of tonal center.
Mark Levine's all melodic minor chords are the same chord.
Learning how to move a voicing through a scale.
The idea of soloing as if the chord was a different one than the pianist is actually playing -- and extending that to sequences of chords. (This one, I figured out by listening to records).
Thinking about all 12 notes, divided into chord tones, consonant extensions, tensions and likely clams.
Deciding to learn the notes, by name, in all the chords and scales I use.
The wheat therein justified the chaff.
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My experience suggests it’s a better use of time to focus on what to play, not on what not to play. At least until changes playing becomes completely intuitive.*
There are no clams really; just incompletely audiated musical ideas. Intention sells a lot. All twelve notes sound great over every chord if you know and hear what you are doing; which means knowing how they want to move and how to resolve phrases. Bla bla bla I indeed.
* I don’t think there’s a point where this is true for all changes at any point. Practice is always going to be necessary for unfamiliar things.Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-28-2021 at 09:28 AM.
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I dunno? I swear I hear some pentatonics, Blues scale, and arpeggio's in there somewhere?
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On Clams: Originally Posted by Christian Miller
Any note can sound good in a well enough constructed phrase.
But, to take an example, if the chord is G7, the chord tones, G B D F are less likely to sound like clams than an F#. That's why I mentioned "likely" clams. And, the fact that Wes made the F# sound good (an old thread on this forum covered it) doesn't mean that someone else is as likely to accomplish that. And, even Wes' line with the F# included a lot of consonant notes iirc.
Andre Bush was a player who made a point about using all 12 notes, all the time, apparently. So, one scale, the chromatic scale, and play things that sound good. He got great results.
OTOH, a lot of other people have found it helpful to divide things up more than that.
From a more practical point of view, it also depends on how well the player knows the tune. If an advanced player is playing a blues or rhythm changes he probably isn't going to play notes that sound like clams no matter what.
But, put a new piece of music with complex harmony on his stand and count if off at a brisk tempo, if he gets the first solo, he's likely to be thinking about chord tones and scales or whatever else he has in his toolbag to avoid clams.
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F# is my favourite note on G7 haha… Gmaj7#5 is like the coolest dominant sub (B/G); but it only works in context . Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
Everyone should learn how to make that stuff work. It’s not hard, you just need to know psychology and how to set up expectations. You start some where and go somewhere via some sort of voice leading. If you are going from an F to a G (b7 in a G chord to a 3 in a Cmaj7, day), F# is the note in the middle. Simple as that.
I think most people know that, it’s just a chromatic passing tone.
What I think people don’t always realise so that you can delay that resolution - delay the gratification - with other notes in the middle; and the ear will still follow that F-F#-G line because we hear steps as connected melodies and leaps as harmonic even in melody lines and you can play with this; flirt with the listeners expectations (think the Bach partitas, right, or the prelude in Dm where we hear the melody in the top line and other melodies in the middle even though it’s just a string of even single notes.)
Jacob Collier’s voice leading is full of this type of stuff, he’s just taken it to a ridiculous extreme dividing the tone up into thirds and so on. I’m not even a fan, really, but he’s shown more than anyone perhaps that absolutely anything is legitimate so long as it starts and arrives in a logical and connected fashion. Music happens in time, and dissonance drives it forwards.
And what could be more guitaristic than resolving a B chord to a C chord lol?
It’s not actually that important to the discussion - but it’s an interesting side note that dominant chords don’t really have an ‘outside’ the way major seventh chords do, but that’s another rabbit hole.
Well there’s tricks for that too…check out the records, it’s interesting what strategies players employ on tricky tunes, but there’s a lot of wisdom in there. Street knowledge, the sort of thing that doesn’t get out in theory books and might even seem a bit disreputable, cheating even. But there’s no cheating in music; only stuff that sounds good, or not.Andre Bush was a player who made a point about using all 12 notes, all the time, apparently. So, one scale, the chromatic scale, and play things that sound good. He got great results.
OTOH, a lot of other people have found it helpful to divide things up more than that.
From a more practical point of view, it also depends on how well the player knows the tune. If an advanced player is playing a blues or rhythm changes he probably isn't going to play notes that sound like clams no matter what.
But, put a new piece of music with complex harmony on his stand and count if off at a brisk tempo, if he gets the first solo, he's likely to be thinking about chord tones and scales or whatever else he has in his toolbag to avoid clams.
The only clams I really care about is playing a note out of time. Most clams are more to do with that; if a phrase swings and comes out right and had a good shape it’s amazing what you can get away with.
And it’s something you can practice from day one because knowing where you are headed - pre hearing it - makes everything sound better, even obvious stuff. I wish more people knew how powerful this stuff is; just knowing how to set things up and resolve them with purpose. Storytelling basically. Otherwise it’s just correct noodling.Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-28-2021 at 07:58 PM.
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Sounds like you're with Andre Bush -- all notes are equal. Is that what you're saying? If not, what are the limits? Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I have some sympathy for that, but I don't see F# and F as equal against G7, even though F# works as a passing tone. I find it helpful to know which notes are in the chord and which aren't.
I agree that nothing sounds good out of time.
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what frees you up to improvise playfully is deep familiarity with what the harmonic transitions are
that enables you to focus much more on rhythmical issues - which is to say, where phrases are placed relative to bar-lines, where you place harmonic transitions in the bar (how long you leave it after the change has gone-by to play it), which changes you join together with a phrase and which you separate with a gap - which sounds you leave out - whether you play lots of short phrases with big gaps or lots of long phrases with short gaps - and, at appropriate tempos - how much you use double time etc. etc.
one of the features of BH's teaching always struck me very forcefully: his stuff on single notes is pretty much nothing more than a bunch of rules for how to use chromatic passing tones on maj/min/dom sounds. Using these chromatic devices (both approach tones and enclosures) is a matter of responding to rhythmical requirements - it is about getting to the right places at the right times. He has a very austere account of songbook harmony - assumes what notes are the primary notes at any time is well established - and explains all sorts of ways (chromatic approaches and enclosures) to make sure you get to those notes exactly when you want to.
I'm trying to set out here an even more austere - or parsimonious - picture of songbook harmony. I'm sure its nothing more than a way of spelling out BH's picture - but perhaps it brings certain features to the foreground which (given move-ability and fingering-proliferation) are particularly important for guitar players.
it is not only simpler and therefore much better to use for improvisation than the diatonic picture with which I grew up - of seven different kinds of chords - it is better at explaining the importance in the songbook of certain key forms featuring non-diatonic elements:
II7 ii change (G7 - Gm7 in F)
flat V half-dim - VII alt dom change (B half-dim - E7alt - Am7)
alt-dom cadences
importance of flat V note to both II7 and V
It also makes chord-changes into something other than endless moves around a circle of fifths (and this can help hugely with constructing more interesting lines).
ii V I - in G
will be (for example):
ii iim6 I (Am7 Am6 Gmaj6)
or
IV iv I (Fmaj6 Fm6 Gmaj6)
or
IV iv iii - or IV iv vi
these are not changes across fifths - and this can be very welcome
finally it articulates and brings to the foreground deep connections between apparently diverse sounds - this just helps everything - it would be crucial for arranging as well as soloing
In G:
G maj 7 sharp 11 - A13/A7flat5 - Em6 - C sharp half-dim - B m7
C maj 7 sharp 11 - D13/D7flat5 - Am6 - F sharp half-dim - E m7
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No not all notes are equal within tonality. (Schoenberg had to work hard to keep his music in a state of harmonic flux; music has a natural gravity to it.) Some notes are clearly more dissonant then others when combined in certain ways. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
But dissonance is not a bad thing; it’s essential in fact to all Western music since the 15th century. Even Palestrina. Understanding how to manage dissonance rhythmically is as important to species counterpoint as it is to bebop, and Wagner et al expanded the basic principles to the chromatic scale. And so on…
All notes have a story to tell; part of being a musician is acquainting yourself with their flavours. A dissonant sound maybe unpleasant or odd on its own; but then no one eats raw chillis on their own except as a feat of endurance, but in the context of a dish and other flavours they can bring it to life. And needless to say people have different tolerances for spice.
This is true even of the diatonic scale; the 4th is a powerful spice within the basic scale, as dissonant as any chromatic tone.
Anyway as chance would have it I was watching a really interesting Lage Lund masterclass today about stretching the limits of this type of thing. So leaving approach and passing tones unresolved for a while in arpeggios (it’s hard to describe but the exact type of logic I’m talking about) and he goes perhaps a little too far with it for my palate in fact and it just sounds like twelve tone music to me and I’m no longer hearing the harmony. But I suppose that’s the point; stretch tonality to breaking point and then come back to an interesting area. Psychology again, I guess, harmony is more to do with the mind than the laws of physics; or at least the use of harmony in music is psychological.
I would say F# in this context is actually a fairly mild spice - most obviously it can be understand as a lower chromatic neighbour of the 5th of the following chord, and as a result is actually very common in bop language etc. Which is a horizontal connection, that is connected to notes to come, not a vertical one, connected to notes presently sounding. Harmony needs both understandings …
Jazz obviously has an expanded sense of colouristic vertical harmony (upper extensions, chords scales etc) when compared to European tonal music, but even though we have more options here, it doesn’t mean everything is vertical; and these things can be ambiguous.Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-29-2021 at 03:15 PM.
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the sharp seven is better thought of as an echo of the previous chord superimposed on top of the present one than as a surprising part of the 'harmony' of the present one
it is the third of the previous dom. chord. Fsharp is the V of V's three: same with say G sharp over an Am7 - the V of ii's three
which raises the possibility the the melodic minor involves this reference to the chord that has just sounded
I like this picture better because it offers a rhythmical explanation rather than a purely harmonic one - it is because that note is over now and you are still using it that it sounds so cool
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and a lot that you might think of under the heading of dissonance - say the three of II7 or the flat five of II7 or the sharp 11 of I comes out as part of the primary sounds on the picture I'm urging here....
along with all the chromatic devices consisting in mm sounds
on my view these are all part of the original primary account of harmony - not anomalies which deserve to be called dissonances
(that is not to say that this picture leaves no room for 'wrong notes' which could be exploited to positive effect in particular contexts)
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Yea... I've always kept it simple, at least as basic References...
references are...
1) harmonic minor
2) melodic minor
What I try to play, or do notate when composing or arranging... is, All the musical relationships begin or start...with harmonic and melodic relationships to either Harmonic or Melodic.
It's not that I can't use anything etc... but the beginning relationship is one or the other and I embellish or develop from that reference.
When I was a kid... there was just Harmonic min.
For the last 30 or 40 years I've generally related... Natural minor... and all of Maj/Min functional Harmony to Harmonic... and still hear Dorian as one of the MM doors.
When you get to a place where you play or use Chord Patterns as compared to chords with embellishments... with comping and soloing... you need to have more levels of control over expanded harmonic development of harmonic relationships. It works for me, and most seem to be able to hear... even if they don't understand etc...
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Apologies for the lengthy if slightly tangential reply. I think it’s great you’ve come up with something you find helpful; I’m not that interested in discussing it specifically because I feel it obviously works, I can see why you would find it useful and it seems quite logical to me. So if you are in the mood to indulge someone who hasn’t had much playing time lately but has been overthinking everything in between listening to the Frozen II soundtrack on a loop, I offer the following BS basically apropos of very little. Originally Posted by Groyniad
Yeah I mean in trad western harmony which is mostly what I was talking about in the last post you have a binary conception; either it’s a consonance or a dissonance; in harmonic contexts it’s either a chord tone or a non chord tone and that’s the end of the story.
That’s never been true of jazz ever; chord scale theory is for all its faults as an improvisation method or a theory of jazz, basically right when it is taken as a theory of static jazz voicings (it began life as a way of explaining chords to horn players according to Ritchie Hart which makes sense.) So you have your basic tones, your ‘tensions’ and your avoid notes. It’s crude, but a three part grading system is better for us than the binary distinction of consonant/dissonant.
(I do think in its basic form it’s a little crude, incomplete, overly classical and misses subtleties of this type of colouristic harmony. For instance, Stephon Harris’s emphasis on the ‘melodic triad’ (which could be an ‘upper structure’) as the primary sound flips it on its head and to me accords with how jazzers hear these things, and I would say is a much better framing of the same basic material.)
TL; DR consonance/dissonance is a binary in Western harmony and a spectrum in jazz.
This is the bit classical musicians often have trouble hearing. With Stella by starlight starting life as a romantic piano piece it’s very a case in point actually, Jazz musicians hear the melody notes of that tune totally differently harmonically to the way the classical/romantic trained composer would have, as extensions (mostly) rather than dissonances.
I think it’s also true for Mahler’s Adagietto; as a jazz cat you can totally hear that first chord as a loungey Fmaj7, rather than the anguished yet poignant leaning dissonance Gustav presumably intended, which somewhat alters the emotional vibe haha. Music is not heard today the same as it was centuries or even decades before.
But on the other hand all of that classical stuff still happens in jazz; the same old methods of embellishing chord tones in use by Mozart and Bach etc; you still have them too. Good jazz improvisers still use this stuff, and Barry Harris’s systems are obviously one way into this type of line construction. (Though it’s not true to say Barry is just like classical though; he does have extended chords just like CST, it’s just he frames them differently. )
TL;DR classical and jazz musicians may hear the same music differently; jazz musicians still frequently employ old school western tonality but are also able to employ other things.
So I don’t think that’s particularly news to anyone, but it is a complicating factor when talking about dissonance in jazz. But when people start talking about good sounding notes I feel it’s a very basic misconception, a value judgement based on whether a note is dissonant or not. If students of improvisation are then expressing a sort of tacit worry about playing ‘not good sounding notes’ something has gone wrong somewhere. Improvisation should not be a realm of worry.
What I don’t think helps is that some prominent jazz eduction books etc have been a little slapdash with their language; often quite loaded (‘avoid notes’ is a classic one of course, as Mark Levine himself points out); it’s hard to come up with accessible but consistent terms though, tbf.
furthermore most of the books discuss the extended jazzy chords and not so much the basic cultural furniture because I suppose the assumption maybe that people can already hear vanilla tonal harmony. (I’m not actually sure this is true anymore.)
In general I think the assumption for most jazz educators is that players will check out real music and use any theory in combination with their ears. They aren’t looking for a complete system anymore than Groynaid is. The problem only really comes when the latter is missing, and that seems to be one of my gigs, to get people on that road. I’ve certainly been that person.Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-29-2021 at 04:12 PM.
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I probably shouldn't participate in a discussion I don't really understand, but can't we all tell a clam when we hear, or play, one?
Is there no such thing?
Sure, it's all about context and any note can sound good against any chord - if used well. Meaning, in a strong enough line that has enough anchoring in the harmony that the ear will accept it.
But, if you're playing a G blues and you keep leaning on F# over G7, don't expect another gig at that venue.
One other point about theoretical constructions.
A theory has to predict something. You don't have a good theory if has so many degrees of freedom that it can explain anything.
So, if you have a theory that can "explain" the use of any note in the chromatic scale over any chord in any harmonic situation, without a comment as to quality or acceptability (or some other metric addressing preference) I don't think that's a useful theory. It's post hoc (insert pejorative here).
In soloing you want rhythmic drive, melodic interest, harmonic interest, emotion and an appropriate percentage of the unexpected. What have I missed?
To do that, you need good lines, rooted adequately in the harmony and not baffling the listener (which does depend on the context and the taste of the audience to a degree).
Melodic and harmonic interest are typically created with a spectrum of consonance. So, for many improvisers, at least on unfamiliar tunes, it can be helpful to know what the chord tones are, what extensions will sound consonant, which other extensions create which less-consonant sounds and which notes are likely to be troublesome. Depending on the harmony and the line, these may be moving targets. Some players, for example, will anticipate a change, or continue a prior chord well into the next chord. But, sooner or later, if the soloist doesn't play something consonant the solo will fall apart, at least to my ear.
I might note that one of my favorite soloists plays almost exclusively things that sound very consonant, but the melodic and rhythmic content are so stunning that I never miss any harmonic adventurism. When I hear a soloist going to more dissonance, I find that a little bit goes a long way.
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K
What you’ve missed is that there nothing inherently definable about a ‘clam’ in terms of harmony. It’s not a theory thing. In my experience clams sound like clams because they are a little out of time or lacking in confidence, or otherwise ‘not quite right’. In short, they are not properly ‘heard’ or executed. A hesitant, disconnected E or G on a C chord is often as much of a clam as some unexpected chromatic note executed with confidence, especially as that funny note can then be resolved Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
i also think the need for an explanation for anything is hugely over rated. Leave that stuff to the academics. I’m not looking for theories that explain music, I’m looking for resources I can make music with. This isn’t science, it’s art. If you need a theoretic justification for playing this or that note you can’t be trusting your ears.
So a common tendency is to think that the theory books offer an explanation of how to play jazz or worse still, an explanation for what makes jazz sound the way it does. In fact, they don’t. And they couldn’t possibly… but there is a reliable source of information on these matters, which are the recordings.
And from this we can learn that, no, no one lost a gig leaning on an F# on a G7 chord in a G blues, lol. Ok maybe if you played only an F# maybe, haha. Monk could probably get away with it.
Anyway, quite aside from understanding of dissonance and harmony on one hand and obvious objective mistakes with melodies or written pieces and arrangements, when you start talking about mistakes in improvisation it all becomes incredibly subjective.
For instance, I am a terrible judge of my own playing. Some gigs when I think I’m playing like crap and I listen back to a recording a few weeks later and it sounds great. maybe the stuff I played that I didn’t expect to play sounded better than what I meant to.
Other gigs when I think I’m nailing it and I listen back and it sounds mediocre. And I’ve had enough conversations and read enough interviews etc to know this is a very common thing. If I hear things I don’t like about a performance it’s never stuff like ‘oh I played a bad note on that chord.’ Well sometimes, but sometimes that ‘bad note’ becomes my favourite bit. Or someone else really likes it, thinks it’s cool. It’s all subjective.
You like Chet Baker? Lester Young? Art Pepper? Louis blinking Armstrong? Great melodic inside players, right? Well turns out when you listen close their solos are actually full of ‘funny notes’; major sevenths against dominants and things like that. just study their solos. In fact only someone with very good harmonic ears would actually notice this on casual listening, because the melody and swing dominates everything and legitimises the note choices musically.
If we take them at their word (and there’s plenty of invested parties who find reasons not to) these guys didn’t think about the chords even: just melody. Lester didn’t even know what they were half the time apparently.
So if there are clams in jazz they are much more to do with timing and articulation, loss of flow, loss of confidence. You can play all the ‘right notes’ but if there’s no vibe there it’ll sound far wronger than playing a ‘funny note’ over a dominant chord as part of a swinging, confident musical phrase. Of course the latter is much less about nerdy theory and much more about tone, vibe, chutzpah, street style, cultivating an intuitive flow state when playing and staying out of your own way. Well this is to do with the non-European aspect of jazz, the exact same things that mark out a great freestyle MC for example.
None of which can be taught in a theory textbook.
But it is on the records, so don’t take my word for it. I’m not making this shit up. The top guys will tell you that, I wonder if you’d believe them more than me haha?
Basically, i think a lot of people think jazz improv is chess but actually it’s more like poker.
(Anyway Lage Lund again said something very funny as he does, which is that he sees his style as being about making mistakes and that he embraces them as a source of ideas. But that’s a whole other level.)Last edited by Christian Miller; 12-29-2021 at 06:33 PM.
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