Originally Posted by
Christian Miller
Except it’s not is it? Except it is? Except it’s not? Except it is? Actually I don’t know.
Ah it’s complicated.
if you subscribe to the school of thought that the B ‘gives away the dominant’ then you will actually avoid that note when playing Dorian and talk about hexatonic scales and so on. It’s described as an avoid note in some books in fact. And I get why people think that. It makes sense (albeit framed in a backwards way imo); the notes B and C have always been central to western tonality in cadences and so on.
The problem is that this has nothing to do with actual jazz music. The very first note note to be added to a minor triad back in the early days of jazz was in fact that exact ‘dominant’ note B. We hear it in Django and early Count Basie. And the Dorian mode was frequently played with that emphasis and frequently elided with the melodic minor, right through into 1959 when the minor seventh chord quality became established by modal jazz. the b7th was a descending passing tone and the natural 7th an ascending passing tone until the 40s and Strayhorn started to play with it more l…. And presumably before common knowledge of what a Dorian mode was.
So the C is a more modern resting note on minor and increasingly the B is avoided (some books call the B an avoid note on minor seventh which is presumably the most common Dorian chord.) This I call ‘modal minor’ as opposed to ‘true minor’ and became established in jazz and all kinds of popular music everywhere after Kind of Blue, but is found rarely before.
But even then - tunes like Recorda Me heavily focus on the 6th/13th on modal minors. Wes often stresses it on m7 chords etc.
there is also the small matter of the blues. Jazz musician’s brains get filled up with all kinds of convoluted bullshit, so they sort of forget fairly obvious facts about American music such as, we can quite happily have dominants that just don’t resolve and this is called ‘the blues’ which at some point in the remote past may have had something to do with jazz in the era before delay pedals.
So while the tritone between B and F might suggest a need to resolve this is in no way as primary as it is in Mozart. And the m6 chord so beloved by Charlie Christian and Barry Harris again blurs that quality. (Some credit Eddie Durham for this sound, but I feel Django was there earlier. Again there’s probably a phd in it.)
Furthermore of course jazz is full of ‘applied minor’ on dominants that we might today consider ‘melodic minor modes’ or something. An early example might be simply using that Dm6 sound on a G7 for example. It’s everywhere in 30s music.
In terms of playing modal tunes - you can do what you like. Both sounds exist within the Dorian mode, and both can be leant on. And in fact as even So What solo by Miles the Dorian and Melodic minor are essentially joined at the hip. Listen to Wes, same thing. Not every improviser is like that - Blue Mitchell really likes to play pure melodic minor (although apparently he wouldn’t have know what that is) but a lot of them are.
In terms of the way I personally conceptualise and play - if you listen to me play you will hear a lot of Em and G on A7. I conceptualise A7 but I don’t necessarily spell out A7 chord tones. That’s from Barry, other people will conceptualise differently. Some will think Em for instance. But the G dominant ‘bebop’ scale is the exact same as the D Dorian ‘bebop’ scale listed in the Levine and Baker books, and the emphasis on the G7 chord tones is the same. When I hear Brecker playing on a vamp, I hear a LOT of this type of thing, for instance. Cannonball too.
in practice the truth is there are kind of two sounds in the Dorian - a sort of tense, gritty m6 sound and a more neutral and resolved m7 sound. you could also talk about m7 and m6 variants of the pentatonic.
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