Theory question! Who can help??

[Jpmusic8]

So I'm fairly new to Jazz guitar and and the genre in general. I have a decent understanding of theory but some of the more complex chord progressions I've encountered leave me slightly bewildered. An example being:

D#7(#9#5)
Emaj9
Gmaj9
Cmaj9(#11)

This is one of the progressions in the song Velours by Anomalie.

When listening to this modern jazzy/low-fi stuff I'm always wondering how the composers choose the chords they do in order to construct their progressions. For example, the Emaj9 and Gmaj9 here have no obvious theoretical relationship, but it sounds good nonetheless. Are the composers literally just thinking "it sounds good so I'm going to do it", or is there concept being utilised that I'm unaware of?

Many thanks!

J

[FwLineberry]

For example, the Emaj9 and Gmaj9 here have no obvious theoretical relationship, but it sounds good nonetheless.
J

The same chord type moving up or down in thirds (major or minor) is called a chromatic mediant relationship. It works due to the chromatic voice leading between the two chords.

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[pamosmusic]

There’s always a theoretical relationship, but that also doesn’t mean they’re not just doing it because it sounds good.

A lot of the time the theoretical relationships are applied to things later. That way, the composer can say “what was that thing that sounded good? Oh it was that chromatic mediant thing.” And then they can pull it out in a different context and tweak it and see if it still works.

So the theory is super useful for us, but also not always applicable for the person doing the composing.

I find when I write, I’m usually just doing it because it sounds good. The theory I can slap on it after the fact helps when I want to arrange it or improvise over it or whatever comes later.

[pamosmusic]

The same chord type moving up or down in thirds (major or minor) is called a chromatic mediant relationship. It works due to the chromatic voice leading between the two chords.

.

and +1 on the voiceleading.

Two four note chords can’t have but so much distance between the various chord tones. So people can get creative with the voice-leading and get beautiful, borderline-or-non-functional chord changes that are hard to put a label on.

[pauln]

Are the composers literally just thinking "it sounds good so I'm going to do it", or is there concept being utilised that I'm unaware of?

Many thanks!

J

"It sounds good" IS a concept;
often, the most important one,
in time sometimes the only one.

I've played with two keyboarders that each had been playing four services each Sunday for over 25 years playing similar complex dense harmony church music. However they had acquired their ability, it had long been displaced by just "it just sounds good" without any conscious regard to the formalism, theory, devices, tricks, or technique... everything was just an endless fountain of gorgeous music.

[bako]

Explanations that accurately describe a musical event might possibly have nothing at all to do with how the original musician conceives of it.

E major is the parallel minor to E minor which contains a Gma7 as a bIII chord
or the mediant relationship or if it just sounds good as others have mentioned.

[Jimmy blue note]

... have no obvious theoretical relationship, but it sounds good nonetheless. Are the composers literally just thinking "it sounds good so I'm going to do it", or is there concept being utilised that I'm unaware of?

Many thanks!

J

The concept of "Theory" is not a finite, nor, contrary to academic tradition, limited to what the person next to you or in the front of the room believes.
The nice thing about jazz is, it progresses, in harmony and in historical justification.
By that I mean jazz theory (and many of the Western classical traditions it shares roots with), is a progression from one place of identifiable stability to another. In jazz this is done through diatonic, dominant, chromatic harmony for starters. The great thing about jazz, if you have practicing and performing artists in a community, the music evolves or progresses in the evolution of codified harmony.
When I lived in Philly, there was a solid set of harmonic theories that determined a strong flavour of bebop and post bebop. I'd go an hour north to NY and there was an entirely different set of dialect and at first, it was relatively an acquired taste, but once acquired, the sounds my ear heard, and the playing of the musicians who were traveling on those new avenues, was fresh, strong and personal. The theoretical canon was different and the acceptance of sounds within each community did differ, but the theory was solid within each community.

It's interesting to note that in the time I'd spent in a music school even further north, there was a solid set of theoretical tenets and rules and if you applied NY standards (or even the guidelines of more progressive teachers within that school), you would get marked wrong; punished for violating the rules and guidelines of the generation their harmony was based on.

Listen to the progressions of this and other examples you may not see the apparent logic of. Does it flow? Do the cadences function to determine movement that is recognizable? Is there a logic, some system of repeatable and controllable causality that the player uses? If so, that logic that guides him/her is a valid theoretical system.

Listen to the chords, determine the logic, flow, tension/release and resolution within that and any piece. You can teach yourself a lot about the larger functions of theory. The more you play, the more you hear, the more you hear, the more you know.
In jazz, if you have a repeatable system and it sounds good, if you can communicate your intentions and if it sounds good, I think you've got good theory.
"If it sounds good, it's good music. Nothing sounds worse than a symphony in the wrong hands" -Duke Ellington

[rpjazzguitar]

I've included the totality of my knowledge and trust in theory, below.

[Jpmusic8]

That's interesting, thanks.

Do you know of any books/resources where I can learn more about this?

[Jimmy blue note]

That's interesting, thanks.

Do you know of any books/resources where I can learn more about this?

Any good book will give you a set of comprehensive perspective up to the point where the book was written. When I was starting, it was Walter Piston's Harmony 4th edition and Vincent Perscichetti's Modern Harmony. Burt Ligon's books have been excellent foundational materials for a solid generation. Berklee College's core curriculum texts/work materials will bring you up to the mid 80's and are pretty solid there but that's where the world ends for them. Jumping off from there are many books including David Leibman's excellent Chromatic Harmony and Hal Crook's How to Improvise.

Honestly, once you have the fundamentals though, you need to open your mind to the purpose, spirit, function and aesthetics of the music, which has been the way since the earliest swing bands started writing their own rules. In those days, the core rules and roles were pretty much undisputed: Know the harmony by ear, find the melodic line of the head, re-compose the lines of harmonic melody with respect to the original piece and the people you're playing with and for. The best harmony sources are your internal knowledge attained from hearing the music in real time and hanging with the people that are making it. That does not mean you need to be a headlining virtuoso to learn, but you DO need dedication, humility, an open mind and a good attitude.
When I lived in New York, there was a generation of young players who asked the same questions as you. There weren't a whole lot of schools, nor comprehensive how-to books, certainly not the confusing plethora of 'authoritative' videos. Where did people learn this? Radio, live music, lots of it, and there WAS one store, Charles Colin's publisher in mid town where the first floor was file cabinets of exercises and above were lesson and practice rooms always radiating the sound of swinging jazz. I can say that's what I needed to get me started.

I will say that in Philly, the jams and the old timers who hung and played there taught me a TON. They were the cats when, as a tune was called that I didn't know, told me "You got this. Use your ears. You know this."

Now the sources are ones that are out to reinterpret and redefine the rules of jazz, as it should be IMHO, so I can only recommend that you adopt an attitude of not taking the word of others but rather listening and owning your own sound. When you can take the first step towards knowing the music you love, you'll learn the theory and you'll start playing by rules that feel solid to you.
Banish the theory gods, respect sound and talk to people who are actually making the music.

My two cents.

[pamosmusic]

… there WAS one store, Charles Colin's publisher in mid town where the first floor was file cabinets of exercises and above were lesson and practice rooms always radiating the sound of swinging jazz.

Well crap. No such luck when I lived there. That sounds awesome.

[FwLineberry]

D#7(#9#5)
Emaj9
Gmaj9
Cmaj9(#11)

Are the composers literally just thinking "it sounds good so I'm going to do it", or is there concept being utilised that I'm unaware of?

That's pretty much how most songwriting works. A composer gets a melodic idea or happens to run across a couple of chords that sound nice on the piano, etc... Then they start working with it to flesh it out. Whether or not any sort of theory comes in to play during this process, as far as the composer is concerned, is anybody's guess.

The point of theory, in my opinion, is that it gives you a way to label, sort and categorize different musical structures that you come across, so you can recognize them when you hear them, recognize when you see them, and/or pull them out and use them within your own compositions.

Take the first two chords on your list for example D#7(#5b9) - Emaj9:

The common place for a dominant chord to go is up a 4th or down a 5th to a major or minor chord. This is the typical V7-I resolution.

An alternate path for a dominant chord is to move down a half step to a major or minor chord. This is the common tritone sub bII7 - I. bII7 is the tritone sub of V7.

A third option is what is called the deceptive cadence. A deceptive cadence often times amounts to a dominant chord moving up a whole step to a minor chord or up a half step to a major chord. This is what is happening with your chord sequence.


Emaj9 - Gmaj9:

This is a chromatic mediant relationship or you can look at it as a shift of mode from E major to E minor (G major). The easiest thing to grasp, here, is that you can move chords around in 3rds and it almost always sounds good.


Gmaj9 - Cmaj9(#11):

This should be fairly obvious as a I chord moving to the IV chord in the major key. The #11 is a dead giveaway for that chord acting as a IV chord or Lydian chord.


Cmaj9 - D#7(#5b9):

This is the least important chord move in the sequence. Going back to the D# chord simply starts the sequence over again. You can always go from whatever chord you end up on back to the beginning chord, and it will almost always sound good. In this case, however, you can also look at the voice leading between the two chords. G, B and F# stay the same, the C moves up a half step to C# and the D moves up a half step to D#.

.

[RLetson]

I think I learned to really hear jazz by listening to Monk--reconstructions/deconstructions of standards like "Don't Blame Me." And I came to Monk (specifically "Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington") via Ellington, whose compositions were close enough to the big-band dance music I grew up on that they didn't sound all that far out. Hearing Monk's reworkings of standards was a kind of revelation--and it probably didn't hurt that at about the same time I was listening to post-romantic classical material as well (Schoenberg, Bartok, Prokofiev, and such).

The point is, I'm neither a composer nor improviser and I can't read standard notation, nor do I have a grasp of theory beyond a smattering of chord construction and what modulation is. I follow my ears, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear of musicians and composers who are led to their work by their ears first and then explain it via whatever standard theoretical descriptive models are available--or adaptable.

[bediles]

The key is B maj.
Lot's of these neo-soul vibe tunes use sidestepping (parallel min9 chords is the classic)
Also judicious use of sub dominant minor function chords where the main characteristic of these is the presence of the flat 6 of the key (the note G). Someone mentioned parallel minor, same thing different name. You could call it modal interchange too.

One thing to take away is thinking of the functions of the chords ex: tonic, dominant, subdominant. They all have feeling accociated and may help when you want to use the left brain to help a bit with your writing.

[bediles]

The D#7 (Tritone sub of A7) to Emaj is a plagal cadence variation. (Sounds like it, right)

Some say V I to Emaj/G# but I don't think so.

But really however you want to categorize that sound

[DonEsteban]

#14

Wanted to write something but Bediles said it already. Listen more to that Neo Soul stuff and you'll recognize the patterns. Pretty phenotypical stuff here ...

[chp]

I don’t know the tune in question, but I see a series of modulating chords in the form of V-I-I-I. That’s how I’d read it and that’s how I’d play over it.