I was going to put this in the current thread Help with the next step please, but this somehow grew into something that should have its own thread I think. This is one of those things that crop up from time to time in various discussions
My take is that it is now inevitable that mainstream or straight ahead jazz of the 40s/50s (golden era?) is often concentrated on by teachers and learners and is for several reasons:
The chord/mode approach kind of takes a snapshot of the chord and makes assumptions with not necessarily any relevance to the context of (2) and (3).
So as an example we often hear that if there is a G7 you play a mixolydian mode of G. (those are all the notes from C major). That does fill in the chord notes effectively but pays no attention to the context, e.g. what if it's key centre is not C major. If it is resolving in C minor what relevance has the mixolydian got?
On a very basic level I much prefer to think of the chord notes, and think of linking them with other notes from the key centre scale. I'd immediately think "G7 is the V chord of C, therefor my passing notes or suspension are from C major or minor." I'd never think mixolydian in G. With a mixolydian mode G is the "tonic" not the dominant, so confusion there right from the start.
So that is why I don't like that method. It can maybe be equated to "painting by numbers". It can work in that you can play stuff from a scale that will often "fit the chord." Although it is easy to formularise (and so easy to teach in a mathematic kind of way) it has less to do with thinking about the creative quality of the music and understanding tension/release etc.
But the big thing here in this thread is also the fact that to a certain extent the teaching and learning of jazz is focussed a lot on this 60 year old period, as I said the so-called golden age. Is it golden because there is an assumption that earlier forms such as traditional New Orleans, swing or later freeform styles are somehow inferior?
I don't think so. I just think that the early forms are ignored because they are either not "art" or not "cool" (bebop having that hipster image of berets and shades etc). And later forms of "avant grade" are not really possible to formularise as there is little or nothing to grasp in the way of assessable conventional musical elements. Any academic assessment therefore has to rely a lot on subjectivity.
In academia that is getting more and more important as students and parents can get litigious and complain about the grades. With more conventional teaching you can justify a high mark by the fact that there are fewer wrong notes (that weren't in the prescribed mode) but how do you do that with avant garde... what makes on piece of freeform objectively "better" than another?
- It may be fair to say that jazz (and its evolutionary forms) as we know it mostly started out in the US (with roots in the slave plantations and ultimately Africa)
- It was originally considered as dance music or brothel entertainment (ie way below Classical in terms of "artform").
- 1940s/50s bebop innovations brought its status up to be considered a more serious art form until eventually it started being taught in colleges. A big reason was that finally America proudly now had its very own type of classical music.
- Hence its popularity seemed to get rebalanced, ie less as as dance/entertainment music but more as art music
- The rise in demand for jazz performance education (as possibly more of a peoples’ thing and more accessible than classical) meant that it spread in popularity into secondary education as well as further education.
- The demand for it may have outstripped the quality professional actual practitioners, many of whom preferred to gig rather than teach anyway. Maybe due to the constraints of academic bureaucracy. Plus it was to a large extent an art that was self taught, learned on the road or passed down orally.
- So once it's there in academia, the learning process had to be more structured, capable of formal assessment by grades and so a formulaic teaching method came into being. This was a formulaic approach and not only meant it could be assessed, but could be taught by teachers who could learn that formula and just needed to stay one step head of the student.
- So instead of trying to teach the art (ie inspiration and melodic impro) it was possible to teach the harmony (close to classical anyway) but add the impro element to that by inventing the chord/mode approach which was achieved by a technical analysis of what the masters played, which purely looked at the end result rather than the creative art process of achieving it. (Barry Harris had quite a bit to say about this)
The chord/mode approach kind of takes a snapshot of the chord and makes assumptions with not necessarily any relevance to the context of (2) and (3).
So as an example we often hear that if there is a G7 you play a mixolydian mode of G. (those are all the notes from C major). That does fill in the chord notes effectively but pays no attention to the context, e.g. what if it's key centre is not C major. If it is resolving in C minor what relevance has the mixolydian got?
On a very basic level I much prefer to think of the chord notes, and think of linking them with other notes from the key centre scale. I'd immediately think "G7 is the V chord of C, therefor my passing notes or suspension are from C major or minor." I'd never think mixolydian in G. With a mixolydian mode G is the "tonic" not the dominant, so confusion there right from the start.
So that is why I don't like that method. It can maybe be equated to "painting by numbers". It can work in that you can play stuff from a scale that will often "fit the chord." Although it is easy to formularise (and so easy to teach in a mathematic kind of way) it has less to do with thinking about the creative quality of the music and understanding tension/release etc.
But the big thing here in this thread is also the fact that to a certain extent the teaching and learning of jazz is focussed a lot on this 60 year old period, as I said the so-called golden age. Is it golden because there is an assumption that earlier forms such as traditional New Orleans, swing or later freeform styles are somehow inferior?
I don't think so. I just think that the early forms are ignored because they are either not "art" or not "cool" (bebop having that hipster image of berets and shades etc). And later forms of "avant grade" are not really possible to formularise as there is little or nothing to grasp in the way of assessable conventional musical elements. Any academic assessment therefore has to rely a lot on subjectivity.
In academia that is getting more and more important as students and parents can get litigious and complain about the grades. With more conventional teaching you can justify a high mark by the fact that there are fewer wrong notes (that weren't in the prescribed mode) but how do you do that with avant garde... what makes on piece of freeform objectively "better" than another?
Last edited:
