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The chromatic scale is useless if you can't imply functional direction. I think what players like Pilc are doing is stretching ideas over layers of functional harmonic substitions. Think of playing an Eb triad and F triad over Cm, but alternating between those triads and Db and B triads. The Db and B triads are very functional if you trace the steps back. They are diatonic triads outlining a Db7 chord... and a Db7 chord is a tritone sub of G7, which is obviously V of the Cm. So you're really just switching back and forth between Cm and G7... nothing fancy at all.

Chris, so are you saying that Footprints and Stolen Moments cannot be played as modal tunes?

Scott, of course I know that a dominant chord half a step away is a Tritone sub.

But you're missing what I'm saying. When Herbie Moves chromatically from Cm7 to C#m7 or back to Bm7, that is not a Tritone sub. Once I start playing that with Fourth voicings, we are in completely different territory.

Very common thing in So What is to play the fourth voicings a step away in the scale. And then start thinking Half-Steps like Ebsus /D, Esus/D Fsus/D, F#sus/D.

Now of course the harmonic movement in scale steps is the melody to Little Sunflower.

Is everything to be viewed as vertical responses to the changes? What happened to common tones?

The reason I view tunes with long stretches of minor chords differently is that the harmony can be made vague by quartal harmony, ala McCoy Tyner.

So when there's opportunity to stretch out of functional harmony, I like to explore a little different approach. Focusing on 1-3-5 on Mr PC at 240bpm for 10 choruses isn't all that interesting to me.

Ehh no.
Both tunes is a modal tune.

Come on, that WAS the blues man. That Prokofiev was a bad mutha. I found myself tapping along and humming the tune.

But hey, in all seriousness, nice stuff. I'm not sure I could read through charts like that without getting a bit frustrated.

These types of movements are still heard functionally, otherwise the tonal gravity of the original harmony is lost.



I don't think there's anything vague about this type of harmonic approach. It would be vague if you couldn't tell what the foundation is... a minor chord.



I don't want to play 1-3-5 for 10 choruses either. But I also don't want to play stuff that doesn't give the sense that Cm is the resting place. Earlier when we were doing recordings of lines without accompaniment, the goal was to make the lines give the sense of the harmonic movement. I think this is the same thing, except when we move away, we have to always give a sense of the underlying stability.

All blues, whether major or minor, can be approached with the blues scale, or with modes... or both at the same time. As long as there is something functional that connects whatever it is you are doing. This is why, in order to be a jazz player in the true sense, we have to understand and absorb the language. We can't just play stuff because we know about some theory to support it. It all has roots in function and that's what makes it work and what makes it jazz. It's evolution and has to be understood that way. The hard part I think, is unravelling it all. I'll be doing that for the rest of my life.

Well, let's agree to disagree then.

Quartal harmony in my mind already implies a vague tonality so if that implies something different to you then of course we'll be coming from different directions. One of the things I do when I play a quartal harmony on minor tunes, or modal minor tunes, is to not continously imply the third of the chord and focus on the 11th instead.

I specifically look to approach my minor chords differently. This is one of the reasons you disagreed with my note choices on Stella, and it was on a minor chord.

Let's just say my modern jazz lessons influences me in a different way. I don't intend to look at all progressions functionally. I think of it based on the intent of the tune. And if I define my approach on a tune as modal, then as far as I'm concerned, all "functional" rules go out the window.

Now of course, one could attack anything functionally, but I'm just leaving the option for myself not to.

McCoy does the same thing with more major tunes as well, and tunes that run through different key centres.
It does lead to a certain flatting out of the harmony, a relaxation of voice leading and dominant-tonic relationship, although he usually brings a bit of that in as well.

Passion dance for example is a more major/dominant tonality primarily

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvmJHprG_Fg

Thanks Sceptical. It does have a kinda blues feel, I guess maybe it investigates the same emotions.
Playing any kind of music can be frustrating maybe, but I am not really reading it, just using the sheet music to jog my memory to remind me how it goes. I am bad at proper memorisation, too lazy for it. I save that mainly for jazz tunes.

I don't know. Blues at its most basic doesn't seem much like functional harmony to me. I can think of no functional reasons why we can play a blues scale over a dominant chord and it sounds good.
Actually I think that one of the interesting things about jazz is the clash between the functional approach (developed from european composers) and the blues lines (originally from african tribal music). Can it get less functional than African tribal music?

I definitely agree about the clash between functional and non-functional... in the strict sense of the term functional. There is certainly no "European" function in African tribal music. So from that perspective, the blues scale creates a clash with the dominant chord. But I tend to think of the root, 5, and b7 as the stable tones and the function of the others is to create tension that releases to those tones. Even in the IV and V chords when playing the I chord blues scale, I think of it as layers of tension and release. The chords are just adding another layer of tension that wants to get back to the I chord. And during the IV chord, the 4 in the blues scale becomes temporarily more stable, the 5 and b7 less stable. Similiar types of shifts in stability happen over the V chord.

I guess this is pretty vague and could be over-analytical, but I think there has to be some kind of function at work, otherwise we could just noodle around on the blues scale and it would sound good. We all know that doesn't work.

I guess I'm just thinking that everything has to have some purpose. And while it's a part of the jazz tradition to invent new ways to express music, it's also part of the tradition to absorb the lineage of the music. In that absorbtion, we find ways of understanding the purpose of things and we can use that understanding to create new things.

I always go back to the analogy to language. If we want to speak a language, we have to understand it. We can't just learn words from the language and put them together any way we want to.

I agree to a point, but music doesn't have the same shared meaning that words have. A word has a (more or less) specific meaning to everybody (who understands the language) but chords or musical phrases do not. The rules of syntax are fairly strict whereas no such rules exist for musical phrases or pieces.



I tend to think that is just what I do, just play around with the notes, putting them in places that appeal to me. I have long since given up trying to work out why some combinations appeal and others don't, as probably somebody else just has a different idea about what sounds good. If I go further I could probably say that any combination of notes would sound good in the appropriate place - hard to prove though as note choice is virtually unlimited.

Beeboss, thanks for that introduction to another new style. I've not worked on a Major/dominant tonality before.

But this is really the crux of the debate. The whole idea to the use of perfect fourths and perfect fifths in jazz was to make the tonality vague and in itself changes the idea of functional harmony. The tune then takes a more modal flavor.

Take the progression (from a minor blues)
| C-7 | C-7 | C-7 | C-7 |
| F-7 | F-7 | C-7 | C-7 |

If you took this functionally, then you'll have to think about outlining C-Eb-G-Bb and F-Ab-C-Eb in the harmony (1-b3-5-b7 of the chord).

This is just one example since I can think of many. Thinking about this modally, if I don't play the thirds of the chord, I can imply this...
| C-11 | C-11 | C-11 | C-11 |
| F-11 | F-11 | C-11 | C-11 |

Now here I'm thinking of the common tones which happen to be D, Eb and F and are shared between the two chords. (9,b3,11 and 13,1,b7 for C-11 and F-11 respectively).

In a functional harmony sense, someone would label my note choices "wrong" harmonically since focusing on extensions like 9, 11, and 13 weaken the function (subdominant or dominant). Chord quality is vague.

But then now we're caught up with the rules and not focusing on modal tunes not really going anywhere. That being the case, then the progression can be substituted further as in:
| C-11 | C#-11 | B-11 | C-11 |
| F-11 | E-11 | Eb-11 | D-11 |

Or to be more accurate, since the bass player doesn't follow this:

| C-11 | C#-11/C | B-11/C | C-11 |
| F-11 | E-11/F | Eb-11/C | D-11/C |

So now what's the rule here? Harmonically someone would be over me like a cheap suit over my note choices. But now I've introduced tension and release within a modal tune.

Now to introduce more tension and release, the above isn't played to the barline. But I just stuck it within the barlines for simplicity.

This is an example of how I think of a lot of tunes. Sometimes I'll look at common tones and skip the function of the progression and stretch a note over.

Scott, we specifically discussed this when you aimed at my note choice of 'A' in | E-7b5 A7b9 | in the opening of Stella. One of the common subs I do is play the E-7b5 as E A Bb D (no b3) or Root-11-#11-b7. I've gotten used to this different sound (probably a modern styling) and now I hear this progression differently and that is with the common tone in mind.

It reminds me of the sub of |Vsus4 V| progression instead of |ii V|, another common reharm.

Maybe everyone thinks my note choices are random.

Another comment on the blues. Now talking about major blues along the lines of what I said earlier.

I learned to think of blues (alternatively) as:
I7 - IValt - Valt.

Now this is an oversimplification since obviously when anyone thinks of Alt, you automatically think tritone sub. But here, I'm thinking more along what I've been taught as the diminished cycle, which means all the subs I can do with dominants a minor third away (so there's always 4 options).

In any case without complicating it further, I just think of the opening I7 as the tonic and thinking of all the dominant subs on the IV and V chords I will in fact have full chromatic access, beyond just the idea of a tritone sub. If I think of the I7 as a tonic, can then think of the IV and V chords and subs thereof as serving to raise tension.

Now Chick's Matrix is an example I drew from here.

I haven't played Blues progressions like that here. Neither have I ever posted a true intervallic playing style. I've used snippets here and there. Partly it's because I'm too concerned about people's response. When I get over that, it might come out someday.

As you can see, I haven't mentioned the Blues scale. Because in my mind, the Blues Scale would be limiting. Intervals like b9, #5 aren't in the Blues scale and were heavily used by Chick. So now you can see why I think Alt instead.

Anyway, this is just a look at my modern jazz influence. I just have to build the confidence to play it like this and the bigger challenge: to hear it ahead of time. Very hard with some of these intervals.

From my point of view, these analogies are taken to levels that may not be so applicable.

For example, there are two kinds of story telling. There's the one with a plot where you build suspense and then there's a climax (equivalent in my mind to a functional progression).

Then there's the "slice of time" story where there's no real plot. This to me is the equivalent of modal playing.

Just my 2 cents.

JW, if you stick to anyone thing it will be limiting whether that is a blues scale or an altered scale. Maybe you could try thinking of them as curries - the altered scale is a hotter curry but we don't necessarily want to blow our heads off with each mouthful, what we need is a balance of flavours.
The blues scale is a tasty flavour in its own right and you can do many things with it. If you play it all the time then the taste buds will get bored but if you ignore it is like a curry without garlic and onion, a necessary flavour has been left out.
McCoy for instance uses those blues pentatonic all the time and he stretches the tonalities often by using different and unexpected pentatonics.

Or try Zawinul
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkfz69dh5X0

Even Chick
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-tmCLZlqVs

I think you are missing something about modal playing. Just because the plot is left up to the player rather than specified in the sequence doesn't mean there is no plot. The player has to work harder to create direction and suspense and release in the narrative, thats all.

In the story analogy, a "slice of time" story has mini plots. I think of the example of nature documentaries. There's moments of tension and release as animals are seen in nature facing life and death. But the ending of a nature documentary isn't necessarily based on some anti-climax thing. You're left to imagine when the actual end is.

I understand that's the difficulty in modal playing, which is why the aspect of creating your own "tension/release" points independent of the form just like that story style. It is very difficult of course to do it. But I think I understand the intent.

Understood. But as you already know, I don't even play it like this here. I'm so afraid to even play like that in public. So I'm at the other extreme.

In a gig for example, I tend to be more diatonic in my choices.

This is where I have to transition into finding my voice and being confident with it. Oftentimes, the analysis here leaves me lacking confidence and then I will tend to go with safety -- diatonic.

Sometimes it takes guts to play the blues with Alt. Or like using only black keys on a B scale over the entire Bb Blues form. I don't even have the guts because I'm thinking I will be criticized.