"Keep it simple."
But there isn't a simple solution to the VI7(♭13 ) chord, i.e. in Bourbon Street Parade, Sheik of Araby, Whispering, Rock-a-Bye Your Baby, Wait 'Till the Sun Shines Nellie, and who knows how many other tradjazz warhorses.
This chord has been the bane of my existence for as long as my ears have been awake to it. In my nightmares and often in real life too, it goes down something like this:
If the melody player knows one note of the actual melody, it's probably the ♭13, because that's the highest, tensest note in the chart. So the cherry is always on top, no matter what kind of sundae is on the menu that day.
The bass player has been scolded to "keep it simple," and so given any G chord, the options are G and D. That's it. The language used to describe bass players who play notes other than G and D is even less flattering than the old joke about players who can do only this. So, "simply" put, this is a dominant chord, shit runs downhill, and payday is on Friday.
The chord player, meanwhile, has been playing these songs for decades and hasn't looked at a chart in years, but they know that G-B-Eb forms an augmented triad, hence that we are dealing here with a Black Sheep offshoot of the Augmented family, and that the remaining members of this clan are A-C#-F. And although the chord player is too tasteful to overdo it, planing is definitely a thing, and so planing there will be.
In other words, if everyone narrowly assimilates to their role, eventually there will be at least one C#-D-Eb pile-up, and probably more than one. This is especially likely in Sheik where the chord just sits there for two whole bars at medium tempo. If there are more than a couple of solos then there almost certainly will be a D-Eb-E pile-up too. This is the tradjazz version of thematic development.
I'm being extremely pedantic and a bit viscious here, but I promise there is a point to it.
The point is: the bass and chord players can't treat this chord as either a straight dominant OR augmented chord, because IT IS NEITHER of those things. By the most obvious analysis it is only one note away, but that analysis is so misleading as to deserve to be labeled actually "wrong." The functional diatonic weighting and countour of this chord are unique in tonal music. Hence there also is no point in everyone simply agreeing to treat it as straight dominant or augmented. That doesn't fit any of these melodies anyway, as parties to any such agreement will be quickly and viscerally reminded; but even if it did there would be much lost and nothing gained this way.
Technically, in the case of the above-named tunes, I believe this chordscale is best analyzed as "fifth mode of harmonic (or melodic) minor";
i.e. G7(♭13 ) = C harmonic (or melodic) minor starting on G;
but that is far too verbose to be useful, especially for tradjazzers who would rather live with the clams than bring this kind of talk into the band. So, I propose we label it the "Dixieland Nightmare" chord, in honor of an offhand remark that was once made to me by a bandleader.
In high school and college this chord used to drive me nuts as a listener, but now it drives me nuts as a bass (function) player.
Staying with G7 as the working example:
If the melody shuttles between E-flat and D, then both of those notes are out; C is outest-of-out, as always; and there is an unresolved ambiguity even in what I consider to be the "correct" reference analysis of the chord, namely: are we using harmonic or melodic minor? i.e. Is it A or A-flat? So even there, one of the most obvious "simple"-but-hip solutions, the G-A-B walkup, comes with the same risk of a pile-up.
And so . . . buckle up, hornheads! The F is a really attractive option. The F is both minimally consonant AND minimally risky. So, we can walk DOWN, G to F; we can even do one full bar of each if we must; and this is a very elegant solution! Most days it seems to me like the ONLY elegant solution. The problem (for others, not for me) is that this lands us on the third of the impending C7 chord. Unless you're dealing with exceptionally hardheaded necrophile purists, this is also quite elegant against the resolution to D in the melody. There are two problems, though. (1) Those necrophiles ARE out there; and (2) generally putting the third on the bottom in this style IS actually pretty destabilizing, and people get annoyed with it when it happens all the time; that is why bass players are so often admonished to "keep it simple" even where doing so creates clams rather than preventing them.
So, as nice as this line is, you can't play it every time. Probably you can only play it once per song, and there are likely to be more choruses than there are unique workable solutions. You can probably get away with the G-A-B walkup, one way or another. I often find myself ghosting the dangerous note in those once-bitten-twice-shy moments. And again, "keeping it moving" IS a viable alternative to "keeping it simple": you can fill-ghost with G-A-B♭-B such that the NCTs really are placed and articulated like NCTs and the anchors like anchors; and this (I really REALLY mean this) usually leads to better results and happier sidespersons as compared with letting some necrophile talk you into "keeping it simple."
"You played a Bb under a G7 chord!" Sure did. If you want to fight about it, fight with Messrs. J.S. Bach and P. Chambers, for starters. Just realize that you're fighting the music that came BEFORE tradjazz at least as much as the music that came after it; you're not just damming the backwash, you're damming the headwaters too. That is really Somethin' Else!
7 comments:
Donald Francis Tovey
The Forms of Music
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"COUNTERPOINT
"...the art defined by Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley as that of 'combining melodies' ... This neat definition is not quite complete. Classical counterpoint is the conveying of a mass of harmony by means of a of a combination of melodies. Thus the three melodies combined by Wagner in the Meistersinger Prelude do not make classical counterpoint, for they require a mass of accompanying harmony to explain them. That accompaniment explains them perfectly and thereby proves itself to be classical counterpoint, for its virtue lies in its own good melodic lines, both where these coincide with the main melodies and where they diverge from them. From this it will be seen that current criti cism is always at fault when it worries as to whether the melodies are individually audible in a good piece of counterpoint.
"... nearly every harmonic fact is in its origin a phenomenon of counterpoint. Instrumental music develops harmony in unanalysed lumps, as painting obliterates draughtsmanship in masses of colour; but the underlying concepts of counterpoint and draughtsmanship remain."
Tovey (cont. #1)
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"FUGUE
...
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...
"... A fugal exposition is not intended to emphasize a key-contrast between tonic and dominant. Accordingly the answer is (especially in its first notes and in points that tend to shift the key) not so much a transposition of the subject to the key of the dominant as an adaptation of it from the tonic part to the dominant part of the scale or vice versa; in short, the answer is as far as possible on the dominant, not in the dominant. This is effected by a kind of melodic foreshortening on principles of great aesthetic interest but difficult to reduce to rules of thumb. The rules as often as not produce answers that are exact transpositions of the subject; and so the only kind of 'real' fugue (i.e., fugue with an exact answer) which could rightly be contrasted with the tonal fugue would be that in which the answer ought to be tonal but is not."
Tovey (cont. #2)
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"HARMONY
...
"... while the abstraction of harmony from instrumentation is as legitimate and necessary as the abstraction of draughtsmanship from colour, the abstraction of harmony from counterpoint cuts music adrift from its foundations ...
...
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...
"The terms 'augmented' and 'diminished' should be applied only to chromatic intervals, that is to say, to intervals of which one note is foreign to the scale of reference. There is in every scale one fourth that is greater than perfect (F to B in the scale of C) and one imperfect fifth (B to F). This diatonic enlarged fourth is called the tritone. Intervals are 'inverted' by raising the lower note to a higher octave; thus the imperfect fifth is the inversion of the tritone fourth
...
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"... Acoustics tell us that the rapid 'beats' that distress the ear in harsh combinations are due to the periodic reinforcements and weaknesses that occur as the waves get in and out of phase with each other. When these beats are so rapid as to produce a note of their own, this resultant tone may or may not be pleasant; the painful stage of beats is that in which they are noticeable, as a flickering light is noticeable. Combinations that are out of beating distance may set up beats between the upper note and the octave harmonic of the other. On this criterion, thirds and sixths, especially the minor sixth, are rougher than many combinations that rank as discords, or than some that have never been digested in classical harmony, such as the seventh overtone.
"The art of music had not attained to the simplest scheme for dealing with discords before it traversed the acoustic criterion in every direction. It became a language in which sense dictated what should be accepted in sound. The minor sixth, as the inversion of the major third, occurs in many positions of what has come to be the most fixed chord in music, the major triad. On the other hand, a discord beyond beating-distance will have no beats if it is produced in a timbre that has no octave overtones; but if its sense has come to be that of a discord, its timbre will not make it a concord."
Tovey (cont. #3)
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...
"...in listening to polyphony the mind can appreciate the parts two at a time; and the sixteenth-century theorists avoid reasoning as if the mind could do more. They were probably right as well as cautious; nor is it necessary that the mind should attempt more. For any fault in the aggregate of the richest polyphony must be a fault between two parts. If it concerns more, then it is more than a single fault; and if there are no faults, the ear enjoys the faultless aggregate whether it can distinguish the parts or not. ...
...
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...
"In practice these modes are not always easy to ascertain. The B natural in Lydian tonality is so difficult to handle that the great masters almost always flattened it permanently and put the
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flat as a key-signature, thus producing an Ionian mode transposed, or plain modern F major. ... The Phrygian mode cannot form an authentic cadence; and its plagal cadence sounds to our ears like a half-close on the dominant of A minor. This is quite final enough for modal harmony; but a very slight impulse may make Palestrina reverse the cadence and so end with a chord of A. This does not make the mode Aeolian, and, though the Aeolian mode looks as if it was the origin of our minor scale, true Aeolian polyphony is of all harmonic styles the most remote from modern music. The Dorian and Phrygian modes are much nearer to our notions of a well-grounded minor key. The Ionian mode is identical with our major key; and Mixolydian tonality is like a major key with either an excessive emphasis on the sub-dominant or a top-heavy and finally prevalent dominant.
"Extraneous sharps constantly come into modal music through the necessity of providing major penultimate chords in authentic cadences, as well as final major thirds for minor modes. Flats were no less often necessary to correct the tritone fourth between F and B ... The rules governing these accidentals were so well known that singers resented the providing of the signs where the need of such musica ficta was self-evident. On the other hand, many of the most mystical harmonies ... were the gifts of creative imagination equally remote from modal theory and modern tonality. Brahms understood modal harmony much better than the critics who blame him for violating the modes of folk-songs ... If you want to set old tunes without using leading-notes and changes of key you should not harmonize them at all.
...
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...
"Here is an extreme case in which the ordinary rules of musica ficta give results which strain the nineteenth-century theorist and compel him to discover 'double roots' and other cabalistic secrets.
Example 12
"The bass singer, knowing his rules of musica ficta, would be insulted at such a 'donkey's mark' as a flat to the B for the purpose of correcting the inadmissible tritone ... The treble singer would automatically sharpen his G, under the impression that he was making a close on A; and so the augmented sixth, one of the most complex discords known to Bach and Mozart, did frequently occur in sixteenth-century performances and was not always regarded as a blunder. In Ex. 12 the treble singer would happen to be mistaken in sharpening the G, for it is not really part of a close on to A. The close is on to D, and the middle singer would recognize its leading-note without the aid of 'donkey's marks'. ..."
Tovey (cont. #4)
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...
"VI. THOROUGH-BASS
"The great classical tradition cares little for the study of chords as things in themselves; and the art of harmony perishes under a discipline that separates its details from counterpoint and its larger issues from form. An excellent means of mastering a good harmonic vocabulary is to practise the filling-out of classi-
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cal figured basses at the keyboard; in other words, to exercise the function of the continuo-player ... Fluency in such a practice does not of itself confer the ability to produce original harmony, but it means that music can be read with understanding. It is an empiric craft. But it had the misfortune to become a science, when, early in the eighteenth century, Rameau discovered the theory of the fundamental bass. ... The conception is true only of the most obvious harmonic facts; beyond them it is as vain as the attempt to ascertain your neighbour's dinner from a spectrograph of the smoke from his chimney. The augmented sixth which arose so innocently in Ex. 12 requires a double root. The first chord of Beethoven's Sonata in E flat, op. 31, no. 3, is an 'eleventh' with
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its root on the dominant in flat defiance of the fact that the dominant is the most inconceivable bass-note in the whole passage until it arrives as a climax in the sixth bar. But musical fundamentalists refuse to look six bars ahead.
"Philip Emmanuel Bach, in conversation with Dr. Burney ... , said that Rameau's theory was 'childish, for it reduces all music to full closes'. This is perfectly true, and the theory did no harm to eighteenth-century French music, which eschewed long sentences and seldom strayed far from the regions of the full close. But in England Rameau's doctrine raged unchecked by taste or common sense, ...
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... The remedy lies in cultivating vivid impressions of the actual relations between counterpoint and harmony in detail, between tonality and form in general, and between key-relations and chromatic chords. To this end, thorough-bass should be cultivated not on paper but at the keyboard, ..."
When I was in college I spent a fair amount of time at the keyboard "cultivating" just such "vivid impressions", both for school (soul-killing Damschroederian textbook drudgery) and on my own (starting with an Aebersold publication called Jazz Piano Voicings for Non-Pianists and eventually graduating to Levine's The Jazz Piano Book. All of this works. Only later did I find that playing bass (function) in Polka and Dixieland bands is almost as good, maybe better. Much as I loathed the drudgers and the drudgery, every word of Tovey's above is borne out in the latter domains. For me, the keyboard, though certainly preferable to "paper" for these purposes, was most valuable for its tactile quality; that is the part you really miss when your primary instrument can only sound one note at a time. But INSTRUMENTATION is what really brings the wolves out; and moreover, the loosening of protocol and structure in jazz as against "classical" music is what really gets you to listen hard (for a while). And though I ultimately cast my lot with Modernism and against Revivalism, it's undeniable that what is nowadays called Jazz Theory is too often guilty precisely of treating "chords as things in themselves." The counterpoint between lead and bass is taken for granted as such, and while that's a safe enough bet with accomplished players, I suspect that the deluge of mindless wankery that prevails pretty much everywhere else almost always traces back to "chords in themselves" thinking.
Nominee for christening as the "reverse nightmare" chord:
towards the end of Avalon,
on the very word "Avalon" in fact,
is a VI7 chord with the 9 in the melody
i.e.
usually (hopefully) in F,
it's a D7 with melody E-D-E ("AV-a-LON__")
but
after six choruses of solo
the D7 may have acquired a preparatory Amin7(b5),
or A7(#11),
or who knows what other predominant specimen;
or the D7 itself has spouted a flat 9,
as would almost always be assumed IF the nat 9 weren't in the melody
hence we just might be visited again by our Nightmare cluster.
This one is the "reverse" and the other one is the straighty because here the melody lands on the Locrian tonic, whereas in the original (Sheik) example the melody lands on the Lydian tonic. (I don't know if Russell applies this terminology to modes besides Lydian, but it seems necessary to have the option.) Meaning what exactly? The melody E in F major is almost already an "upper structure," so usually you can get away with a lot; you can easily make it jazz-consonant with any of the other six notes, even the Bb; the "sense" of jazz "harmony", even in Dixieland, is such as to permit this, "classical" sense be damned. But try the other six notes of Bb major under a melody Eb and it's much tougher to find inner voicings which satisfactorily realize the obviously implied chords (to say nothing of the less obvious ones) above Bb, D and G; and as Tovey says, contra the Spectromophologists, this has nothing do with absolute acoustics and everything to do with local sense.
So, in my experience it's just way easier to step in it in the Sheik example than in the Avalon example. But it's pretty easy to charitably hip up the solo choruses but then forget to un-hip (de-hip?) the out head. In fact it happened twice today.
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