the forgotten dominant and lennie tristano's weird scales
Вставка
- Опубліковано 16 лис 2020
- #jazz #jazzguitar #lennietristano #chordscales #jazzharmony
If you want to chuck me a little one off donation (5GBP or something) you can do so here:
ko-fi.com/jazzguitarscrapbook
My website:
www.christianmillerguitar.com
I really like this concept of superimposing melodic minor arpeggios over dominant chords. How I’ve seen it is this:
D melodic minor over G7= Lydian dominant
Ab melodic minor over G7 = altered scale or super Locrian
C melodic minor over G7 = mixolydian b13
F melodic minor over G7 = Dorian b9
I’ve found that thinking of these superimposed scales is easier than thinking of altering the major or mixolydian scale to achieve the same results.
I'm a big fan of just converting everything to the same of chords and scales. So in this way, I'm never at a loss for anything to play over any chord, because I know how to convert it all to either minor or dominant/mixolydian and I know a big bag of that stuff to play. But I think altering scales can be useful for more motivic approaches.
C Harmonic min over G7 = Phryg Dominant = V7 b9 b13
Many thanks Christian. This was a lightbulb moment for me. If you look at Levine's books then according to 'chord/scale' theory the second mode of the melodic minor scale can only be played over sus flat 9 chords. But as you rightly point out, it will often work over any dominant chord.
Don't forget that there there is an even more forgotten melodic minor scale that works well over dominant chords - the fifth mode of the MM scale.
Ah, the Bach scale
I like these ideas. Thanks for new inspiration!
This is so weird, I actually found this same concept myself some years ago when I first considered instead of adding chromatic notes in the scale, to continue up the scale into the second octave to hit the altered extensions. I abandoned it when I got to Barry's thing and stopped believing in extensions. Fun to see it has been formulated before, I couldn't believe I would've been the first person to think of it. Great stuff
What I have learned from Barry is that you don’t have to believe in extensions to play them :-) which raises an interesting philosophical question....
@@JazzGuitarScrapbook oh yeah i just don't think of them as extensions anymore, it's all borrowing to me now
Hello Christian - Greetings from Oakland, California, and thank you very much for the mention at the beginning of this video. Great job, I enjoyed your presentation and your playing, keep up the great work! And hello to everyone on this comment thread, best wishes to everyone with your musical endeavors and pursuits.
Wow! Hi John. Your book forever changed my ideas about music. Thanks so much for the kind words and sharing your knowledge and experiences studying with Warne.
@@JazzGuitarScrapbook Thanks to YOU for recognizing Lennie's teaching and the mention of Warne and Peter Ind, keep up the great work!
@@johntheboptist2 hello :) can you maybe name some specific examples (solos, compositions etc) where these devices are used in the repertoire? This is super interesting stuff, wow!
Really enjoyed this lesson. I use iv minor sound alot, usually play a lick over the ii chord then do it up a minor 3rd over the V7. It has such a dark pull to it's resolution I love it. The double scales were really interesting. I came here after studying Lennie's Line Up to get more ideas (:
Good Lesson! I do a video also using the Lennie Tristano Cmaj7/Dmaj7 to the 23rd chord. I find it all really interesting subject.
Ah yes the two octave major....
Check out pianist Dave Frank's channel. He was a Tristano student and talks about some of the concepts he learned from him.
That title made me laugh. I am Sal Mosca’s son, one of Lennie’s most dedicated students. Those ARE my dad’s chord scales. Lol.
@@take5th hahaha amazing! I have no words :-) Thanks for dropping by.
i knew it! i almost wasnt sure if youve knew of barry until u played the g scale to the 7th hehe
i love this idea of double scales. really gets some interesting sounds and acknowledges that rhythm is embedded in the vocabulary. (so that certain notes land on down beats). really cant get that with chord scale theory. I love barry's scales for this. the rhythm is embedded in practicing it. its meant to be practiced and played in time.
barry talks about these sounds in a different way but in a way ive found incredibly helpful with his concept of families. he talks about D-6 being G7's important minor. (if you've got an Abo7, lower the Ab and u get G7, raise it you get D-6). SO you can play D-6 scale of chords and resolve it to C and it'll have the same gravity as G7 (if the bass player is rocking G it becomes that 9, #11, 13 or DomI sound). because G7 and Db7 are family and share tritones, they are interchangeable, which means The Tritones minor can be used as well. this gives us the ability to use Ab-6 scale of chords giving the Alt or domIII sound to resolve to C. With his ideas of family ive thought about the F-/G sound that ive heard Jim hall do (which i was taught in chord scale would be Gsusb9/Phrygian) but i've been finding that F-6 scale of chords works really nice. (your domII sound, the important minor of the backdoor!).
ok ok.. so what u might ask. Those 3 chords are all from the same family: D-6, Ab-6, and F-6. They all share diminished neighbours (Go7!) so any of those combos of chords we're using a diminished note in the bass. The Minor 6 scale of chords is bonkers cos it like moving to sooo many places. This has become really handy for me as i've been practicing barry's scales of chords in their families ( so i dont just practice G on its own I practice moving it into Bb to Db to E and the iterations of maj6, minor6, dom7 and dom7b5) cos he says we play with our families first.
one thing I like doing is taking a minor6 scale of chords and using enclosures to hear the tension and release of the sound. (C# E D, Bb C# B, G Bb A, E G F, C# E D) over a D drone at first. but then imagining it as these super imposed sounds. Put a G in the bass and its Lennies DomI (so weve gotta learn to move it to Cmaj). Put a Db in the bass and its Db7alt now or Lennies DomIII (so weve gotta learn how to move it to F#maj). Play that D-6 over an E bass and you've got your DomII sound. (so weve gotta learn to move it to Amaj). use a B drone and its B-7b5 (so we gotta practice moving it to A7). All the resolution chords (C, F#, A, A7) are from the same family.
I find this enclosure thing reaaaally helps me and students i teach hear the conflict and resolutions between the diminished notes and tonic notes that the modes haven't helped with as much, as well as puts everything into a rhythmic context, always. The families thing is a whole other thing cos now Im really convinced there are only 3 keys.
I’ve been going to Barry’s workshops on and off for around 15 years
There’s a lot of info in your post that might take a while to digest haha. But I’ll get around to it!
I knew Brighton based guitarist Dave Cliff when I was Sussex Uni. He toured with Warne & Lee for part of the famous Jazz Exchange European tour.
Eunmi Shim’s *Lennie Tristano: His Life in Music* (University of Michigan Press) is worth a read for technical insight and careful transcriptions of solos and heads.
@@RalphBrooker-gn9iv yes! Dave is one of the greats for sure. I have the European tour CDs stashed away somewhere.. time to re listen. Also that album with Geoff Simkins… chefs kiss as the kids say.
@@RalphBrooker-gn9iv btw some of my earliest memories are from living on the Sussex uni campus, I grew up in Brighton. Dave was a teacher on the weekender where I first found out about jazz…. I think Jim Mullen’s based down there these days? Not a bad jazz guitar pedigree really haha.
@@JazzGuitarScrapbook I studied sax with Geoff briefly. Lovely, uncompromising player. He turned down profitable gigs that just weren’t his scene. Dave and Geoff used to play as a duet in one of the campus bars. I’ve been a devotee of Lee and Warne all my life, from a tender age. Imagine my astonishment to find Dave Cliff playing on campus. I knew it was the right Dave Cliff just listening to him. Geoff has listened closely to Lee without trying to sound like him. Dave & Geoff were resident at the Concorde Jazz Club. Dave ran a quintet there. Whenever Geoff clocked me coming into the club he’d quote something from the Tristano repertoire if he was blowing. I have a couple of their albums. Very nice. I enjoyed your lesson though I’m not a guitarist.
@@RalphBrooker-gn9iv thank you!
@@JazzGuitarScrapbook I’m 63. I grew up in the Portsmouth area. My earliest musical experiences were the 1949 Tristano Sextet on Capitol. My father had 78s and a 12inch 33. Also Konitz’s 1951 recording (Hibeck and Duet for Alto and Guitar being standout, way ahead of its time, interesting that Miles is quite mealy-mouthed about that music). Also Bach and Schoenberg’s 1st String Quartet. I would have been 8 when this music was entering my awareness. There was also Lee Konitz’s 1949 Prestige recordings (Marshmallow, Fishing Around, Sound-Lee). Astonishing to hear these lines. This is still among the most beautiful, evocative music I’ve ever heard.
Thank you for this lesson. I especially appreciate your explanation of the paradigm of the two-octave extended scale condensed into one octave, and I think it should be taught more often.
I would like to respectfully offer an explanation of the melodic minor scale and how it came to be. I speak as a student of European music history and theory from classical antiquity to the present. Please mind that I only dabble in jazz, and that I reject the Berklee chord-scale paradigm.
Let us begin with the medieval practice of musica ficta, or "false music," meaning notes outside of the mode. A melody was conceived and written in musica recta - "real music" - that is, in "white key" notes within the mode, but inflections of musica ficta - accidentals - were sung or played to taste and as needed. These chromatic alterations of the notes of the mode were used to smooth out melodic contours and to avoid harsh melodic intervals, such as tritones. In late medieval and renaissance polyphonic (contrapuntal) music, musica ficta inflections were used to sweeten the harmony between contrapuntal lines and to avoid unwanted harmonic clashes and dissonances between them. That is, people wrote and thought in lines and adjusted them as necessary to polish them and the harmonies formed by their combination.
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the horizontal paradigm of entwined polyphonic lines began to be complemented by a vertical one of successive harmonies or chords. Musicians codified proper harmonizations of bass lines rather than simply concerning themselves with sonorous contrapuntal conversation between parts. These codified harmonies included standardized inflections of musica ficta. That is, the most ubiquitous applications of ficta were taken for granted as parts of the structural identities of scales and harmonies themselves.
Most ubiquitous were sharpenings of the 6th and 7th degrees of the minor scale in order to approach the tonic from below.
A B C D E F G (A)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (8)
A B C D E F# G# (A)
1 2 3 4 5 #6 #7 (8)
These alterations were only used to draw a line upward to the tonic. Descending lines were not altered, nor were lines that did not reach the upper tonic.
As the vertical harmonic paradigm began to supplement the horizontal melodic, this same application of ficta was conceived of thus:
When the minor scale ascends, its second degree is harmonized with #6, and its fifth degree with #3:
A G#A A G#A BA B G#A A G#A
A B C D E F#G#A G F E D C B A
In the 18th and 19th centuries, musicians further abstracted harmony from the notion of intervals above a bass line to that of a series of triadic and seventh chords in root position or an inversion. They stopped labeling chords in reference to the sounding bass note and began labeling them in reference to a fundamental bass note, that of the root of the chord.
In this paradigm, the minor scale's second degree is harmonized with a V7 chord in second inversion and its fifth degree is harmonized with a V7 in root position.
In the 19th century, musicians began speaking of three separate minor scales:
The natural:
A B C D E F G
The harmonic:
A B C D E F G#
The melodic:
A B C D E F#G#A G F E D C B A
But, from the medieval perspective, there is only one minor scale - the natural - that is inflected with musica ficta as needed and to taste.
Speculating generally, I believe the time-traveling medieval European musician would understand jazz lines thus: all alterations of modal scales (including Ionian/major and Aeolian/minor) are applications of musica ficta. They are all "altered scales."
For an in-depth explanation of historical European conceptions of mode, please see the two-part video on my channel.
Sounds like EXACTLY my sort of nerdery. Will do!
@@JazzGuitarScrapbook nerds of a feather. And I will further explore your channel! Keep on pluckin
Wasn't Joe Satriani a late student of Lenny Tristano? Also, Alan Holdsworth used to talk about scales that didn't "resolve" in one octave and it sounds like he uses these ideas all over the place with various melodic minor superimpositions. Great video, great channel, a lot of food for thought. Thanks!
Yes Satriani studied with both Tristano and Billy Bauer....
Hi, I just recently discovered this sound via Barry Harris. You can a play C7/diminished scale over G7b9 nat13, it’s basically the IV minor scale you’re talking about with the third added in. A really satisfying and more tonal alternative to symmetric diminished..
So: C D E F G Ab Bb B-over the chord mentioned above
Haven’t done much with the 7-dim scale, interesting to know…
The IVm over the G7 is the important minor of the backdoor dominant?
Aye
Right what you said of Warne Marsh!!! It should have been widely known by now!
Absolutely. Frightening technique. Mark Turner openly admits listening closely to Warne.
@@RalphBrooker-gn9iv But Mark Turner is not interesting as an improvisor!
@@GeoCoppens Lee Konitz thought otherwise. That’s good enough for me.
@@RalphBrooker-gn9iv Where? It happens that I knew Konitz!
@@GeoCoppens He’s recorded with him!!! In any event your’s is a crass, arrogant and more importantly subjective view. As for knowing Lee I don’t care one jot if you’re his brother. If the album Parallels isn’t enough for you then see Lee’s explicit views about Turner in Andy Hamilton’s book *Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Art of Improvisation* . Very disappointing (your comments, not the book; you should read it!).
this is weird. it kind of sounds like the thing i do where i do straight mixo into apreggios from altered (or somilar) to create a smoother leading into the tension. would this be mostly played bottom to top and then released in the I?
There are different patterns and so on you play through it
l really like the way that you're essentially breaking away from the chord/scale that's been trotted out since I first was introduced to John Mehegan's Jazz Piano books back in '69 by a wonderful gentleman who was considered the Oracle in the wilds of Wellington in New Zealand. It seemed too pat to me even then but I took the Kool Aid anyway. [I did learn Roman numeral chord analysis though.] Keep up the good work Christian. Oh and BTW...I wonder if the major 3rd interval you've noticed that's often omitted was the "butta note that Miles told Herbie Hancock to lay off?
I think so!
Although the way I understand that story is it was more Herbie’s interpretation of some half mumbled gnomic utterance lol
If you think of e.g. a chord of C major as synonymous with a chord of A minor then the choice of F melodic minor as a dominant scale of choice makes more sense because that is what you could use over an E7 chord (the E7 sound is also available from the G half/whole scale). Then if you think of a C major chord as like an E minor chord, then the choice of C melodic minor (B7) makes sense and so on...
That's true - I'm not sure it's the way they thought of it though.
@@JazzGuitarScrapbook It could be, Barry Harris seems to think of minor chords as effectively inversions of major 6th chords when improvising and will create inner movements according to that. Maybe this major 6th = minor chord idea has existed since far before Harris?
Hello. This is a very good and insightful video and thank you so much for it.
I would like to ask you to write the name of the guitarist you mention, john "something" (sounds of polish ancestry, I guess the spelling is gonna be somewhat peculiar) and also if you could name/mention some more tunes using these "compound" scales that are different on their low and upper octave. Super interesting. Thanks again.
John Klopotowski, who was kind enough to comment on the video. As for tunes, I must defer. There’s probably some in the Tristano school repertoire but to be honest I don’t know that stuff very well (John’s your man). I’ll be on the lookout tho.
Thank you!!
👍👍👍
Very interesting. Somehow I've never been exposed to Tristano's teaching. I'd add one thing - most often, Bird used the #9 in a triplet with the b9 going down to the root. I wouldn't even think of that as harmonic extensions - I'd consider it as b2-b3-b2 triplet down to the root. It's a melodic embelishment, not a harmonic extension, so the '9' terminology doesn't seem right to me, other than as the commonly used label. Bird also used both diatonic non-chord tones and altered tones over the same chord - so what 'scale' was he using? None at all, I'd say.
Well yeah, the #9 to me normally fits that description - as in, here is A harmonic minor on E7, but going F-G#-F sounds weird so let’s play F-G-F instead. However they are plenty of examples of the #9 being used on a dominant chord harmonically. In this case I’d rather hear it as a b3 blues note. Example: last few notes of Blues for Alice IIRc
The thing that’s dodgy is when people say aha! b9 and #9, ergo altered scale! Even if you subscribe to CST it’s not the overall sound; the b5 for example sticks out. You’d be better off with diminished, but really it comes from mixing up harmonic and natural minor over a dominant. See melody to Blue Bossa for instance.
Otoh you can hear players as swing era oriented like Oscar Moore with Nat and Al Casey with Fats Waller (!) playing 7b13#9 (or tritone subbed dom13) in the 1940s.... so these notes were in play harmonically... go Db13 on a G7 and boom. Django plays similar stuff in the 30s for instance Exactly Like You. In this case it sounds very bluesy. So, this sound may have a longer history with guitarists - presumably a shapes thing. Tristanos melodic minor on dominant concept AFAIK goes back to the late 40s as I mention.
Oh god you can’t shut me up now; Moonlight in Vermont (1944) and Green Dolphin Street (1947) both use that #9-b9-1 (b9-#9-1 in the case of GDS) melodic device on V7. I think it was a popular sound then.
You raise an important point. I read somewhere that Tal Farlow could not play a scale up and down the guitar. Scales were remote from the melodic thinking of these guys, apart from using them to warm up. They thought more about melodic cells and alterations on the informing chord or substitute chords and on what beats all of those things fell.