You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Scales for a Minor 2-5-1 - #77

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

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Hey, Peter. Hey. What scales would you use over like C minor 7, flat 6 to like F7, alt over a G flat to like a B flat, minor flat 9? Yeah, I definitely use a C scale over that. I'm Adam Manus. And I'm Peter Martin. Peter Martin in Denver, Colorado. And you're listening to the You'll Hear at podcast.

Daniel Lee Jaz advice coming at you. Coming at you from two different locations, because PM is a globe trotter, world traveler. Well, this went so well yesterday. I just decided to stay here another day because we were having so much fun with this.

So I might never come back. Okay. It's going to be hard, man. It's going to be hard to keep this up from thousands of miles away. We'll give a shot. We'll give a shot. So we have a user question from SpeakPipe. Someone went to you'll hear it.com.

and left us a voicemail. Nice. Can you do that? Is that even legal? It is legal. You can go to You'll Hearit.com and leave us a voicemail. Do it now. Is that an official invitation to our listeners to do that?

It is. Why don't you go ahead and play it? Okay. Here we go. Hi, Peter and Adam. I have a question for you with respect to improvisation. When you're improvising over a 251 going to a minor key, do you like to use different?

scales over the two, the five of the one, or do you pick a common scale, and if so, which one or which ones do you use? And also, as a broader question, what strategy do you recommend for someone in the process of learning to improvise? I realize that you two are very advanced, and you probably don't need to write things out in advance to practice or perform improvisations, but for us, mere earthly musicians trying to develop those skills, do you have any particular recommendations? Thanks very much.

Thank you, David. That's a great question. And I love it when we get to go into a little bit of music theory on this and jazz theory. So minor 251s are pretty malleable in that there's a few different ways you can approach them. Hold on a second. I'm looking up my mouth. how do you spell malleable? No idea. I think I just picked that word up from a fancy book. I like it. Go ahead. So I don't know. I don't know about you, Peter, but I'll talk to you about,

or I'll tell you about my first choice over a minor 251 is sort of coming from the bebop school. And this is like if you want to stay really inside, I actually use the Dorian from a minor third up. So like if we're doing a minor 25 in C minor, for that D have to I'll use like an F Dorian, right? And then for the G7, you can use, and I actually learn this from one of our listeners, Elias, you can use the C harmonic minor scale starting on G. That's kind of what the B-Bop cats would use back on the day.

And then for the C-minor 6, the C-melotic minor. So those three scales, right, the F-Dorian, the C-harmonic minor starting on G, I don't even know what that would be called. But and then the C melodic minor, those are gonna give you a very inside sound for a minor 251 if you can kind of follow all that. So like, you know, if you transcribe any like Bud Powell,

you could actually hear Bud Powell sort of on that D half diminish play something he might play over an F minor seven. You know what I mean? Like there's some similar licks and similar, similar movements around that. And then when they get to that G, there's that flat nine sound,

there's the B natural, and then the rest, is like a C minor, so you feel really inside that harmony. Yeah, yeah. I like that a lot. So I want to dive into the harmonic minor one after, because I didn't quite understand that one. But the one you're talking about here, I've actually never thought about it like that. So F, Dorian, instead of the, well, really, and harmonically or diatonically, it's the same as a D, what is that? What's the seventh scale degree one?

that whatever that we we we you know what we got to look at a picture of some Greek columns before we we start these episodes because that'll help line us up you know well that's the thing ionic ironic ironic no like it's it's kind of it can be about how you think about like so that scale using that f dorian was locked into me when I realized like oh bud pal is playing like an f dorian lick over a two five to c minor and it makes sense because c minor is the relative minor to e flat right so a two five to e flat you can place somewhat similar thing to the relative minor. It's interesting. Yeah, and I mean, this really hits on an important point that I think could be helpful

for a lot of people is that it's not so much like which scale you use when they're diatonically or inharmonically the same. It's about the function of where it can take you. Right. And so I realize, although I've never thought about that F minor, that minor third up from the two of the two five minor two five to a minor chord, I've definitely played those same kind of B-Bob licks. And I kind of take it a step further. Like when I go F minor, you know, with like the ninth kind of arpeggiating even up to the 11th or whatever over that D, then over the G7, I'll go kind of like B-flat-7 altered or B-flat-7

diminished there. It totally works. And it works. And then you can kind of slide it down to like a G altered even. And then you're at the C minor. That's right. And then you're getting those cool melodic ideas based upon these patterns that are suggested by these kind of alternate, although not that alternate,

you know, harmonic areas from what the original chords are. Yeah, and hey, look, sometimes we get yelled at because people like to think of scales as they're from their root for intervolic reasons, and that's fine if that's your bag or whatever. But, you know, for me, a lot of these scales, especially, like you said, you know, the B-flat altered works over the G7, just great. And so sometimes thinking about it, it just saves my brain space from having, like, you know what I mean?

I'm just thinking about one thing instead of. of having to transpose all this stuff. And I mean, I really think this is an area where you can get into that kind of esoteric concept that we talk about a lot. And a lot of jazz musicians, a lot of musicians, really a lot of just artists talk about, which is like being able to hear something in real time as you're improvising. So this gets very difficult. And I think what happens is for some people, they want to explain everything from a theoretical

standpoint because it's like, it's like watching a great baseball pitcher when you can slow everything down and you go back in time and say, look at the way he did this, you know, the way he twisted his hand and everything. And that's all fine, but you can't think about that in the real time of throwing a baseball any more than you can in the, and when you're playing fast, b-bop over a two-five to a minor chord, right? Right. And also what really matters is the results. Did he strike him out or did the guy hit a home run off him? You know what I mean? So how does it sound actually? Like what you're playing, you know? That's exactly it. And that's our equivalent is like, how did it sound? You know, if you have the theory to back it up or not, it

really doesn't matter if what you're doing is sounding good. And so what this enables you to do, if you start on that F minor, now you maybe are thinking about that, especially as you're practicing it, but this will become a part of your kind of just automatic place that you go once you practice it enough. But if you start at that F minor place, what's happening is you're not actually thinking, well, you're starting out thinking F minor over the D after finish. But then when you get to the G7, you're not actually thinking, okay, now what's the substitute for G7? You're thinking about where did the F minor lead me to?

Yeah, exactly. know we've got a place to go, which is C minor. We can get there whenever we want. We can even get there the way Charlie Parker and Bud Powell and the bebop masters, they got there late sometimes. Yeah. You know, they were in time, but they got there at the next measure, and they caught up later. That's where the interesting stuff happens.

So you're not so much thinking, okay, F minor substitutes for the D chord, and then G7, B flat seven, altered substitutes for G. No, you're thinking B flat is a cool place to go based upon the melody. You're improvised coming off of that F minor. That's right. And when you have the experience to make it work, you know it's going to work and you know it's going to sound good. Yeah. And then it becomes really more of a concept and the theory behind it becomes you're leading from a melodic standpoint.

You know, now there's, of course, rhythm and harmony and all that working in there. But really the melody is kind of the leading indicator and the harmony becomes the lagging indicator of how you're improvising. And that's, I mean, look, you can do it any way that you want. But if you want to do some authentic OG bebop style, that's the way you do it. That's true. So let's go a little bit further in time. We're not going too much further here, but by the sort of late 50s,

people had stopped using, not everybody, but some folks had started using more of that, what is it, superlocrean? I don't even know what these scales are called. They just know what they sound like. But more melodic minor sound rather than the Dorian sound. So it's the same, you could still think of it as F melodic minor, so you have that E natural now instead of an E flat,

which is interesting because you're taking it, yourself out of the key of C minor, which was what the two five is a part of. So you would have D, E natural F, G, A, flat, B, flat C, and then we're back to D as your half-diminish sound. And then for the five, you'll start hearing more altered scale sounds, right? Yeah. Over the actual five. Over the actual five. Over the G7, you would hear based off of the A-flat melodic minor, you'd hear G, A-flat, B-flat, C-flat, B-natural, D-flat, E-flat, F, and then you're back to G.

And then the C is the melodic minor again. And there's some good examples of this. Go ahead. Go ahead. We finally got... This is our first breakdown. We got a leg breakdown. Okay.

Well, you're going to have to fly back to St. Louis now. We'll finish this here in the podcast. No, so I was just going to say, a really great and obvious example for you to check out is from Bill Evans' trio recording of beautiful love. It's a beautiful recording. I mean, it's a swing in recording, too. Great solo, easily solo to transcribe.

I transcribed when I was super young. But you really get how those melodic minor sounds work. That natural nine over the half-diminished chord. He was such a master at making that sound almost like French impressionistic. You know what I mean? Right. As he was apt to do. Yeah.

Yep. Yeah. And I mean, I think that that, you know, in terms of, you know, the tension and releases what that scale, whatever we decided to call, but with that natural. ninth over the half diminished going i mean look when you're going more traditionally with the the f dorian or eflap major scale you know over the two the d half diminished when you're going from that to the g7 your main sort of tension and beginning of resolution goes from that c to the b natural and that's whether you're using an altered or even just a straight dominant or diminished or whatever

on the five now putting in that e natural that natural ninth over the two the d half diminished. Now you've got that sliding down to the E flat and you've got the C going down to the B. And those become important areas whether you're playing kind of BBop or moderate or anything. It's just another area for you to play with with that tension and resolution. Bro, that can either slide down to the E flat or you could slide that up to the F on the G. You know what I mean? That's what's so great about that E natural is there are some voice leading opportunities there that aren't presented as clearly with the E flat. I really like that using that, you know. Yeah. And I mean, these things are important. Again, it's not even so much

the theory outside of sort of reverse engineering as an explanation. But these points to tension and release. And look, we're ultimately releasing down to the one. So it's kind of a two-step process. But we want to have choices and places that we can weave our melodies so they don't sound generic. Like you ever heard somebody who's just like eighth notes and they're playing exactly the right notes within the chords? And there's nothing altered and there's no tension. So everything has to be like their rhythm has to be so strong because there's nothing in the melody or the harmony that gives it any kind of meat to this story. So these are just additional places and choices that we have as we weave our melodies,

because that's where it's at. The melody is what's telling the story. One more choice I'd like to mention, and I think I've heard you do this too, is sometimes I just straight up think of this half diminished as a substitution where I'll just play an A-flat sort of Lydian dominant sound. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. Or you could think about it as like a D-sharp 9 kind of sound or whatever.

Yeah. But having that F sharp in there, that G flat F sharp in there. I like that sound on a minor two five. It works great. That's funny because my additional one, I was going to say D7, sharp 9 flat 13, which is really an A flat 13, you know, with the ninth in there. And then so you have some choices as far as your room note. But in terms of, again, you've got some nice places you can slide from there to the G7

altered, the G7 diminished, G7 straight dominant. And what you start to see with all of these are choices. That's what it's always about choices for us to make interesting, you know, melodic ideas once we get there. And I would say that, you know, I remember when I used to look at the half-diminished, especially because that's such an ornery little chord as like such a challenge. And I would want to, when I was kind of beginner and improviser, I'd want to get away from it as quick as possible. Yeah. Get on to the next score, you know.

So I was looking at these 251s, the minors as much more difficult than the regular 251. But then when you start to see, there's actually more choices in a way. And look, a lot of these that we're talking about can also work over a 251 as like a deceptive thing sounding like it's going to a minor. But once you start to embrace the different choices and, you know, you take the time to practice and learn each of these different sounds and do it slowly so they can really absorb. Because these are things you can use a lot of different situations, you know, so you want to take your time with it and really let, you know, give yourself your ears a chance to absorb it and your fingers and all that on your instrument so that it can become a deep part of your playing. That's so great, man. Yeah, this has been a fun, nerdy conversation in two different time zones. Appreciate it.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, thanks, David, for the question. Yeah, great question. And I hope we cleared something up or just gave you more confusion to think about either one. Well, this might be a good, you know, after our episode from last week about what we listened to when we're running, we got all these responses back from folks about and some great comments into YouTube about, well yeah this was great because I'm always running while I listen to the podcast so this one's kind of a you know maybe keep you going if you're on your little daily run

this could be a nice thing for you to to think about because like right now we're both doing this away from the piano and I think it's a great and look I know we don't have all pianists listen I'm sorry I'm always referring to the piano because we're pianists but no matter what instrument you play always great to take time away and think about and hear this kind of stuff these really small little theoretical things hear them away from your instrument so you can start to like process them not just in terms of how it feels on your instrument but away from that kind of habit thing and while you're out walking while you're out running or whatever's a great time to try to hear some of this stuff so true yeah and if you want to

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