Mixophrygian Augmented

 
or: Why Scales Are For Fish  

Let's conduct an experiment: Let's go out and visit our favorite music store 'round the corner and browse through the jazz instruction textbooks on display. Chances are that we run into three things: Scales, scales, and more scales. Scales with five tones, with six or seven tones, some even with eight. Scales with impressive names, culled from a strange understanding of medieval modes, or from Asian and African languages. Familiar-sounding scales, alien sounding scales, but scales nevertheless. Scales, scales, and more scales, usque ad nauseam.

Who is going to learn all of these? Who in their right mind is willing to invest all the time and effort to stuff all of this into their precious mental harddisk? Not me, that's for sure. And I doubt that the great jazz players of the past did. So how did they sound that good? What other mechanism is there that could substitute for the knowledge of some-odd hundred scales? The answer is easy:

It's a fact that more than one scale can be played on top of any given chord. Now let's pool all these scales together and overlay them and we'll arrive at a sub-set of the chromatic scale that contains notes that sound good with the given chord. Some notes (usually called avoid tones) are suitable as passing tones only, and others (the ones not contained) will be no-nos.

So for example:

• the major chord offers 7 nice tones, 3 passing tones and 2 no-nos,
• the minor chord has 8 nice ones, 3 passing tones and a single no-no (the major third, of course),
• the dominant chord offers 10 nice tones, 2 passing tones and no no-nos at all!

And even that is not the last word: In the case of minor, if you play the major third in a diatonic context that it acts as the "blue 4th", it sounds SO nice!

All that remains to be done is remember the tones that don't work (they're fewer than the ones that do) and play with the rest. For passages, we can just construct diatonic material on-the-fly from our note reservoir, and arrive at new "scales" every time. It's that easy − and it puts you MILES ahead of the scale apologists.

Free your mind!

 

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On Music

Bud Powell's "Glow" - that incredible tone that just sustains forever
M-S Recording - and Reverse M-S too...

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Mixophrygian Augmented or: Why Scales Are For Fish

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