Is the Melodic Minor Scale Really a Thing in Jazz?

[Christian Miller]

On all blues I feel the most natural choice is Dm pentatonic followed by Ebm pentatonic

minor pentatonic is usually the most natural sounding choice for a 7#9 chord, quiet as it’s kept.

Anyway listen to what they play on the original - varies from soloist to soloist a little. IIRC miles opts for the blues option. I think Trane unsurprisingly plays something diminished scaley

Altered sounds quite ‘out’ to me in this context. Dim scale, less so, on fact.

[Christian Miller]

Oh yeah I have a note on my notes app with a bunch of these written out. That was a cool concept … though I haven’t actually gotten around to practicing it since I watched … so it goes

thanks!

[Christian Miller]

Follow-up questions:
Is the 'altered' sound something that is only heard in post-bop? I seem to remember reading that it's not really idiomatic to bebop.
If the 7th is *not* functioning as a dominant (I'm thinking the two bars of Eb7 starting at bar 13 of Out Of Nowhere) is the altered scale still an appropriate choice?

Despite what I said regarding the #11 I think soloing wise Barry Harris would have suggested jaut playing a normal dominant scale there. At least at the entry level.

Bird often ignored the #11s implied by the melody in chords. Beboppers don’t tend to honour them, that’s more of a modern concept.

[pamosmusic]

On all blues I feel the most natural choice is Dm pentatonic followed by Ebm pentatonic

minor pentatonic is usually the most natural sounding choice for a 7#9 chord, quiet as it’s kept.

Anyway listen to what they play on the original - varies from soloist to soloist a little. IIRC miles opts for the blues option. I think Trane unsurprisingly plays something diminished scaley

Altered sounds quite ‘out’ to me in this context. Dim scale, less so, on fact.

Yeah I transcribed Miles many moons ago …

it’s that D Eb F Gb Ab pitch series over the two chords and he’s definitely mixing buckets a bit, but mostly D F over the D7 and Eb Gb Ab over the Eb7

[Tal_175]

This is something that's not talked about much to my knowledge but if you're practicing a certain concept playing vocalistic ideas in quarter notes 80 beats per minute it's gonna sound different than playing vocabulary based on the concept in 8th notes at 200 bpm. So sometimes practicing slowly isn't the right way to hear ideas. Concepts and vocabulary to some extent depend on the tempo they are played at.

[Christian Miller]

Go ahead and start.

I am invested.

OK so scale choices on bVI7...

--CLASSICAL STUFF---

So this chord is of course an augmented 6th blah blah.

How I don't think they usually teach it (or at least not in any of the books I read until much later) is the historical context. It originates as an alteration of the Phrygian cadence, which is similar to the Andalusian/Flamenco Cadence.

Am G F E

However because we don't like parallels in classical harmony, we have 'sixth chords' 6 3 chords (first inversion triad) on a couple of the degrees:

Am Em/G Dm/F E
We also have this variant
Am Em/G Dm6/F E

The augmented sixth rocks into town during the Galant era (mid to late C18) and embellishes this by altering the Dm/F by augmenting the sixth above the bass (the root to us) - D by a half step to D#. This gives us (enharmonically)

Am Em/G F7(no5) E
and for the second
Am Em/G F7#11 E
(which is we go from F A D to F A D# in the first case and F A D B to F A D# B in the second)

So, the #11 is very much part of the standard deal since the age of powdered wigs. You can hear how much this screams Mozart compared to the first which sounds more Bach.

Now, scales. What Mozart would have done is simply altered the scale run. if we run third to third (from the BASS, so the note A) to the third, we can simply alter the natural minor with that D#.

A G F E D# C B A
3 2 1 7 #6 5 #4 3

Which is what you can hear him writing melodically on this chord (and others of the era) despite the aug 2 and the two consecutive semitones. I haven't heard this scale called anything, but it's there in the music. I call it the aug 6th or Mozart scale. Lydian #6. Who knows?

AHA - but this chord doesn't move to I? Well it does if you stick a dirty great cadential 6 4 in (second inversion triad). I mean, classical musicians wouldn't think so, but jazz musicians WOULD.

Am Em/G F7(#11) Am/E E Am

You also get this link in this common move (which sounds more romantic era to me)

C C7/E F F#o7 C/G G C

I won't talk about the Tristan chord...

--JAZZ STUFF--

Mozart scale
A B C D# E F G

Actually Out of Nowhere fits into this scale, and Eddie Lang example.

And I do think this scale sounds pretty cool for jazz. Try it!

However, I'd think for jazz these options would be the most common and they are quite similar to the 'Mozart scale'

Blues scale
A C D D# E G

Whole tone scale
A B C# Eb F G

F Lydian Dominant/(A Locrian nat 2)
A B C D Eb F G

So I haven't done enough listening on this, but my guess would be jazzers in the pre war era used whole tone if anything beyond the arpeggio/melody and at some point in the post war era gravitated to using the lydian dominant which I think is the standard choice now. I suppose I better get listening....

[Bop Head]

id play fmaj7

so fmaj7-f something or other - C

Learned this in the early 90ies from Werner Pöhlert's books.

[Bop Head]

[...]

Barry harris taught it as what happens when you put the ascending 4’n’back line on top of the descending one
C-E-F-F#-G
C-Bb-A-Ab-G

[...]

Eric Clapton and Billy Gibbons do this to LOL, they got it most likely from some trad blues.

[Christian Miller]

Learned this in the early 90ies from Werner Pöhlert's books.

Good for you, +10 points.

Seriously, I kind of came up with this myself from transcribing solos, but good ideas have usually been thought of someone else somewhere. That's annoyingly the best way to know that they are good ideas. Which is no help at all should I ever think of something new lol.

OTOH it is kind of obvious if you look at what is actually played by the soloist (as opposed to trying to relate everything to the extensions of the vanilla chords.)

[Christian Miller]

Eric Clapton and Billy Gibbons do this to LOL, they got it most likely from some trad blues.

What like bass playing one line and the guitar playing the other?

I'm not thinking of them as playing a huge amount of contrary motion on one guitar, although I'd like to be proven wrong haha.

[Bop Head]

What like bass playing one line and the guitar playing the other?

I'm not thinking of them as playing a huge amount of contrary motion on one guitar, although I'd like to be proven wrong haha.

Blues turnaround in E:

Pick triplets from lowest to highest note

x-x-12-x-9-12 (twice)

x-x-11-x-10-12

x-x-10-x-11-12

strum x-x-9-9-9-12 (OK it's not perfect)

then C7/9 to B7/9

[Bop Head]

Good for you, +10 points.

Seriously, I kind of came up with this myself from transcribing solos, but good ideas have usually been thought of someone else somewhere. That's annoyingly the best way to know that they are good ideas. Which is no help at all should I ever think of something new lol.

OTOH it is kind of obvious if you look at what is actually played by the soloist (as opposed to trying to relate everything to the extensions of the vanilla chords.)

Pöhlert was a poll-winning practitioner in the 50ies.

Here he plays with Albert Mangelsdorff: Wolfgang-Lauth-Septett - Tele Funky : WOLFGANG-LAUTH-SEPTETT : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Good for me that he prevented me to dive into the abyss of chord scale theory 30 years ago . And I recognized many of the examples in his books (more than 70 percent of the few hundred pages of Grundlagenharmonik -- Basic Harmony -- are standard notation, guitar tabs, bass tabs, keyboard chord representations) in the music I was listening to at that time, although I was not really transcribing.

EDIT: Regarding transcribing he told an interesting story: They would go several times into certain US movies to figure out how the guitarist of a band that played somewhere in the background of a scene would finger a certain chord.

[pauln]

Right, although I was really wondering about single notes. But the chords are good too.

Oh, well I like blues lines that change.

D7
G blues but swapping in its 6th and 9th (like F major where F is #9 of D) like D E G B...

Eb7 and return to D7
keeping the G blues feel but swapping in its b9 and b6 (like Eb major where Eb is b6 of G) like Bb Ab G F Eb D

then C Bb B G into G13

I like to "stay" in a blues reference even when departing from it to express the harmony change, so I call all this as G blues feeling. Someone might just as well think of phrasing from F major to Eb major (pianists?)

[Christian Miller]

Yeah you could just play Fm all the way or something if you want. Up to you.

Blues turnaround in E:

Pick triplets from lowest to highest note

x-x-12-x-9-12 (twice)

x-x-11-x-10-12

x-x-10-x-11-12

strum x-x-9-9-9-12 (OK it's not perfect)

then C7/9 to B7/9

nice. Do you have a recorded example?

[pamosmusic]

Looks like Pat is mostly playing Eb Dorian over the D7 chord, and E dorian over the Eb chord. With some passing notes e.g. between the 4th and the minor 3rd. Those lines are very similar to what’s in the Linear Expressions book, which is good to know (since I have been learning some of those recently!)

Thats more like the straight up tritone substitution. It’s kind of an out sound — just playing the dominant scale a tritone away (or is minorized equivalent) — but I really like that. Probably use it more than any kind of truly altered thing.

[Bop Head]

nice. Do you have a recorded example?

No, I either picked it up from a Billy Gibbons video lesson on YT which I can't find ATM or a Guitar Player lesson long time ago. Letting those picked triplets ring is probably the trick. For C7 use x-7-8-7-8-x and slide down to B7. Sounds nice with some overdrive but works also on acoustic.

[SlowJoeJones]