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It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!
(pun intended) so; is there a method to this madness? I feel quite confident with bebop and what it entails so I thought I'd give this some serious thought. But I find it arbitrary, and the transcriptions I've made doesn't really reveal anything significant in terms of how to apply any "rules". It feels like a whole different mindset then playing bebop. Which I guess it is. I'm also a bit baffled by how simple some of it seems when it's finally on paper. Have anyone else tried to incorporate some of this in their playing later in their "career"? Up until now I have always avoided it cause I believed all it would achieve would have something in common with a really really sad copy of McCoy… Input appreciated, cheers!
Klonk, can you list 4 or 5 songs/tunes that you have in mind. I'll try playing around with just about anything and see what happens. Are you simply talking about McCoy Tyner's style. Amazing but I'm not familiar with his stuff. But do you have some specifics you can give.
BTW, I just listened to "Cantelope Island" by HHancock. Nice inventive blues. I think I'll try playing along with the recording (link below).
KlinkKlonk,what would you like to know exactly.My students asked a similar question to McCoy when he conducted masterclass in my Academy (group of only 10 students) . His answer was: "I know the same theory like all of you .. EVERYTHING WAS SHOWN ME ON PIANO BY COLTRANE HIMSELF ".Since then, theoretical thinking has made some progress...
It doesn't really address your question in relation to MT. But it includes concrete examples from transcriptions and it does show ways of playing "outside" the chord changes.
Here's a transcription of McCoy Tyner playing Passion Dance. The solo is entirely over an Fsus chord so the transcription in essence shows how freely he plays over that chord. Find a few licks in it you particularly like and practice them in 12 keys. Some logic likely will emerge
Nahum, can you elaborate on your statement about McCoy? Was he referring to his breakthrough quartal/penatonic way of playing..Coltrane showed him how to do this? One of McCoy's/Coltranes greatest records was something like "One Up, One Down"..McCoy turns the piano to dust on this..
Klonk, can you list 4 or 5 songs/tunes that you have in mind. I'll try playing around with just about anything and see what happens. Are you simply talking about McCoy Tyner's style. Amazing but I'm not familiar with his stuff. But do you have some specifics you can give.
BTW, I just listened to "Cantelope Island" by HHancock. Nice inventive blues. I think I'll try playing along with the recording (link below).
Nahum, can you elaborate on your statement about McCoy? Was he referring to his breakthrough quartal/penatonic way of playing..Coltrane showed him how to do this?
Exactly! Chord luggage of Tyner we hear in Equinox.
KlinkKlonk,what would you like to know exactly.My students asked a similar question to McCoy when he conducted masterclass in my Academy (group of only 10 students) . His answer was: "I know the same theory like all of you .. EVERYTHING WAS SHOWN ME ON PIANO BY COLTRANE HIMSELF ".Since then, theoretical thinking has made some progress...
Yea I guess it's a pretty vast subject. There seem to be two sides to modal playing . The tunes which features sections of "modal" chords for four or eight bars in which there aren't much sidestepping: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6P4ckoHqlY. I took down this solo by Chick and he's basically just playing the changes relaying heavily on pentatonics without doing any side stepping. And then there's the tunes which consist of one or two chords (impressions, passion dance). I understand the first concept of the playing on "Herzog", not so much the playing on passion dance et al. The question is where, when and how to play outside the harmonies. Especially the "how"; It seems like some of it is based on what the left hand does (passions dance) but I must admit some of it seem pretty random and the lines doesn't sound that good when played in isolation.
I guess each tune has to be tackled differently. At some point I'd would like to be able to play "Impressions", "Passion Dance", "F - blues a'la Matrix" "Softly as in a Morning Sunrise" using these concepts, but it's a long way to go.
And it's not just the outside playing that needs work: I'm a novice with basic pentatonic. cell over all - I'm mostly in tertian territory. I hope that made some sense.
It doesn't really address your question in relation to MT. But it includes concrete examples from transcriptions and it does show ways of playing "outside" the chord changes.
Here's a transcription of McCoy Tyner playing Passion Dance. The solo is entirely over an Fsus chord so the transcription in essence shows how freely he plays over that chord. Find a few licks in it you particularly like and practice them in 12 keys. Some logic likely will emerge
Hope these resources help ...
Thank you Mark, I checked that out earlier in relation to the discussion about Paul Bley ATTYA a while back.
Quote
Find a few licks in it you particularly like and practice them in 12 keys. Some logic likely will emerge
This is where I'm at. Just waiting for the logic bit…
To make it easier to analyse, push it back one beat so it starts on 1 (the downbeat of the measure). Play it like that and you may see that it breaks into two chords - F7sus4 (one measure) followed by Cm7 (one measure).
That tells you that McCoy's art is about connecting things. But notice there's a rhythmic component to it. Which is we push the whole lick back to start on the downbeat ONLY to see more clearly how it breaks into F7sus4 followed by Cm7. (Someone might want to call that minor 7th chord a pentatonic scale ... well, ok, sure).
So that rhythmic component: McCoy starts the lick on beat 2 which means those two chords that follow each other (F7sus4 and Cm7) flow across the bar line. Meaning McCoy connects chords like that (or scales) one after another but he often hides the connection by shifting the chords or scales so they flow across the bar line. In other words the connections often aren't on downbeats. But they could be .....
If you want, play the Cm7 chord up a 1/2 step as C#-7. The lick will still work. Or play it down a half step as B-7. The lick will still work. If you harmonise the licks with corresponding chords voiced in 4ths (move up or down a 1/2 step as the case may be) you'll still be in the parameters of McCoy's style.
Some caveats:
1. Are there other ways to analyse this lick? YES. OF COURSE.
2. Did McCoy think of it like this? WHO KNOWS? Actually, the answer most likely is NO ... He didn't think about it. HE HEARD IT AND PLAYED IT.
3. Mileage may vary when we analyse transcriptions because some of the licks will be easy to explain and others will defy explanation. But that's the fun of it.
.... Another entirely different way to analyse this lick is to break it into groups of 3 and 2 eight notes. And go from there ....
But to be clear about analysis ... it comes after the fact. Because the music comes first. Usually in the moment theory won't help at all because the music goes by too fast to think about theory. So the gold standard is hearing the lick and playing it. The theory is an afterthought .... something we can see and use and try to get some advantage from it. But hearing this stuff ... that really is the key.
Hope this helps ... it's a way of looking at things. But it's definitely not the only way ..... Charlie Banacos used to call this style chord-on-chord. But that's a different discussion ....
First we have to understand the phenomenon "play out" itself.
Outside of what? - Outside of chords, scales, tonality . This phenomenon is not entirely new, even the very old, and is not associated with the occurrence of modal jazz, but with the drama in ancient Greece (although not direct manner) . It has been called: melodeclamation . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melodeclamation
Melodeclamation ,of course, has become an integral part of the church service, and being aware of the strong religious feelings of Coltrane, we can assume that it affected him in terms of transform music intonations in intonation of ecstatic speech.Research European languages have shown that they do not contain the exact pitches and intervals , and their boundaries are blurred.
None of the sounds, which says MLC is not part of a single chord in the background. Why it does not prevent? I guess we perceive melodeclamation as the connection of two parallel processes, each containing its own logic related to the generality of time, generality of character,, intonations, groove ; that balances the lack of harmonic and tonal relationships. Stage of transformation of musical melody in human speech in Western music falls at the beginning of the 20th century in the works of A. Schoenberg and A .Berg. Jazz took the same path up to 45 years later. The question about the connection with pentatonic scale refers to musical traditions of art, where happens this transformation.
Play outside can be within any harmonic system including a conventional tonality . Here chromatic transformation of a fragment of a solo Parker "Anthropology." The general logic hasn't changed, but it has become similar to Eric Dolphy))
To make it easier to analyse, push it back one beat so it starts on 1 (the downbeat of the measure). Play it like that and you may see that it breaks into two chords - F7sus4 (one measure) followed by Cm7 (one measure).
That tells you that McCoy's art is about connecting things. But notice there's a rhythmic component to it. Which is we push the whole lick back to start on the downbeat ONLY to see more clearly how it breaks into F7sus4 followed by Cm7. (Someone might want to call that minor 7th chord a pentatonic scale ... well, ok, sure).
So that rhythmic component: McCoy starts the lick on beat 2 which means those two chords that follow each other (F7sus4 and Cm7) flow across the bar line. Meaning McCoy connects chords like that (or scales) one after another but he often hides the connection by shifting the chords or scales so they flow across the bar line. In other words the connections often aren't on downbeats. But they could be .....
If you want, play the Cm7 chord up a 1/2 step as C#-7. The lick will still work. Or play it down a half step as B-7. The lick will still work. If you harmonise the licks with corresponding chords voiced in 4ths (move up or down a 1/2 step as the case may be) you'll still be in the parameters of McCoy's style.
Some caveats:
1. Are there other ways to analyse this lick? YES. OF COURSE.
2. Did McCoy think of it like this? WHO KNOWS? Actually, the answer most likely is NO ... He didn't think about it. HE HEARD IT AND PLAYED IT.
3. Mileage may vary when we analyse transcriptions because some of the licks will be easy to explain and others will defy explanation. But that's the fun of it.
.... Another entirely different way to analyse this lick is to break it into groups of 3 and 2 eight notes. And go from there ....
But to be clear about analysis ... it comes after the fact. Because the music comes first. Usually in the moment theory won't help at all because the music goes by too fast to think about theory. So the gold standard is hearing the lick and playing it. The theory is an afterthought .... something we can see and use and try to get some advantage from it. But hearing this stuff ... that really is the key.
Hope this helps ... it's a way of looking at things. But it's definitely not the only way ..... Charlie Banacos used to call this style chord-on-chord. But that's a different discussion ....
Thanks Mark, you're right about the hearing thing. One would need to get these things into ones head and fingers first... About the phrase you quoted: to me this seems like something derived from the melody, and the most simple way to look at it for me would be the two triads Eb and F. There's quite a lot you can do with only those six notes that would make sense in context of the tune.
First we have to understand the phenomenon "play out" itself.
Outside of what? - Outside of chords, scales, tonality . This phenomenon is not entirely new, even the very old, and is not associated with the occurrence of modal jazz, but with the drama in ancient Greece (although not direct manner) . It has been called: melodeclamation . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melodeclamation
Melodeclamation ,of course, has become an integral part of the church service, and being aware of the strong religious feelings of Coltrane, we can assume that it affected him in terms of transform music intonations in intonation of ecstatic speech.Research European languages have shown that they do not contain the exact pitches and intervals , and their boundaries are blurred.
None of the sounds, which says MLC is not part of a single chord in the background. Why it does not prevent? I guess we perceive melodeclamation as the connection of two parallel processes, each containing its own logic related to the generality of time, generality of character,, intonations, groove ; that balances the lack of harmonic and tonal relationships. Stage of transformation of musical melody in human speech in Western music falls at the beginning of the 20th century in the works of A. Schoenberg and A .Berg. Jazz took the same path up to 45 years later. The question about the connection with pentatonic scale refers to musical traditions of art, where happens this transformation.
I'm sure you're right, I just don't see how to make this more concrete. That said, I though your MLK clip was badass. One of my problems is due to looking at music vertically for the longest time - blame Mark Levine.
Klink, you're 101% correct that you could look at it as two triads (which gives you a six note scale if you'd like) and mentioning that it comes from the melody. Jerry Bergonzi has a book about the two triads sort of thing. The book is Hexatonics.
I like my way of looking at that lick because (a) it takes the rhythmic dimension of MT's solo into account (rather than notes only) and (b) it's maybe a little simpler looking at it that lick as two distinct groups that follow each other (chain together), rather than two triads broken into bits that are interwoven and (c) each of the two groups fits nicely under the hand, which is to say fingering is almost built into the lick if you look at it as two groups.
But having said all above, it's opinion and a choice. Your way (the hexatonic way!) is perfectly good–and that it is perfectly good is one of the reasons I said in my post that there are other ways to look at it. If you do go down the hexatonic road then that F major triad can also get combined with any other triad (which is what/how Jerry Bergonzi shows in his book).
The saxophonist George Garzone has a method for linking 4 triads together that cover all 12 notes. Then he uses his linked chains of triads to solo over chord changes.
You might also take a look at Chick Corea's Matrix solo. Here's a slow motion transcription on Youtube
It also has plenty of stuff to analyze in terms of two triads (hexatonics) and it's a textbook of how to move in and out of changes. The recording it's from - Now He Sings, Now He Sobs - has been transcribed (all tunes on the recording) completely by Bill Dobbins. It's well worth having.
Anyway it sounds like you're on the path and I hope all above is helpful. And well said:
Originally Posted by KlinkKlonk
looking at music vertically for the longest time - blame Mark Levine.
I'm sorry, I do not speak slang, and do not understand the expression. Anyway, I made a number of similar files with voices of Satchmo, Richard Burton and Red Rodney with the intention to explore the relationship between rhythm and intonation of spoken and musical languages regarding the use in improvisation, especially free improvisation. An example for me was Ermeto Paskoal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVajWqWdEco
Originally Posted by KlinkKlonk
I'm sure you're right, I just don't see how to make this more concrete.
It can be said simply: if you build on the given harmony the phrase , which is logical in a rhythm and melodic intonation - you can play ANY  NOTES! However, required to comply with the proportions and smooth transitions. This is due to the fact that the appearance of alien notes sharply increases the degree of dissonance; so the entrance to  outside playing must take place smoothly, without unnecessary jumps .This can be based on the same notes relating to completely different chords; or melodic shift in seconds :
A)(Dm7 | G7 |C maj7||)
|| G- ↓A-↑E-G -F-E- C# - D | Eb -Gb-Bb-F- Ab-G - F - B | D-B-C-F# //||
B) D-E-F-↑C -Bb -Ab -Eb -D | Db-C-B-Bb- A -F# _C# -D | E---||
The degree of escape from a given harmony and its duration varied in the history of jazz - just as it did in "serious music". Already Parker has shifted forward and backward in melodic harmony compared to the accompaniment : the tonic above the dominant and vice versa.
PS Klink Klonk, if you want learn to think melodically, is worth to be engaged in imitation of your talk pitches on piano. By the way, on melodica is much easier ...
I have a couple of things to submit to the coversation. Fist how I would try to teach Passion Dance to someone. I'd have them get familiar with some arpeggios. Especially Fmaj and Cm7. McCoy is doing a lot of riffing. Not sure of all he's doing, but I noticed the left hand seems to do a lot of perfect 4th triads based on F (Bb and Eb) and G (C and F). The Cm7 is the most utilitarian thing to start with I believe. Anyway here is my slowed down example. I played open 5ths in the left hand. Excuse any messups.
My second thing is I wrote a sketch in what I think is a common (I won't call it a cliched) Blue Note style. It's just a quick fun thing. I called it "Ode To Van Gelder".
![[Linked Image]](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19895150/passiondance.png)
![[Linked Image]](http://s929.photobucket.com/user/jazzman1945/media/Pent.modal_zpsip66wvvg.jpg.html)
