katch wrecktoday i was working on harmonizing a melody wrote about a year ago, and i realized something else cool about the melodic minor scale! not only can you derive it by adding a dominant function to a Dorian V chord (i.e. Dorian#7), but you can also derive it by considering a half-diminished seventh chord a whole-step above a dominant seventh chord. e.g., taking G7 as the dominant, & Aø7 as the half-diminished, you get the following pitch class: C D Eb F G A B, the C melodic minor scale.
since the G in Aø7 is already present in G7, you could also get C melodic minor by taking the union of G7 and the A diminished triad (Ao), if you want to avoid redundancy. but jazz harmonies are primarily based on seventh chords, so it's often natural to consider adjacent positions on a scale in terms of their corresponding diatonic seventh chords.
and so, the melodic minor has an interesting and (to my ears) beautiful variation of a minor "ii-V-i" built into it, but not one that i've seen before: the "viø7-V7b13-i". this is where my own understanding of the melodic minor scale seems to diverge from some jazz textbooks, like Levine. my own intuition runs counter to Levine's assertion that a V7b13 chord creates "all kinds of problems". in fact, this statement directly contradicts his interchangeability claim for melodic minor modes! funny
also, my music teacher explained to me that the V7b13 chord is used all the time, a fact that also contradicts Levine's melodic minor treatment. Levine even goes so far as to re-label the melodic minor V7b13 as a imM7/V! totally backwards, in my opinion. this gives me another reason to question Levine on this point. therefore, i have to consider Levine's treatment of the melodic minor scale to be insufficient to develop a good intuition in terms of how it relates to the standard diatonic scale.
... anyway, that's sort of an aside :) what i'm really excited about is that just by tinkering with different ideas on my bass and listening to their sounds, i stumbled upon a way to incorporate the melodic minor scale into one of my own compositions in a natural and intuitive way, which also involves a modulation and which fits into the context of the song. #achievementunlocked
..oh, and there's even a cool name for the 5th melodic minor mode (which Levine doesn't seem to mention): Aeolian Dominant!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolian_dominant_scale
i figured this was probably the name for it last night as i was laying in bed waiting to go to dreamland... glad to see a whole wiki page on it :)
the name makes perfect sense in the context of adding a dominant function to the Dorian V chord, since the 5th mode of Dorian is Aeolian. So, to get a dominant Dorian V, modify the Aeolian (sharp its 3)
alternatively, as the wiki article mentions, you can flat the 6 of Mixolydian. this is not surprising, since Aeolian and Mixolydian are related by inversion: descending Aeolian has the same sequence of intervals as ascending Mixolydian, and vice-versa. this explains why adding a dominant function to Aeolian should be seen as something very natural to do, to deliver V-i harmonic function to Dorian. i strongly disagree that this creates "all sorts of problems" (Levine)! there is one more reason...
to use Aeolian Dominant (which my music teacher told me about). namely, in contexts where Phrygian Dominant might be the most obvious choice, but you want to avoid the b2 of that scale. I.e., Aeolian Dominant can also be seen as Phrygian Dominant #2.
Jacob Something@katchwreck Thank you for that thread! I will read it a couple times more. What fascinates me: I understand nothing of it. Which is weird, because I studied music. It turns out that, apart from this being a language thing (I know all music terms in German), I learnt an entirely different theoretical (classical functional theory) system. I think, not only the chords have different names, but I'm missing entire concepts. Or I'm too slow matching one thing with another. It's quite hot here...
@jkanev yw :) yeah jazz theory is quite different from classical traditions... and there are disagreements from book to book on how to define it, and its relation to classical harmonic function. i see now that i have reached a point where my own opinions on it have developed independently enough from certain canons that i am developing some of my own perspectives on it, which may be a little unconventional
@katchwreck Nice! Is there also the idea in Jazz that each chord has a function? And that dischords need to be resolved according to certain rules?
@jkanev in jazz there is a hierarchy of elemental functions, rhythm being the most important, followed by melody (horizontal form), then harmony (vertical), and lastly "inside" vs "outside" playing. given a rhythmic feel and a melodic theme, any number of harmonizations can be arranged by a given band leader, although some have become defaults published in books and apps like iReal. harmonizations are based on ii-V7 cadence variations. once these are set, you can then add color tones over them
@jkanev given some set rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic structure, the players are free to make their own decisions about what notes to play at any given point in the (typically 32-bar) form of any particular song. at this point, there are a variety of opinions regarding how to pick what to play, so that it (hopefully) pleases both the performers and the audience (although the latter can be tougher than the former). at that point, there are a variety of approaches/theories/schools of thought...
@jkanev the best jazz players develop their own approaches, mostly by ear, but also through education and by transcribing improvised lines from their favorite recordings, and studying them. as far as jazz education goes, perhaps the most basic method of teaching jazz improvisation relies on so-called "chord-scale theory", where the choice of what note(s) to play are informed by matching a scale to each chord, although one scale can often cover more than one subsequence of chords in a progression
@jkanev chord-scale theory is often the easiest "starting point" for learning jazz improvisation, but it's not the only one, and it has some significant drawbacks associated with it. nevertheless, it is practical, and has served as a reasonable (if a bit elementary) introduction to jazz improvisation for people who are not lucky enough to come from a musical family or tradition that allows them to learn the "jazz language" more intuitively from a young age :)
@jkanev chord-scale theory is probably the most direct way to begin understanding jazz theory given a background in classical theory. but, to play devil's advocate, here's an interesting and somewhat dense essay that i have not finished reading myself, but found interesting because it shows how much disagreement there is among music educators regarding the limitations of the chord-scale theoretic approach (warning, this may not be the best starting point for learning) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0ZI8di-pEDvRXlQckRZbl82OGs/view?fbclid=IwY2xjawSr12xleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFQQkJNeXV4dTNybTN0cHA4c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHozU5rSukW6BKuphENUzxJ8NGVbFgH6qBIWXHTWmDMXuxu4twt3VMfa_tQyw_aem_Gf405Ih1e2djq3bh39-zSg&pli=1&resourcekey=0-uQbW7QjXUWBeZTowr9F8Iw
@katchwreck Wow, thanks! Started to read, but have to continue later.
@jkanev yw! for a cogent, self-contained, and accessible introduction to jazz theory, i recommend "The Jazz Idiom" by Coker
https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/jazz-idiom/author/jerry-coker/