McCoy Tyner | Maj7 Triad Pairs... Plus Altered Dominants & Playing Out w/ Melodic Triads

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Free PDF posted below...
Today's episode is based on three questions from Daniel.
(1) How do you use triad pairs?
(2) How do you apply triads over altered dominants?
(3) And how do you sound outside when improvising with triads?
(1) How do you use triad pairs?
There are plenty of traditional generic ways of using triad pairs which involve arpeggiating through one triad, then arpeggiating through the next, and then moving back and forth for a while. This is a fun technique that will get you outside of sounding like you're running scales. If you can't do this yet, you should try it. It's a good way to break things down.
However in the Melodic Triads approach, there's one additional thing happening. Melodic Triads is all about learning to control tension and resolution within our lines. So when we apply triad pairs in our approach, one triad is going to be a stable, resolution triad (our melodic triad) while the other will be a tension triad. The tension triad's entire purpose in life is to create turmoil which will want to resolve back to the resolution triad. We don't HAVE TO resolve it... but it's a good habit to start with to help train our ear and learn to control sound.
If we look at a generic major 7 chord through the lens of Melodic Triads - let's say EMaj7 for our example - our triad pair will be G# minor and A major. G# minor is our melodic triad and will give us stability, and A major will give us tension and drama that helps provide the feeling of a forward momentum... like the bad guy in a movie.
Once we have our triad pair picked out that best accentuates the chord we want to imply (which melodic triads provides for us perfectly every time), and once we understand which of these triads provides tension and which resolution, then we can begin employing different techniques and variations to create a musical effect.
As I show in the video, one of my favorite techniques, and the one that I find the easiest, is to pick one note and hold it constant while the other notes move. Here is a good way to visualize what this effect offers us.
Notice that the low E note is ringing out the whole time. If there's a bass player in the group, you might not need to play that note. If there's not, it can help define the chord by offering us the root note in the bass. Up on the top, we see that D# note static. It's a pedal tone that doesn't move while the middle two voices move up from G# and B to A and C#. Not only does this lead to some really interesting and unexpected chord voicings using only the shape of simple triads, but it also breaks apart the incessant parallel movement trap that we so easily fall into when running through scales or triads pairs where all of the voices move up or down together. This parallel movement is fine, but as soon as we halt it and create contrary motion (where voice movement in opposite directions) or oblique motion (where some voices move while others don't... as shown here) it creates a very 3-dimensional quality to the music. It makes it feel as though the voices aren't simply one big chord voicing, but instead are individual voices the move in their own ways and have a life separate from the other voices. By holding that D# note and moving the lower two voice-dyads through multiple inversions of our triad pair - as shown in the video and the free PDF download for this post - we can create a ton of interesting movement. And once we're good enough at this idea, we can also then add movement into that top voice to create a separate melody line that is harmonized by our triad pairs.
McCoy Tyner uses this exact same static note technique during his solo on the John Coltrane Quartet's recording of My Favorite Things. You can hear this section of his solo in the video above, and you can see the voicings written out in standard notation and tab in the free PDF. It is such a beautiful effect and really creates a wonderful landscape at the start of his solo that he's able to expand upon once he gets going.
(2) How do you apply triads over altered dominants?
One of my favorite…
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Happy Practicing!
--Jordan Klemons

Опубликовано:

9 июл 2024

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Комментарии : 30

@azomyte Год назад

The maj7 triads are like Grant Green’s Time to Remember

@proximact695 7 месяцев назад

suuuuper

@JazzGuitarScrapbook 4 года назад

Thanks Jordan!

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar 3 года назад

You bet!

@manicguitar2455 2 года назад

Great job explaining these concepts Very inspiring - thank you

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar 2 года назад

You're welcome... glad you got some cool ideas from it!

@pickinstone 4 года назад

That triad pair harmony you did with McCoy was awesome, I thought I recognized the sound--but when you gave the direct example, it clicked. What frustrates me with triad pairs, is that too many people teach it as an end all be all. When you solo, you have to improvise a melody--as complex or simple as you want--but it has to follow at least some of the principles of melody. I was creating an etude and included some fouths and it sounded lame because the "device of using fourths" became too explicit, too obvious. Melodies have development of ideas, contour, drawing upon earlier ideas (layering), peaks and valleys. When Coltrane or Oliver Nelson used "triad pairs", they were blended into the larger story of their improvsied melodies. When Woody Shaw used "the fourths", they were blended into his astonishing melodic solos (too many mislable him as a purely angular player). Suffice to say, what you are talking about here is quite exciting :)

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar 4 года назад

Glad you dig McCoy's triad pair use. It's always fun to discover when a legendary recording has a really basic concept at work in it. It can show us just how much of the picture we're missing when we become "theory collectors" rather than "concept appliers". I was just talking about this in a Skype lesson with a student. We're all so obsessed with WIDENING the range of things we know. To memorize more stuff, to steal more riffs, to find more chord voicings... More is cool. But DEPTH. That's where the magic happens. Can you take ONE thing and dig deep into it to find 10 ways to use it? 100 ways? 1000 ways? Because like you're saying, then it's about being inside the tune, in the moment, in the sound the group is creating... and being able to really move around and explore all of that without constantly trying to force everything. I always come back to the cooking metaphor. I'd rather eat a simple pasta dish made out of 2 or 3 ingredients by a world renowned chef than a 4 course meal made by an amateur chef using 37 ingredients. They're just not going to know what to do with them. We need to stock throwing more ingredients into the pan in hopes that it will turn into something great, and we need to start getting more serious about one ingredient at a time, exploring it, seeing how it fits in harmonically and melodically, seeing how others use it in tunes, seeing how musical and creative we can be with it, and then seeing how much control we can gain over it so that we can cook that delicious pasta dish CONSISTENTLY.

@pickinstone 4 года назад

@@jordanklemonsjazzguitar Man, I miss these conversations with you--J! My mentor uses the cooking metaphor the same way you do, and he's been a student of Peter Bernstein as well. He had me work on arpeggios to a jazz standard for 3 months. Had me write several etudes. Basic arpeggios, basic changes. But the stipulation was, it had to work under the specific arpeggio constraints he set, and above all--it had to follow the parameters of a strong melody and be MUSICAL. It's amazing how challenging it can be to create music under such basic constraints--but I am now applying these concepts into other tunes and my melodic harmonic/ melodic concept is more purposeful and clear. It's like being able to taste each ingredient and have each flavor amplified by how it is added to the final dish. I'll send you the final etude over Stablemates when it's complete sauce :)

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar 4 года назад

@@pickinstone can't wait to check it out!

@JazzGuitarScrapbook 4 года назад

NYC Jazz Guitar Masterclasses great point Jordan. I think most jazz musicians kind of know this and yet we feel tempted to try and wrap up all our knowledge in a neat way - write theory books and so on, as if that will help....

@dragolov 2 года назад

Thank you!

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar 2 года назад

You're welcome Ivan!

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar 4 года назад

Make sure you check the description for links to the full blog post and the free PDF download

@jarbasgoulartdecastro9104 10 месяцев назад

Hi,Jordan!I ´ve subscribed your nice channel ! Fine material !!! all the best!!!

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar 9 месяцев назад

Hey Jarbas... great to run into you on here! Many thanks! 🙏🏻

@pichipachu Год назад

gorgeous guitar!

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar Год назад

Thanks!

@paulrottman4471 Год назад

Nice! Reminds me of Ted Greene.

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar Год назад

That's awesome

@michaelaldrid 2 года назад

Good good good shit better than scales

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar 2 года назад

Glad you dig it M!

@alcndlk Год назад

if you don't resolve coming from tritone sub to the main key ofc cmaj is going to sound stable that's the whole point in superimposing another key, and to top this argument with a drone Ealt chord LOL

@JazzGuitarScrapbook 4 года назад

Thing about that 7#9b13 sound - check out the Ab7b13 or B7b13 chords in Kind Folk, for instance by Kenny Wheeler, or to my ears also the Bb7b13 sound in 'Iris' by Wayne Shorter - those chords do not want the b5, and the melody of the tune and the soloists avoid them. I think that the way using that melodic triad on the altered dominants allows you to key into the specific sound a lot better. Also the b6 on the triad has the benefit of avoiding the tritones in the melodic minor which make them less 'resolvey' and much more like a sound in their own right - for this reason I also like to use the T/b6 on 7#11 chords. What do you think?

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar 4 года назад

Great hearing from you man! You know I fully agree with you regarding the benefits of thinking triads. I've been at it 100% this way since right around when we first started talking, and the opportunities and benefits and sounds it's continued to bring into view for me have been staggering and never-ending. As for Wayne's use on Iris. If I remember the melody over that Bb7 chord, I think Wayne is using a Gb triad w/ a tension 2 - (Gb)/2. This is right in line with the melodic triads approach. That would be our secondary quadratonic. And that Gb triad in the melody is EXACTLY the sound I was explaining in the video. It tonicizes the root, #9, and #5 (b13) in the melody and makes them the most stable. What's interesting about your thought on the chords not wanting the b5 there is that the chord tone of a b5 would actually be a tension b7. The b5 of Bb7 is Fb. But if we're using the Gb triad to form our melodic phrases, than that Fb note is going to function melodically against the Gb triad... which means we have a b7. And in generally, I try and warn people to keep their distance from tension 7 and tension b7. We CAN get away with them in the right situations sometimes. But generally they're not going to provide the same melodic clarity and lyricism that other tension notes will. Because it ends up sounds like we're just playing any old 1-3-5-7 arpeggio. Good sounds to have at our disposal. But they inevitably lead to sounding like we're simply outlining chords. They can be an option, but I usually push everyone to let chord tone arpeggios be chord tone arpeggios and to let quadratonics be quadratonics. They can overlap, but in the beginning they're best treated differently. I don't know that Kenny Wheeler tune well enough to comment without looking it up and playing through it a few times. But I know you've got good ears and a keen sense of harmonic analysis. So I'd imagine you're spot on with what you're noticing. As for the 7#11... assuming I'm thinking of the same chord/triad relationship as you (D triad over C7)... this tonicizes the 13, the #11, and the 9... and it makes the root, 3rd, 5th, and b7th all into melodic tension notes. Super hip sound. My go to tension notes for this are essentially just that... the basic harmonic chord tones. The whole harmonic picture is flipped upside down with this one when we look at it melodically using this triad.

@JazzGuitarScrapbook 4 года назад

NYC Jazz Guitar Masterclasses definitely... by the way in Iris Wayne uses that same triadic motif on a Eb triad against Db7.... anyway it’s a powerful set of resources for bringing out the sounds of chords. BTW I call the super useful major triad with a b6 as a tension note sound ‘the Brahms arpeggio’ he seemed to like that sound.

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar 4 года назад

I'll have to give this tune a deeper analysis. I find almost all Wayne tune's I've looked at have intense amounts of melodic triads happening throughout. Dude has the biggest ears!

@jordanklemonsjazzguitar 4 года назад

Finally had a chance to check out Kind Folks. Haven't played through it yet, but just from quickly looking over the melody in the lead sheet, those two dom7 chords you mentioned appear to me to be this exact 'tonality' that I'm talking about. There are other melodic triads that could work, and obviously scalar and modal approaches that could be taken. But I would likely go straight for this 7#9#5 sound I'm talking about. Gb major triad over the Bb7 and E major over the Ab7. If you look at the melody over both of them, it descends down from the previous chord and completely skips over the natural 3rd that jazz theory and chord tone running tells us to emphasize when dealing with dom7 chords. Instead it skips over that note and goes straight to the #9. Something we see in Blue in Green as well. So the melody is minimizing the importance of the major 3 and emphasizing the #9 instead (though the natural 3rd could still be used... I would just classify it as a melodic tension note for my own playing to make sure I was accentuating and tonicizing the #9 instead). Then it drops down to the b9, and after moving back up to the #9 resolves the b9 down a half step when moving to the next chord. I hear this as the #9 being stable, the b9 being a melodic tension/passing note, and the resolution down to the dom7 root note (which doesn't actually take place until the next measure) implies that those melody notes CRAVE that... so that would be a stable melodic triad note. This could be interpreted in a couple of ways using triadic thinking... but I'm seeing this as the 5th of a major triad, passing down through the "tension 4", and resolving to the 3rd. That tension 4 isn't the primary tension note I would use to start improvising with here... but it IS in our melodic triad bebop scale for this chord... it's definitely an important part of the melodic triad approach for it. And IF this were the sound Kenny was hearing in his mind and we were approaching it with melodic triads, it wouldn't shock me if the b5 of these dom7 chords sounded odd or out of place in your ear. I'll have to play around with the tune for a bit and/or transcribe some of Kenny's lines over this part of the tune to see how I feel about it beyond analyzing the chart. But right off the bat, basically every single line I'm seeing so far falls exactly into the realm of what I would expect to see melodically happening over the written chords based on what the melodic triad approach would yield. Beautiful tune!

@JazzGuitarScrapbook 4 года назад

NYC Jazz Guitar Masterclasses well tbh I think it’s diatonic melody chromatic chord originally, as in I wrote this nice melody in G lydian/C Lydian, now let’s put an Ab7 chord under it. You get a similar example in Blue Bossa with C natural minor/G7. The m3/dominant chord false relation is very common throughout jazz, you can prob think of examples v quickly. Melodic triads/quadrad give you a way to bottle that sound as a voicing complex/pitch set thingy which is nice.