Mike's Music Musings

An instructor once told me that a great skill to develop is the ability to translate one lick to multiple scales and chord qualities. Music is made up of patterns and thematic development of a motif, which is usually expressed over changing chords. Accomplishing this involves understanding how scales are constructed, and which of the scale degrees are stable versus unstable . This is just another way of saying which tones carry tension and which tones carry the absence or resolution of tension. Chord tones are stable, and the non-chord tones are more unstable- especially if within a half step of a chord tone. For example, the b9 really wants to resolve to the 1, and the 4 is begging to resolve to the 3.  Non-chord tones with a whole step relationship, for example, the 9 or 6 in a major scale, are more stable and depending on the context can act as stable or unstable tones. Notes that are neither chord tones nor non-chord tones (i.e., outside of the scale) can be also expressed as ...

I jammed on Footprints for the first time this week, which was a lot of fun, albeit difficult.  The song is a C minor blues with a twist of a turnaround, which I was unprepared for and slogged through.  Although I've seen several variants of bars 8-10, I'm using the Real Book vol. 6, where the changes are F#m7b5 F7#11 / E7b5#9 A7b5#9. At first it's hard to make sense of these changes.  The usual turnaround to Cm7 would be Dm7b5 G7alt, or Ab7 G7alt. It seems like the turnaround is back cycled up another set of ii-Vs.  So it could be thought of as F#m7 B7 / Em A7 / Dm7b5 G7alt Where the F#m7 is a F#m7b5, B7 is subbed for its tritone F7#11, the Em7 is turned to a dominant chord, and the Dm7b5 G7alt is missing. In the practice room, my first approach was to just play all the arpeggios, and try to stick the landing when I got to Cm7, resolving smoothly.  After I could do that, I  created some more interesting lines of my own.

While practicing over the tune "There Will Never Be Another You," my favorite jazz standard to play on, I used a classic jazz lick as a starting point to write a longer line of my own. The chromaticism builds tension and excitement, which is then released playing relatively simply following the Abmaj7. I continue after the ii-V to show how to outline the descending chromatic line that is internal to the skeleton of this tune. So the chromaticism doesn't really stop after my lick. The classic jazz lick (cliche) - can be played over Eb7 or Dbmaj7 as well. My chromatic line.  A lot of energy loaded into this line due to the chromaticism, and by accenting the & of 4.