A few tidbits on the melodic minor

I’ve been thinking about the melodic minor a lot this week. It occurs to me that in jazz pedagogy, it’s common to refer to the 7th mode of the mm as a “diminished / whole-tone” scale. (In addition to the other common nomenclature, which is “altered scale.”) This makes sense, but why limit it to the 7th mode? Why not just think of the entire melodic minor as a diminished /whole tone? I just spent some time practicing the scale this way on the piano, and it has really opened up my thinking.

Earlier in the week, it had occurred to me that, instead of thinking of a “locrian #2” on a IIm7b5, it makes much more musical sense to think of it as a minor IV, using the melodic minor. That sets you up for some lovely parallelism going from mm on IV to mm on the b9 of V–or in other words, up a minor 3rd.

And then, once you’re thinking that way, it’s easy to drop in a mm on the 5th of V, which gives you the so-called “lydian dominant.” A nice way to practice that is to play a mm scale in the rh, start with the root in the lh, and then drop a 5th to turn it into a dominant. Play that, and I dare you to try and stop from playing Debussy-esque riffs.


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