This is a video that discusses how to think about the notes that we play. Why I think in note names as well as intervals and why you need different things to play jazz solos.
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Music theory can help you learn faster and have more options. Here’s how you work on making that a part of your practice and playing!
I think Jazz is almost considered music theory turned into music by a lot of people, and mostly by people who don’t actually play Jazz. That’s, of course, not really true but at the same time it is really useful to learn some Music theory if you want to learn Jazz and it can really help you learn a lot faster and get much more out of the things that you practice and transcribe. But it is also important that you go about it in the right way so that it does not become a weird set of rules that stops you from using your ears.
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The Harmonic minor scale is a very distinct sound and it is one of the cornerstones in the songs we play. It is also just a beautiful color that you can add to your solos. In this video, I am going to show you how you can apply the harmonic minor scale to some chords and get some great sounds.
I sometimes see people comment that you don’t need the harmonic minor scale, I think this video will clearly show you why you don’t want to miss it.
I am going to apply it to 3 chords, and to have some chords that you can use we need to just check out the diatonic chords in harmonic minor.
A harmonic minor – What we use it for and why
A harmonic minor is: A B C D E F G# A
The diatonic 7th chords of A harmonic minor would be:
AmMaj7 Bø Cmaj7(#5) Dm7 E7 Fmaj7 G#dim
The 3 chords that I am going to focus on are the 3 last diatonic chords: E7, Fmaj7 and G#dim.
Two are extremely common and in a lot of songs and one is a very specific sound that is a great way to change things up a bit and a good introduction to poly chords.
One way to understand Harmonic minor is to see it as a minor scale that Is changed so that we have a dominant chord.
The A natural minor scale has these diatonic chords:
Am7 Bø Cmaj7 Dm7 Em7 Fmaj7 G7
A harmonic minor A B C D E F G# A has these diatonic chords: AmMaj7 Bø Cmaj7(#5) Dm7 E7 Fmaj7 G#dim
You want to have a dominant chord to really hear that the piece is in A minor. This is the primary function for A harmonic minor
E7 – In Minor and in Major
In this scale we have an E7 with a b9 and a b13:
E G#B D F A C
You get this chord by stacking 3rds in the scale.
This gives us these E7 chords shown below. Of those three the E7(b9,11) is not that nice, but the E7(b9,b13) is a great description of how the dominant sounds.
And some of the arpeggios that work well for this chord would be:
Using E7 from harmonic minor
You can use the E7 in a minor II V I like this:
But it also works great in a major cadence as a surprising sound that quickly resolves back to the tonic:
G#dim – More than just A minor progressions
If you look at the A harmonic minor scale and the key of A minor then the G#dim is a dominant chord that wants to resolve to the tonic
Notice that I don’t use harmonic minor on the tonic chord, I am using melodic minor which is a more common tonic minor sound.
The “difficult” dim chord
But in Jazz we mostly come across subdominant diminished chords, and here the harmonic minor scale is also very useful. Mostly the diminished chord is then written as an Abdim chord like this in F major:
Am7 Abdim Gm7 C7 Fmaj7
The way you arrive at the A harmonic minor scale here is by altering the F major scale:
F major: F G A Bb C D E F
And if you want to fit the dim chord in there then we need an Ab(or G#) and a B:
F G# A B C D E F = A harmonic minor
An example of a line sounds like this:
Fmaj7(#9,#11) – Harmonic Minor Poly Chord
This chord is not very common, in fact I don’t think it is in any Jazz Standards I know. It is however a great different sound that you can use to play something surprising in a solo. Monk used this chord in Round Midnight and Wayne Shorter uses it in Speak No Evil.
This chord is in fact the diatonic chord on F in the scale:
A harmonic minor: A B C D E F G# A
Fmaj7(#9,#11) : F A C E G# B
You could look at this as being an E major triad over an F major triad.
The way you usually play this chord on guitar is like this where you leave out the 5th of the lower triad:
A line using this sound as a substitute for a tonic F major chord:
Melodic Minor – The Other Cornerstone
Harmonic minor is a cornerstone in tonal harmony and is what you want to use for a lot of essential chords in a key. Another very important and also very beautiful minor sound that sounds really great on especially tonic minor chords is melodic minor. If you want to check out this scale and how to use it then this video will really give you something to work with.
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Most of the time the one thing that holds you back from really understanding Music Theory or using an idea on several different chords is a really simple part of what is going on.
A big part of what having a good overview of music theory is to be able to think in different layers. You can think of the notes you play as individual notes but also as groups of notes like arpeggios, scales or other melodic ideas. But you need the basic overview of the material to be able to do this.
Content:
0:00 Intro – The Basics Are What is Holding You Back
0:21 Three Layers of understanding what is going on
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A thing that is never mentioned when it comes to Music Theory is that there is a basic knowledge you want to obtain and then the rest gets easier. There are things that you need to know and work on that will make the rest very simple when combining Music Theory, Jazz Guitar and Practice.
In this video I am going to talk about three things you can learn or train for your music theory that will help you build a foundation to have an easier time understanding chord progressions, extensions and voice-leading. I am also going to relate this to what you need if you are improvising over chords, since that is what I am using the theory for.
Instead of looking at voice-leading upper-structure triad pairs in Utopian b7 minor then you can easily build the basic knowledge to make all the other stuff easy to understand.
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It is not surprising that a Coltrane solo isn’t bebop, but it is interesting to figure out why that is the case. Understanding what types of licks or melodies are typical for a style of music is a really good description of what is going on.
The solo that I am talking about in this video is John Coltrane’s solo on the F blues – Take the Coltrane off the Coltrane/Ellington album from 1963.
In the video I am presenting an analysis of the solo with a focus on the melodies, there placement and function in the form and not only the notes that are being used. I find that it takes a more detailed view to understand a solo than just what scales are being used.
Let me know what you think?
A few thoughts on this Coltrane solo Analysis
As always music is not an exact science so this solo has a lot of traits that are really not bebop sounding but it still contains examples of normal bop lines and chromatic passing notes etc. So clearly Coltrane is rooted in that tradition even if he is moving away from it.
I am going to talk about this using three examples from the solo but it can be a good idea to check out the whole solo. There are a lot of transcriptions online so you can easily find that and listen to the solo.
Some of the things that are different are about the choice of sounds, but in my opinion it is more about how the sounds are used and the melodies than what scale. I am curious what you think?
Melodies without direction and not playing blues
What is interesting about this first part of the solo: He doesn’t play the 3rd of the chord at all for the first 8 bars, that is very different from bebop where everything is tied much more closely to the chord. Here the melodic statement is very strong and fairly long but it is intentionally vague. If you play the melody it could fit on a Cm blues just as easily as a F blues which is not really going to be the case for a Parker or Stitt solo. There is a Wes solo that does this as well and Wes would often sit heavily on the “II” sound on a V chord.
The 2nd 4 bars is a development of the first 4 but then moving with the chords, still not playing the 3rd of the chords.
So this is really about what note he isn’t playing and it becomes even more clear when we don’t have the piano comping.
Unresolving Tensions and Angular melodies
This example illustrates how the approach is much more modal. Coltrane is very often playing melodies that fit the chord but are not really functional and moving forward towards the next chord.
This is clear in the first bars where there is first an angular statement just using an F7 arpeggio. In fact using the 2nd inversion F major triad which Coltrane seems obsessed with in this solo.
A great example of how the emphasis is on sound rather than function is the Altered dominant in bars 3 and 4 of this example. Here there is a clear altered or tritone sound and the b5 is really at the center of the line, but the line is not resolved. It stops before changing and the statement on the Bb7 is unrelated to the altered line.
The last part of this example is demonstrating how the chords are interpreted. The statement on the Bb7 is turned into a motief that is moved down in half steps to give us an Am7 Abm7 Gm7 progression.
Another thing that shows how this is less functional is that the final II V is replaced with C7 Bb7 in the song taking away the main cadence of the Jazz Blues.
Super-imposed Pentatonic Scales
Coltrane doesn’t really use normal blues phrasing a lot in this solo and here he does use Fm pentatonic in a way that is really typical for everybody who came after him. I think it is important to notice that using Fm pentatonic on a Blues in F is something that is quite rare with the bop guys. Pentatonic scales are not really a part of bebop in the way they are used as a sound here.
The blues phrases of Joe Pass and Charlie Parker are quite different and much more a mix of major and minor.
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A chord that isn’t in the key isn’t always a modulation. There are many chords that you will come across in songs that music theory does not describe as a modulation.
In this video I talk a bit about some of those progressions of chords. Show an example of something that is a modulation and a few progressions that are not modulations but still contain chords that are not found in the scale.
The way I view music theory is that it is a description of the music that I play that helps me understand and hear what is going on. In most genres of music you will find a lot of chords that are maybe not diatonic to the scale but are still in the key. Examples of this are found as secondary dominants, modal interchange or borrowed chords from the parallel key.
Besides my rant on how people get things wrong with Music Theory this video is also on some of the things that you are missing if you don’t use music theory right or forget to check out important parts. When you study Jazz or Jazz Guitar then music theory is a part of what you need and what you want to learn, but you want to go about it the right way.
Most of the things I talk about in here are mistakes or problems that you run into if your approach to music theory is very superficial. Hopefully I also manage to give some pointers to a better approach to learn and use music theory so that it is actually useful for you.
Do you make these mistakes? Do you know other things that mistakes that are common?
Music Theory is like every other aspect of music, you need to work at it from the ground up and you will only get the benefit of it if you use it in what you play! In this video I will talk a bit about what the very fundamental things are that you need to know well and why you need to know that part of Music Theory. I will also talk about why you should apply it and how it will benefit your playing.
