You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Best of Season 5(How does that Work?)

Episode Date: December 24, 2019

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Hey, Peter. Hey. You know, it's a special day today. Oh, it's a very special day around the world. It is. Deborah Manis's birthday. It's my mom's birthday, man. Oh, I didn't know that.

Happy birthday, Mrs. Manis. You call her Deborah Manus? Can I call her Mrs. Manis? That's called her moms. Well, that's good. Yeah. But it's also Christmas Eve. Question.

Question of the day. Does she get separate Christmas presents from her kids from her birthday? Because, you know, a lot of people, they have the birthday. It all gets folded in together. Yeah, we're not monsters. We do give her separate Christmas presents. presents. Oh, they say we're not monsters.

We give her one present. No. No, as some of my birthday is coming up, too, and you do, you will get one present sometime. Why you point at me with that? It's happened. It's happened. And that's lame. Just because my birthday's close to Christmas doesn't mean you can't get me a separate

present. So you're not familiar with the term, kill two birds with one stone? I know that one well, buddy. Yeah, but it's my birthday. Come on. When is your birthday? December 30th. Okay, well, we've got a little time.

Yeah. So today is your mother's birthday. It's Christmas Eve all around the world for those that celebrate that thing. And it's the start of Open Studios end of the year promotion. It actually starts tomorrow, but it's only for our listeners. You didn't know that? I know, but we can tell them, though, that if they put in the promo code, play better, they're going to save 40% on everything. You're going to save 40% on anything on the site, and you're also going to play better, hence the promo code, play better.

For sure. That's very simple. For sure. Yeah, so we're hoping that folks will be able to get in on this and get a little inspiration for the new. year, you're going to be able to, like, what I would use that for, you can use it for whatever. But if you're a pianist, jump on that very popular piano access pass. That's right. And you can get in on, you have to get the annual version.

Get the annual version. Which you want to get anyway. That's right. And you can get in on our very special January jazz piano boot camp. We are going to make them work. Man, we're going to be mean, man. We might have them practice and then give me 20 and then go back to practice. We haven't totally decided.

But by the end of January, you're going to be in good shape. Yeah. And we're going to have, there's going to be a live component, but you're going to be able to watch a recorded version of it. I'm really excited. We've never done anything like this. This kind of, you know, well-developed. But the whole idea of this is for pianists.

And look, we have a best episode coming up in a minute. Yeah, nobody cares about that. Yeah, no, they can't care. No, but you're going to be able to, like, coming at the beginner, intermediate, or advanced track. You can switch if you're in the wrong time. It's going to be awesome. Go to open studio jazz.com, get that piano access pass,

and enter the promo code, play better at checkout to save 40% on the piano access pass, annual version. That's right. And if you want to pay full price, just don't end up. or any problem with code and we're cool with that. That's fun. Enjoy today's episode. This week, I'm going to take the helm at the piano with some solo versions and I want to do

something a little bit different. I want to do a brief series of basic jazz theory called How Does That Work? And today is our first edition and this will be all about altered dominant chords. How does that work? So within any altered dominant chord, basically any of the extent, basically any of the extensions, the 9th, the 11th, or the 13th can be altered. The 9th can go either way, sharp or flat. So here's what a C7 sharp 9 sounds like. I've heard that before, right? This is a really interesting chord because you have both like the E and the E flat, right? The major third, minor

third, only it's the sharp 9. Now you can't have a E flat in the C7 and call it a sharp 9 unless you have an e natural somewhere in the chord. If not, it's just a minor chord, because that is just the third, right? So you have to have, for it to be an e7, sharp nine, you have to have the e natural in there somewhere so that it's a dominant chord. And you've heard this all, Jimmy Hendrix, but especially in jazz, you know, Duke Ellington love these chords. So that's the sharp nine. Now you also have the flat nine, right? So C, C, E, B, flat, and D flat. Now we can add the 13 to this

and the sharp 11, and this is a C-13, sharp-11, flat-9. Now, you're saying, Adam, why would you ever use that? Well, this is built off of the half-hold diminish scale, which is a great scale to use going to your 1. So this C-7-flat-9, sharp-and-old. 11 with a natural 13 C, E, B, flat, D flat, F, sharp A, is just a really great altered

dominant chord and scale off that half hole. Half step, whole step starting on C, going to F, right? Sounds great. You've heard that sound a million times. Very common. C7, flat 9, sharp 11 with a natural 13. And it sounds more complicated than this, really. It's just those are the altered extensions, right? The 9th, the 11th, and the 13th. Thirteenth is the only one that's natural. The 11th is sharp and the 9th is flat. Okay, another altered dominant that we can do is the sharp 9 flat 13. Right? So pianists often think of this as like an A flat triad over C7. We have C, C, E, B, flat, and then, like, you could put an A-flat triad over there. It sounds just great.

Now, this is based on the altered scale, which is based off the seventh degree of a D-flat melodic minor. Easy way to think of it is the melodic minor from a half step above your root, your C. So D-flat melodic minor starting on C. C, D-flat, E-natural, G-flat, A-flat, B-flat, C. Right? So this is, this chord is called the Sharp 9, flat 13, but it's based off of the altered scale. And it's close to our last, our final altered dominant and really the most kind of crunchy one, which is the C7 altered.

Now the altered is all of the altered extensions. So we have, and it's based, again, off of the altered scale. So we have flat nine. Sharp 9, sharp 11, flat 13. All those in any combination. So when you see C7 alt, that's what that means. It means that all of those upper extensions, the 9th, the 11th, and the 13th are altered.

The 9th is both flatted and sharped, the 11th is sharped, and the 13 is flat. By the way, the 9th is the only one that could be both, flatted and sharp. The 11th is almost always sharp and the 13th is almost always flat. If the 13th was sharp, it'd just be the dominant 7. So on an altered dominant chord, it would make sense to have 2B flats in there. You already have it. It's represented. Today I want to be talking about diminished chords and how we often use them in jazz. There's a few different ways you can use a diminished chord. So how do we use diminished chords in jazz? Now,

diminished chords are often used as a substitute for a seventh chord. It can be, say here we have our C diminished 7. This could be acting as a 5 chord to D flat major. Here this all the time. Right? From the half step below, the diminishes. Or it could be going to B flat minor. Essentially, these are used as part of a dominant seventh chord.

It can really be used as a dominant seventh flat 9. remember altered extensions from yesterday, from any root note, a half step below, any of the notes in the seventh chord. So wherever you would use a B7 flat 9, like say to E major, you could use one of these four, because it's symmetrical, diminished chorus.

So C or A. That's kind of how they function. But mostly they go from the half step below. you might see them use there. They're also used to substitute a tonic chord. So if I'm landing on C, you see this all the time where you would use a C diminished to delay going into the C major 6-9. You know, happens on tunes like let's get lost and what's new. You hear people do this all the time. So that's another way you can use that diminished chord. And then the final way is, or a final way we'll talk about today,

is again as another passing tone, but this time from, instead of from below as a seventh chord, from above, so if we have a 3625, again, you can sub out, instead of A7, you can do E flat, diminish 7, to the D minor 7. So 3, and instead of 6, E flat, diminish 7, two, five, one.

You see this all the time, especially on that three-six sub. And you see it too, from the two up to the three. This is a sound you hear a lot of in jazz. It's how we use these diminished chords. So we have an option is to use it from below, from above, like in the 3625, and then as a substitute for the one.

That's so beautiful. So we noticed from our scale, our whole half that we actually have four other notes in this octatonic scale and all of those notes are in play and they're all one whole step above are C diminished here of C, E, flat, G flat, and A.

And so at any time, we can take any of these notes in our voicing, if we're going to voice out a chord and sub it out with the note a whole step above. So even here, the C diminished 7, I can, instead of playing A, add that B, and it sounds great. But it works with any of them. It adds just a little bit of a clash there, you know?

Any notes from this diminished chord that you move up one whole step sound great. And for pianists, when we're doing two-handed voicings, we can get some really lovely voicings out of this just by using the notes in the other notes in the scale. It's called a double diminished, right? So here I have C, A, and E flat in my left hand. and that's from our original C diminished chord. And then I'm borrowing notes from those other four notes in the scale. A, flat, B, and F.

I could put D in there too. Here's all of the notes, double diminished. Fully double diminished. All the notes from the octatonic scale. And it sounds awesome. So if we're doing our, again, our 3625 with subbing that E flat diminished for the A7, we can do that exact voicing. How great is that?

Again, E-flat-C, G-flat, and then from the other scale, B-D-F-A-flat. I love that so much. That sounds so good. So today is chord subs. How does that work? Which is something we get asked a lot about here, and by chord subs, I'm talking about chord substitutions. So if we take a tune like have you met Miss Jones, right? So in those first four bars, we can apply a number of substitutions to almost any of those chords. But we'll start. So here we have a three six going to the two, right? We have A minor, D7 to G minor seven. So our very level one chord substitution is what's called a tritone substitution. This can be used on

any dominant seventh chord, really, especially ones that are going somewhere. But if we have a three-six here, we can use the same, we can use a dominant seven chord, a tritone away from the dominant chord we're using here. In this case, it's D-7. So we can use an A-flat seven as the tritone sub going to G minor, right? So we have F-major 7, A minor 7, and instead of D7, flat 9, we'll use A flat 7, sharp 11, right? So when we're soloing over this, it gives us this chromatic movement. You might not do this substitution during the melody because it will clash with the melody, and that's something to consider whether you're playing the melody or you're soloing.

But when we're soloing, these substitutions are often used by jazz musicians as ways to sort of slip in and out of what are, is expecting. And one of my favorite substitutions put a diminished seventh chord in place of a major chord, essentially, especially if the melody note is a sixth. And you can do this as you're blowing too. Right? So that's a two five and F, uh, G minor seven. C seven. Instead of F major seven, we do F diminished seven complete with that diminished scale. A whole half diminished scale. provides a nice airy sound to the proceedings and it's really, really nice to play. And usually gets a bit of stank face on your audience, a little bit of a woo. Okay, so our third substitution, how does that work?

We're going to do a chromatic substitution that you hear often and maybe you don't know what it is. This again can happen inside of a 251. So if we again, again, if we're on our 251 and F, I don't know why I'm playing that lick so much today, but I'm really enjoying it. It's a variation of a tritone sub. We go G minor, and instead of playing a full bar of G minor, we do two beats, and then we do two beats of A-flat minor. We go up a half-step.

And then we do two beats of D-flat-7, like we're doing a-5, A-flat-7 to D-flat-7, and then slide down to the C-7 that we would have gone to, right? So you're extending, you're still doing G minor 7 and C7 within the space of two bars. One, two, three, four, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. But we're adding this sort of half-step slip in there. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. This is especially fun to superimpose upon a two, five, one. Really, really fun, really, really slick.

So those are what typical chord substance. institutions are. There's a mess of them. And they can get very complicated. They can even get a little more basic. One that I kind of glossed over, but is a really fun one, is on a 251, instead of a Dorian, a D minor 7, G7, C7, if we're in the Q of C, you can use the dominant. Right? You hear this one all the time. Very, very basic, but can be incredibly effective. Why do we use these? We use these to add variety, to add novelty to our playing, to add drama, to really defy what expectations we've set up. So you might not throw every single substitution you know and every single tune that you do from the very first chorus. These can be something that you kind of keep in your hip pocket

and you bring out when things are starting to get interesting, right? Don't overplay these. Use these in a very tasteful way and you're going to get a lot of miles out of them. Today we're talking about playing out. How does that work? What we mean when we talk about playing out is not playing exactly the chord that we're supposed to be playing. So if we're supposed to be playing a C minor chord, typically you might do the Dorian, maybe the Aeolian, maybe the Frigian. I don't know, there's a bunch of scales that would be in, right, that would be playing in. But playing out would be playing like, I don't know, a D major. Right? So that's just one example of some dissonance that you can create. Now notice that that didn't sound great just staying there. So what you hear a lot of modern players do and great players in the past too is establish the harmony inside the changes using, you know, all of the language that we talk about all the time. So in this case, a Dorian, some pentatonic sounds.

And then taking it out by going to that other key, very brief. briefly, and then back. Okay, so that got intense, but that's what it's kind of the point of taking it out is. It's about creating drama, so we're setting up this very pretty sound, and then when we take it outside just for a second, now be warned, this is a sound that a lot of people who aren't into jazz are like, well, you're just playing the wrong notes. And that's somewhat true, but we're doing it on purpose with intention behind it

to create this dissonance, to create this tension, to create this drama, so that we can come back and land on a very comfortable place. But that's just one way of doing it, of just picking a key that... So I pick D major over the C minor, because there's very few common tones between them. You know what I mean? There's a few, but there's a lot that really aren't, some strong ones. So that's an easy way to kind of go out.

And really, I kind of pick D major too because it's relative minor as B minor. It's a half step down from C minor. So I know that I'm going to be safely out of that changes. I'm a half step away. That's fairly dissonant territory. You know what I mean? Today we're talking about drop two. And drop two is a voicing concept.

But don't worry, you can use it. Even if you're not a pianist, it's great for arranging. Anytime you have four voices, drop two is a very convenient technique to use. I was just doing some orchestral arrangements the other day, and I was using this in the strings because I know that it always sounds good if you use it right. So what is drop to mean? Well, it actually means exactly what it's called.

You drop the two or the second note from the top. So if we have a C major seven chord, a four-note block chord, C-E-G-B, just a regular vanilla, wonderbread, C-Mager-7, The second note from the top, the G, we just take it and we drop it down an octave. We omit it from where it was, literally move it down an octave. And that's what it is. And for some reason, these voicings sound awesome.

Beautiful. That's it. So any four-note block chord that you have, here's D minor 7, like the 2 of a 2-5 and C. D-F-A-C, take that A second from the top and drop it down. These sound great. And so there's just an incredible amount of things you can do. So one thing I talked about in a video from last year was the Barry Harris sixth a minute scale. And these drop two voicings work great with this.

And I'll briefly go over that. So the sixth diminish scale is when you have a C major six. Let's do, yeah, let's do this. We'll do it starting here on this first inversion, E, G, A, and C, right? So the C is on top. That's our melody note. And we're going to do our drop two. C major 6 and then we alternate going up the

six diminished scale which is a major scale with a half step between the fifth and six degree. Octatonic scale that is even. Right? Instead of just there's a half step, this A flat between G and A. Okay, so we have our C major six on C. every chord tone in this, C, E, G, A, and C is going to be a C major six chord, just in different inversions. And this is all drop two.

I'll go slower so you can kind of see this if you're watching on YouTube. And then every other degree in this scale, you might notice forms a diminished chord, which, as we learned on Tuesday, is symmetrical in minor thirds. These can be used in drop two. So if we have this D here, why, we were here, see, we can do the same thing in drop two. And now we're alternating between major six diminish. Remember, all major six chord tones are major six chord. Major six diminish, major six diminish, major six diminished, major six diminished, and so on.

It's very cool and can be incredibly useful, especially if you're voicing melodies in four-part harmony. If you're a pianist, you can use this to play chord melodies, and it sounds really cool. See, that was pretty good, wasn't it? I thought that was fun. I mean, yeah. Well, it's funny, we're talking about we have no idea what we talked about. I have no idea what was just played, yeah. Ryan made these a couple weeks ago, but we didn't get to hear them.

We've not heard them. Hopefully it was good. Hopefully it was us. It wasn't some random podcast, some random. I mean, maybe it would be better if it wasn't. I don't know. Maybe if they just played Switched-on Pop. We put our top and tails on it.

We're catching up. We're catching up. It's a good podcast. Until tomorrow. You'll hear it.