NEVER IN MY LIFE…

 

…ain’t never heard ANYTHING about dorian, or mixolydian, or lydian… I heard nothing, but I learnt to play jazz!

So told Barry Harris in one of his most known rants, discussing the (in)famous theory of scale/chord relationship, elaborated and widely spread all around the world by the notorious Berkeley School gang.

Yes. Once upon a time, jazz musicians were able to improvise melodies making almost exclusive use of the chord tones; someone, like Lester Young and Johnny Hodges, was even able to confine himself to the very notes of the tonic chord.

The bebop era increased the utilisation of tension and resolution, through the refined use of neighbouring chromatic tones and chord extensions and alterations… but the core concepts was the same: play the chord notes on the strong beats.

This inflexible obsession for the relationship “downbeat-chord tone” was so deeply rooted in bebop musicians that a fully new set of octophonic scales  was developed, just adding an extra chromatic passing tone to the classic scales (specifically the lowered sixth on major scale, the major seventh on the dominant or minor ones - with some variations concerning this last one).

Why? Because if you start with a chord tone on the downbeat and you play a seven-notes scale, you’ll quickly find yourself with a non-chord note on the downbeat - just try and you’ll realise by yourself. With a symmetric eight notes scale, the chord tones will stay on the downbeat forever - assuming you don’t purposely want to “displace” them.

Ok, nuff said. Great masterpieces were recorded improvising on the chord notes, providing to jazz musicians unparalleled source of inspiration - and a theory so subtle and multifaceted that could grant centuries of opportunity for forever fresh and new music.

But for someone this was not enough: too simple? Too complicated? Too boring? Or simply the wish to do thing differently or - as Barry told in his rant - because “they realised that they can make some money out of it”?

And suddenly a lush blossoming of modal scales - historically wrong named and simplistically assumed, without any regard concerning the tetrachord theory and the subsequent authentic and plagal form - climaxing in the abstruse and overcomplicated “Lydian chromatic concept” by George Russell.

Lost forever the ability to express the tonal relationship in an horizontal way, lost the ability to play with tension and resolution, lost the ability to create a consequent and compelling story; from now on, just an incessant torrent of depersonalised notes without any intimate relationship with the underlying harmony, an incessant wall of sound seldom ennobled by the genius of rare “musicians-at-hearth” (Davis, Coltrane) but too often resolving into an unbearable flood of pentatonics and diatonic farts, interspersed for the sake of variety with artificial devices such as side slipping, quartal arpeggios, minor third movements and so on.

To make a long story short: it is ok to learn modal devices, but only when one is able to play making almost exclusive use of chord tones, octophonic scales, enclosures, pivoting, extensions and alterations and so on.

And, believe me, it is a long, long way to go.