Key-oriented perspective

It's very common in jazz education to encourage a chord-oriented perspective on improvisation. In many ways, this makes a lot of sense and can be a valuable way of analyzing the music. However, it runs the risk of one failing to see the forest for the trees when applied to many tonal jazz standards, where a key-oriented approach provides a better perspective of how everything really fits together.  It can also lead to more lyrical, melodic lines that can provide a contrast to lines that outline the chord changes more.   Ultimately, I think both perspectives have their place.  Obviously, in tunes that are less tonal, the key-center perspective becomes much less useful.

 I was thinking about this today and thought it would be interesting to look at the diatonic chords in a key, and compare what notes in the key worked where, to get a global view of the relationships. The results are interesting, I think:

Green: works
Orange: mildly dissonant
Red: strong dissonance

What is interesting here is how nearly every note in the key "works" against nearly every chord.  In particular, that scale degrees 2, 3, 5, and 6 can be used anywhere.  Note that this is 4/5 of the major pentatonic scale.  The 7th degree works nearly everywhere (and even the dissonance against the ii chord is fairly mild).  If you take 5, 6, 7, 2, 3, then you have the major pentatonic on the 5th degree as being a pretty much failsafe option against any diatonic chord.    

Also interesting: 

• Nothing conflicts with the IV chord (this is just the scale-oriented version of the observation from the standard chord-oriented perspective that the Lydian mode has no "avoid" note).  

• The 1st and 4th degrees are the only ones that are seriously problematic.  The first degree clashes with the dominant functioning chords (V and vii°) and the 4th degree clashes with the tonic-functioning chords (I and iii, and to a lesser extent, vi).

While I do not advocate mindlessly improvising according to general rules, I do think it is interesting and perhaps helpful to be aware of the relationships in the big picture.  And of course "works" and "doesn't work" is a extremely simplistic framework for understanding relationships, one could conceivably do a much more nuanced chart of how every scale degree and chord relate to one another (and I think that every accomplished improviser does have a personal sense of this, whether or not it is conscious or articulated).

For instance, a very slightly more nuanced chart might be:

Same as above, but add:
Yellow: subtle tension

The fourth degree on a minor chord has a slight tension to it in normal tonal progressions, so one could further refine the chart with this information.  This is moving us a bit in the direction of a chord-oriented approach.  However personally useful this is, it does make the big picture less clear, which is what I meant earlier about missing the forest for the trees.

Then I thought, what about common chromatic chords? So I made the following chart:

Obviously quite a bit more red here, as one might expect in restricting melody choices to diatonic scale degrees while adding in chromatic chords: at least one note in each chord is outside the key.  

Here are my observations:

• The tonic works against all of these common chromatic chords.  

• II7, III7 and VI7 only have one conflict, the 4th of each chord (2, 5, and 6, respectively).  This results in an interesting tetrachord that will work over all three: 1 3 4 7 (the two diatonic half-step pairs).  Although a chord-oriented approach also advises against the 4th degree on a dominant chord, it is interesting to analyze these three dominants according to a chord-oriented approach to observe the differences: II7 (7, 1, 9, +9, 4, 5, 13), III7 (b13/+5, 7, 1, b9, +9, 4, 5), VI7 (+9, 4, 5, b13/+5, 7, 1, 9)—using notes from the key actually encourages the use of altered 9ths and 13ths with respect to the chordal harmony.

• bVII7, a common chord in bebop, works great with the first 5 degrees of the scale (and results in 3,  5,  9, #11, 13 against the chord).

• #iv diminished 7, a troubling chord for a lot of students, works great with the simple 1 2 4 6 7 (rearranged as 6 1 4 7 2 it becomes 3, b5, 7, 11, b13 relative to the chord) 

One of the things that comes from adopting the perspective is that you start to see the key as stable, and the chords as merely temporary events that are happening in the context of the key.  While it's important to be able to zero in on the notes that change (i.e., playing the "changes") it's also effective to emphasize the stable notes that aren't changing.  The simple fact that the 5th degree works over every diatonic chord, for example, could be used as a unifying central element in an improvisation using many other elements.  

I frequently make the observation that any note in a piece of music is simultaneously functioning with respect to the key and with respect to the current chord.  That means that a chord can be stable/tense on two different levels at any given time, and they can agree or conflict (there are 4 different possibilities, obviously with many subtle gradations: key stable/chord stable, key stable/chord tense, key tense/chord stable, key tense/chord tense).  It can be valuable to consider both ways that any note is working.  Here is a chart with a few examples of how things can line up.  In this case, I think it is helpful to consider more subtle shadings of tension, so here I only included unambiguous cases:

Note that any note that is chromatic to the key would be fairly tense—this is an issue often that confuses students when they are told things like "natural 9 is consonant on a diminished chord", which is true (chord-stable), but in many key contexts, the natural 9 of the dim. chord is extremely key-tense.  For example, the common #iv°7 would have #5 of the key, a very tense note, as the 9.  It's not unusable, but it requires extra care to use it musically.  Each particular combination of notes/chords is different, but you can see that there would be at least 3 basic categories of tension: stable (key-stable/chord-stable), mixed tension (key-stable/chord-tense, key-tense/chord-stable) and very tense (key-tense, chord-tense).    

For a practical exercise that has some relationship to all this analysis, see the following post:

http://jazzscience.blogspot.com/2010/12/ear-conditioning.html

This isn't really a methodical theory approach as much as it is just some thoughts and observations that I thought might be helpful. I'll be curious to hear any thoughts you might have in response to these ideas.  

Two Triads Conencted by Chromatic Passing Tone

Okay, here's the first post . . . ready?

This is something I've been working on. It was inspired (somewhat secondhand) by George Garzone. Garzone has a whole triadic concept for improvising that I don't know a whole lot about, but some people who have studied with him have mentioned aspects of it to me in passing (his book is kind of a lot of money, but I hope to check it out at some point). An important part of it is connecting triads chromatically by half step and chromatic whole steps. From what I understand, his thing is pretty involved and deals with how you use different inversions, etc. It results in a interesting kind of inside/outside playing. This is sort of some tangential stuff related to a more general approach to improvising with triads, but focusing on the idea of connecting them chromatically. For this exercise I focus on one of the most common pairs of triads: two major triads a whole step apart (Garzone's idea seems to be about freely moving between more or less random triads and resolving them well into the changes, this is just inspired by one aspect of that, and not really related to trying to do that).

Triad pairs are pretty useful in improvising. The can create a lot of interesting sounds. If the triads have no notes in common, then they represent a hexatonic (6-note scale), which gives you a pretty complete harmonic palette to work with.

One of the most useful/common triad pairs is two major triads a whole step apart.  This is a popular sound, Kurt Rosenwinkel uses it a lot (which is how I first got turned on to it).

From the standpoint of conventional chord-scale theory, these can represent the IV and V chord from either the major or melodic minor scale. This means they work well on almost any chord from the major scale and on any chord from the melodic minor.

Here I present C and D triads, which would be IV and V in G.

The diatonic chords in G major:
Gmaj7 Ami7 Bmi7 Cmaj7 D7 Emi7 F#mi7b5
Of these, the two triads work most easily over:
IV: Cmaj7 (C=1 3 5, D=9 #11 13) and
V: D7 (C=7 9 11, D= 1 3 5)
Not surprising, since they're IV and V . . .

They work over ii (Ami7) as well, especially if it's going to D7.
They also work well over the viiø (F#mi7b5), but you have to be sensitive to resolving the G to F#.

They can work on the I (Gmaj7), but you have to be pretty careful to make sure you resolve the C to a B (the 3rd) at some point.

They work fine on the vi (Emi7), but tend to obscure the function of the chord (to my ear, anyway). Maybe that's what you want. Or maybe it's not a functional chord (like the bridge on Milestones). In that case, they can sound pretty great.

They work over the iii, but mainly if it's a phrygian chord in a modal context, e.g., B7sus4(b9) or C/B or similar sound. Again, that's to my ear. It can work in a functional context if you're really strong with resolving all the tension that's in the C triad.

In G minor:
Gmi(Ma7), Ami7, Bbmaj5(#5#11), C7(#11), D7(#5), Emi7b5, F#7alt
They work great over all these chords. They do obscure the function of the Gmi chord somewhat, but I wouldn't worry about it too much.

That's the basic usage of these two triads. There are other options, but that's the gist of it.
So, while there are lots of ways to make nice lines with just the two triads, connecting them chromatically increases the options for interesting things to happen. Here are a few lines/shapes that give you the basic idea:



Note that the root always moves to the root of the next chord, the third to the third, the fifth to the fifth.
You could connect the third of the C chord to the root of the D chord as well. That creates some less symmetrical patters.

You can connect them by half-step too, but it can only be between the 5th of the C triad (G) and the third of the D triad (F#). There's not a lot of options. Here are some:



I hope you found this interesting, maybe it'll give you some ideas for some other things.

Greetings!

Welcome to my blog!

The purpose of this blog is to share ideas for practicing jazz. I'm going to be posting things that I am practicing or practiced in the past and found useful. I teach as well, and some of these things have come out of stuff that I found to help my students.
I've often wondered what other people are practicing; I think it would be great if a lot of musicians started blogs like this and shared what they're working on.

This is going to be somewhat haphazard, just posting various things from my workbooks. It's not meant to constitute a structured method or be complete or representative. Just some stuff that I find interesting and useful and that others might too.

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www.brianprunka.com

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