You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How Does That Work? Altered Extensions

Starting point is 00:00:13 I'm Adam Manus and you're listening to the You'll Hearer Podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you coming at you solo today because Peter's in Europe and I'm here in St. Louis. I think he's going to be checking in a little bit next week with his own versions on the road of the You'll Hear at podcast. But 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? I want to tell you. So alter dominant chord might be something that a term that you've heard before.

Starting point is 00:00:54 Maybe you know all about them. If so, you can press next to the next one. But if you want a refresher on them and how to use them and how to create them, you're at the right place. So, well, let's start with what is a dominant chord. So a dominant chord is a seventh chord. So if we're in the key of C, you would see C7. It's that sound. Now we call these dominant chords because they usually lead to the tonic, right?

Starting point is 00:01:23 This is kind of the second strongest chord in any given key, and they resolve just beautifully to the one of a key, whether that's major or minor. So a dominant seventh chord is built off of the root of the fifth degree of the Ionian scale, for instance, in the major key. So if we're in the key of F, it's C, E, G, and then B flat, right? Because we're in the key of F. Now in jazz, we like to throw in extensions on most of our chords.

Starting point is 00:01:54 So we're not satisfied with this. We like to add in the ninth. And then we like to go even further with the 11th, except on the dominant chord, we like to sharp it. This is our first altered dominant chord. Because F sharp is not in the key. of f major obviously it's not in the c mixolydian scale which is what we've built this on so far we've built it on the mixillian scale

Starting point is 00:02:23 right and so when we add the 11th the sharp 11th now we're out of that sound and it's an altered dominant because it's altered from its original scale we also like to add the 13 so here's the natural 13 now often you hear this very very voicing. C, E, B, flat, we leave out the fifth completely, 9d, sharp 11, F sharp, and 13A. This is called a C7 sharp 11, or C-13 sharp 11 if you want to get very, very specific. But oftentimes you'll see C-7-sharp 11, and it's perfectly great to play this. Right? So, within any alter dominant chord, basically any of the.

Starting point is 00:03:10 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 9, 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. Do Kellington love these chords. So that's the sharp 9. Now you also

Starting point is 00:04:05 have the flat 9, 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 the 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,

Starting point is 00:04:33 which is a great scale to use going to your 1. So this C-7, flat-9, sharp-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.

Starting point is 00:05:14 And it sounds more complicated than this, really. It's just, Those are the altered extensions, right? The 9th, the 11th, and the 13th. 13th 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.

Starting point is 00:05:41 We have 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?

Starting point is 00:06:10 So this is... This chord is called the Sharp-9-flat-13, but it's based off of the... 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 extension. So we have, and it's based again off of the altered scale. So we have flat 9, 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 13th is flated the 11th is sharp and the 13 is flat by the way the 9th is the only one that could be both flatted and

Starting point is 00:07:18 The 11th is almost always sharp and the 13th is almost always flat. If the 13th was sharp, it would just be the dominant seven. So on an altered dominant chord, it would make sense to have two B flats in there. You already have it. It's represented. So that's altered dominates. How do they work? Hope you enjoyed it. Go to the You'll Hear at Blog to check out all of our free content and go to Open StudioJazz.com to check out all of our full courses. We just released Friday, our new Jazz Piano Technique course,

Starting point is 00:07:45 where Peter Martin and I guide you through. you through, that's the bell for the release of that course. We guide you through four weeks of guided practice sessions. We practice with you to get your chops up. It's only been three days, but I'm sure it's massively popular already. So,

Starting point is 00:08:01 go check that out for Open StudioJadz.com. And until tomorrow, we'll hear.

You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How Does That Work? Altered Extensions

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