You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Our Favorite Reharm Hacks - #28

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam take you through their favorite reharms. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

That's not the real changes, buddy. Oh, it's not? No. Come on, man. What do you think this is? I'm Adam Ennis. And I'm Peter Martin. And you're listening to the You'll Hearit podcast.

Daily Jazz advice coming at you. Coming at you again from the Steinway O'Hare at You'll Hereat Studios here in Midtown, St. Louis, Missouri. I love these little Steinway seated days, man. These are fun. I mean, we're out of the Pod Cave. It's less musty over here than the Pod Cave. Yeah, weirdly, the pianist like being around a piano. It's odd.

Yep. So we're back. We're back. And we're answering a user. question. This is from one of our regular listeners, Mark in Vancouver, had asked about reharms. Nice. And I couldn't quite figure out if you wanted specific recordings of reharms, but we're just going to talk about kind of our favorite re-harm hacks.

Maybe some simple things you can implement right away on your gigs, on your playing, to help you kind of add a little sparkle, add a little color. A little interest. Wake up the audience sometimes. Wake up the audience. Like, what? Is that even legal? That's not a tonic? That's a ginantonic. What's going on? So my... Sorry.

No, I was just thinking, should we say what Reharm is? We're making an assumption. We are making a huge assumption. So when we say re-harm, we're talking about re-hormonization. We're talking about taking sort of agreed-upon chord changes under a melody. Agreed upon as in they were written by the composer. Agreed upon by us and the composer. It's a two-way street.

I mean, hey, honestly, most jazz standards everybody plays are already reharmine. They are, exactly. They're not the original changes that you're playing. If you learned it from Miles' recording, it's definitely a re-harm. Definitely a re-harm. But you can take that even further, and there are some sort of cliches and some hacks that we can do to re-harm. So if you don't mind, I'll just get right into it. Get right into it.

My very favorite reharm trick to do. My favorite re-harm trick is that the last note of a standard. Usually standards end on the tonic, right, where the melody ends on the ones. Yeah. So if we're in the key of F, Right? But one of my favorite things is to end on a diminished

and then resolve. Or you can stay on the diminished, heck, you know. And you can do this anywhere, really, you know. You're not really going to mess up the bass player that much unless he lands on a major third. He should not be on a major. He or she should not be there. They should be right on the tonic

that gives you the room, really, to do anything. But for some reason, you know, that, that diminished sound, it works really well when the melody is the tonic. And also it works really well when the melody is the seventh or the ninth. Yeah. Yeah, I love it there.

And you have that kind of E over F sound. Yeah, yeah. It works over if it's the ninth. It's a little mystery. You say a little mystery, a little question mark? That's what the diminishes is all about, man. Yeah, man. A little mysterious. And I like because you're doing, you know,

you really highlighted that even when you ended on the tonic that the 9th and the major 7th. And that E major triad is kind of implicit in there or cumplice. There's a few triads, obviously. The E, there's D flat, F. And then, you know, you can either resolve as you want. Or it can just, depending on when you're playing it in the set, could be a nice little question mark. And so we're kind of playing this as a ballad.

but if you're really getting going on your solo, throwing this in at the end of a 2-5 can be super effective. You know what I mean? Yeah, it just adds this mystery. So what do you got for number two? And it can also, sorry, it can also just be like just really, even without the comping and the left hand, you're just sliding in and out. Just a little slide on that beat one to kind of like trick everybody.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. Okay, so I think for the one I'd like to go with now is more of like a concept of how to re-harm it. This can go in a lot of different ways. And that is where we're really listening, number one, listen. And so, and depending on where we are in the arrangement, and I'm going to kind of assume that I'm well into the arrangement now.

And I'm getting to the first point where I'm kind of, not necessarily tired of the correct changes, but the arrangement, the moment, the gigs, something about the moment through really intense listening and being in the moment and being present makes it feel like it's time for a little bit of a harmonic surprise. Yeah. Right.

So as much as it's important, what you're going to do to re-harm, this concept is based more upon the moment of when you're going to do it. So let's assume that here, maybe I say here, now I want to go to something different. So I know I've got the regular chord is 2.5 to G minor. Of course, this is autumn leaves. And so it would be A half diminished normally and the melody's on the C. But what we're going to do is think about that C as being all the different possibilities of what could go there. Okay? And so there's going to be, you know, I'm not always this calculating, but sometimes I am.

I'm thinking about some tension and some resolution, but not in the sense of like we normally do it with like, you know, alterations to a dominant and then alter and then resolving into a major that's already built in. This is more like the tension is going to be the fact that I don't go to the expected place. Right. You're going outside. Yeah. So the farther I go. Yeah. So now this is almost like seeming like it's going to go somewhere else. So the resolution is a further place or way.

Now, the tricky part about this, you have to be always sort of a step ahead. It's like playing chess. You know, the better players already are thinking some steps ahead. So you're hearing to where you're going to go because you eventually do want to bring it back home, I think. Yeah. you have to think about where that resolution is going to happen and kind of plan your day around it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the great thing about that is you don't have to be as calculating.

You can kind of just pick things that you know or feel outside of that target. Yeah. Like, I know this is going further and further. Like when you chose, you know, this like resolution to F minor when you're really supposed to be going somewhere to G minor. That's so far out that it's like, I know that's going to get them first. And you've got some time, especially with, you know, solo piano. You can take as long as you want to. But I think what you're saying, it really seems.

speaks to that point of when you do this is what's so important, not how, not, you know, the whole thing of like, well, I like to go, and I mean, you know, to tell you the truth, I don't even know theoretically what this is. I can tell you, it's, so this is like a C2 over E to an E flat sus. So this is more based around that sound coming out of here. Yeah. And then I know that, I know what that sound is. And so now I've got to find something to get to the, like, the only thing in the head is like the G minor. So I'm like, so I might be. That's so cool.

Yeah, you can delay it even more with all that, you know, like until you want to land. Yeah. Finally on there. That can be at the very last second. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that's where we're really having an understanding, really knowing the tune, really knowing the form, knowing the architecture of it. That keeps you from having to think about, wait, how many bars are. till I need to catch up.

Like, because you know the melody. And look, the thing about this tune, if you know this tune, you know that where harmonically form and melodically you have room to really stretch out with some reharms. I mean, look, you could do the whole thing, and sometimes that's cool,

but if you can pick these spots, it's so much more dramatic. So you've got to really know the tune. And the whole thing with this, there's a lot of breaks in the melody. But they're not like the melody's holding, you know, you know. So you can kind of go crazy.

knowing you have these different places, you know. That's so good. Yeah. So another kind of hack that I think is pretty commonly done for reharmonization. This is based around the third, and there's two different ones. There's one for a minor third. There's one for a major third, but you've heard the sound a million times. So let's say we're on all the things you are.

You know, this is based around the minor third. Yeah. And it's really simple. You just turn a minor third into a major third by changing the root. and you can resolve that back up or you can start now once you get to a chord with a major third like this e flat dominant instead of oh by so those those minor third chords those minor seven chords we i was taking the root down one half step so i turned this f minor seven into an e major seven right same third and seven different root and different fifth makes a whole different chord same thing here b flat minor seven with the third in the melody

A major seven. Now when I get to the E flat dominant seven, which has a major third, it's the opposite. You take it up. You can even do a little two five here if you want. Just a little hack. It's nothing, you know,

it's, again, like everything we were just talking about, context matters. Yeah. But this is something that I use all the time. Yeah. If I'm going to take something out, I know it's farther out than the diatonic chord, and I know it sounds slick.

Sounds killing. Yeah. All right, good. All right, we got time for one more? Mm-hmm. Okay. So this is one that I like to do. It's another kind of more of a conceptual one,

but it's where we really think about the re-harmonization coming from some alteration to the root movement. So I'll go back to the... So that's sort of the typical root movement, of course. So now we're going to think about somewhere that we want to change... We're going to change the root movement, okay? But we want to think about creating a melody with the root movement. We're not worried about what the harmony is at all.

So that's going to give us some more... flexibility and more focus. So we might go, and then you're trying to kind of hear an outline. Yeah, yeah. So if I went back and I've kind of already forgotten this and that wasn't the most successful one, but that's, this is part of the fun is like how you're gonna fix it. So I started out, I was already kind of hearing the... So that's C minor, and then we're going to A. We're going to go to A, what is that, flat 13, sharp nine.

And then we go to G flat. Now we got a little challenge because we're at the raised fifth. 5th but I want that I want that it's gonna have tension to matter what so we could go we could go same thing flat 13 sharp 9 but I like that B flat triad over G flat so we got that and then what I go down to a flat I think so I mean E flat yeah and the cool thing about that is that's the chord that's actually bolster B at and then I went up to here C over E kind of stealing from my thing before then maybe F minor make it down you're just doing kind of a two point counterpoint between the melody and the root and then filling in whatever colors you want in between whatever you're hearing.

This is a great way. This isn't something I think you would use in an improvisation with a group, but this is something you would use to create your own original arrangement. Exactly. Of a standard. I think it's super effective in that regard. Yeah, it really can be. And it's a great way to experiment with this.

And what you can do is it allows you, like, the better your melody is for your root movement that you're creating, the more leeway you have to really go crazy with the, with changing up the harmony because you can play stuff that even clashes. Because you've already got the regular melody, which everybody knows. Now you're creating another melody on there. So the inner things, like the cohesion of it is the counterpoint. Yeah. That's the cohesion.

It's so funny, man. I was actually just using this to arrange a pop tune for this gig I have on Friday. We're doing Whitney Houston's I want to dance with someone. Oh, yeah. So just taking just one little, you know, one little melody and root movement. I didn't change much in that. That's kind of the standard change, the regular changes. But just taking one melody and then doing a counterpoint with a root,

changes the whole line of the song. Yeah, man. Let me make a guess that the outro that you do on a little bit. You'll Hear It Podcast. Go to you'll hear it.com. Suggestion for an episode

to stay in touch with our newsletter. I like this, Ben. Live outro music. Until next time. You'll hear it.