Latest Posts…
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A few tidbits on the melodic minor
Thoughts on using the melodic minor in different harmonic contexts.
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Tidbit: Locally Diatonic Scales
I was reading an article by Dmitri Tymoczko this morning, Stravinsky and the Octatonic: A Reconsideration, and came across a useful term: locally diatonic. This refers to a scale whose seconds are all minor or major, and whose thirds are all minor or major. This includes the following scales: major, ascending melodic minor, whole-tone, and…
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Tritone Fun Facts, Part One
This post kicks off a miniseries on tritones. I’ll use the terms tritone and diminished 5th somewhat interchangeably. This post covers some basics, the next one will explore an idea about key signatures, then I’ll look at diminished 7th chords. Let’s start by considering the seven natural notes. If we place a natural note a…
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A busy week in jazz, and writing!
I had a busy week in NYC seeing great jazz and then writing about it in a new blog that Nora Maynard and I are launching called cultured nyc. First off, I caught two nights of the legendary Barry Harris at the Village Vanguard. Then, I saw the amazing hard-bop sextet One For All at…
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Altered Scale Minor 3rd Transpositions
A guitarist on the forum of Dave Stryker’s class at Artistworks recently asked an interesting question that really piqued my interest. The question is, can you transpose the altered scale in minor thirds, the same way you can transpose the diminished scale? I’ve been thinking for a while about how the diminished, altered, and whole-tone…
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Quartal Harmony: Tetrachords
In today’s post we will continue our series on quartal harmony with a quick look at quartal tetrachords. When we began with dyads, we saw there are three quartal dyad types: P, A, and D. With quartal trichords, there are nine types (3 * 3). With quartal tetrachords, we now have twenty-seven types (3 *…
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Quartal Harmony: Trichords
Today we continue the discussion on quartal harmony with trichords. Yesterday’s topic on quartal dyads was a bit of a warm-up. Things are getting more interesting now. There are three varieties of fourth: perfect, augmented, and diminished, or using our labels, P, A, and D. In order to construct a trichord, we need two intervals.…
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Quartal Harmony: Dyads
More follow-ups to my recent visit to the Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop. I attended master classes with four great jazz guitarists: Corey Christiansen, Dave Stryker, Mike Di Liddo, and Craig Wagner. All four of these musicians gave me things to work on. One of the discussions that we got into with Corey was about quartal…
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A Mode For Every Day Of The Year
I just got back from two weeks at the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop. It was amazing, as always, and especially important since this is the final session before Jamey retires after running the “camps” for over fifty years. I sat in on Pat Harbison‘s advanced music theory class, and I got some great ideas…