You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Barry Harris's 6th Diminished: The Basics - #80

Episode Date: December 14, 2018

"Pretend like you're holding a pack of cigarettes sideways..." BH on piano technique See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hey, what's up, folks. Adam Manas here for the Friday edition of the You'll Hear at podcast, back at you solo, flying solo for the rest of this week. Hopefully we're going to get Peter Martin back in here in the pod cave on Monday. But I am at the piano. We get a lot of requests for episodes at the piano. And I'm talking about some popular requests we've had and been meaning to do at the piano, but haven't had the time. And we thought with Peter gone, we can move over here and cover some of this stuff. Today we're going to be talking about Barry Harris's sixth diminished scale and how to use it. Just the basics of it. This is, this is a very deep

process, this study. I highly, highly encourage you to go to YouTube. There's tons of videos. I think he even has some stuff for sale. Check it out on his website. Try to find it from the source. Guys, a genius. I've been lucky enough to attend a couple of these masterclasses and be the guinea pig when I was young and it was really, really eye-opening. And I am by no means like a sixth-diminished with it, you know, fully in my hands to the deepest levels. But I think I understand the basic concepts of it from these masterclasses. And I'm happy to try to highlight some of the things I think are important about it. And then I'll say another thing about this, too.

Like, because Barry is so charismatic and so dogmatic about this approach, a lot of people think that maybe this is something that every jazz musician should know and does know. And it's just common knowledge at this point. and that's just not true. I was talking to a friend of mine a really, really great tenor saxophonist and he was saying that he

he doesn't think about it like this at all because the way this works, conflicts with the way he thinks about things melodically. So the point is I'm saying is like there's more than one way to skin a cat, in this case a scale. So don't take this as absolute gospel. This is just Barry Harris's approach to

this one particular sound. But it is a cool sound and it's a cool kind of rabbit hole that you can get into for harmony and voice leading and melodic content. And here's what it is. The basic premise of it is a major scale with a half step in between the fifth and six tones. Right? So a C major scale and then after the fifth, there's that half step in between the fifth and the six. Now, why is this the thing? Why is this a sound?

Well, it's because this makes your melodic ideas line up with the strong notes of the chord on the beat. That's kind of how this became about. You can really put a half step in between any of these notes, which is what my friend John Ellis was saying, that he thinks about just being able to put a half step between any of them. But as a pianist, actually, that half step between the fifth and the sixth opens up some harmonic possibilities that we're going to get to in a minute. That's the basic premise.

So if we're in 4-4, right, that A, that 6 is on that third beat, and then the root is then again on the one of the next measure. Sorry, the 6 is on the fourth beat, the fifth is on the third beat. But on the beat notes, if you start on the root, are a C major 6 chord, very strong for a C major 6th chord. And then if you start on any of those, you end up logically landing on the beat for the strong tone.

So if we start on the third, you end on the third. If you start on the fifth, you end on the fifth. You always are ending on a strong note. And that's true of putting a half step into any seven note scale. You're gonna logically end or start over again on the beat. And that's why this scale is useful. The bebop scale is useful with the half step, between the root and the flat seven on a dominant chord.

Okay, so that's the basics melodically of why this works. Some things that you can do to really kind of get deeper into it. First of all, I highly encourage you to work this out in contrary motion. So let's start on C and we'll go in contrary motion. This is kind of the first thing that Barry Harris does in his masterclasses too. Same scale. Half step between. Look at that. Octaves.

and you end on the octave two octaves apart. I just added a third there randomly. You can experiment with that too in thirds. You see, it just creates kind of natural harmony for you. And again, starting from any strong tone, see that where that half step is in the left hand creates these kind of natural. these kind of natural resolving harmonic movements.

You can do it from thirds apart. So that was from G and E. This becomes really handy when you're dealing with melodies for kind of some contrary motion, some little inside movers with melodic content. Great for arranging. Anytime you have a melody that you want to move, a little myromance,

You can do little contrary movements that really makes sense and land on the strong beats. Okay, so that's just some basic two-note melodic content. You might have noticed that when you start on the strong notes, the notes that aren't strong are following a pattern.

And that's because if we skip a note, on the strong notes, we have a major six chord. If we skip a note on the notes in between those, we have a diminished chord. And this follows suit the entire way up. So let's say we have four voices moving up the scale together. It's a major six to start built on C, C, E, G, A.

And then we have D, F, A, flat, B. And then E, G, A, C, that's another C major six. And then F, A, flat, B, D, another. other diminished. So it alternates between major six diminish, C major six diminished, C major six diminished and the diminished is, you know, this diminished chord can act like a five to the C major six. If you put a G on the bottom of this, it becomes a G7 flat nine, acting as a dominant to that major six. It's so logical, it's ridiculous. And that's why you hear this a lot. We talked Wednesday about the shearing style voicing, the lockhand voicing. You hear this, a ton for that.

Go up and down scales. Really, really, really, really logical. It's so much fun. By the way, you can do this with minor too, with a harmonic, with a melodic minor sound, excuse me. Is that legal? Yes. So this is just the very, very beginnings of it. It goes pretty deep when you start getting into multiple voicings and and you start switching some things up, I encourage you again to check out the long form masterclasses that Barry Harris does. Just brilliant stuff. And this kind of information can really help you with getting good voice leading no matter what the situation, because you understand the relationships between the strong notes and the leading tones. And especially for like a bebop sound, a hard bop sound, these can be really, really useful.

Okay, that's it for today. And thanks so much for sticking with me this week as I am a solo, You'll hearing it for the first time ever. Pete's going to be back next week and really enjoyed this time at the piano. We're going to do more this year at the piano. We're plotting out our 2019. You'll hear it. And we're going to have lots of cool stuff for you.

As always, you can go to You'll Hear.com. You can leave us a voicemail. You can leave us a message. You can get your ULHeart swag. We have T-shirts. we have a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah, and until next time, you'll hear it.