Jazz Harmony is all messed up in my ear. Help me understand jazz harmony. Usually I have no problem with harmony, whenever I listen to music, wether it's rock, prog rock, folk world music, metal, classical etc.. etc. I can sing or hear pretty well the root, the 3rd and the 5th wich makes it easier to jam or at least learn by ear. But with jazz it's just fucked up in my head. The chords are usually left without the 5th and root wich makes me loose the harmony plus the bass and melodies have so much chromatism that you loose all sense of the scale played and it's root, and that is let alone the fact that it changes every bar or so. I've got no problem improvising over a given scale in a given tone, cause I go with my feel and I just don't feel jazz chord changes. I wanna play jazz, but clarification would be much needed. Thank you very much. Peace
Don't sweat it too hard, man. You just need time. Your ears need time. You are absolutely right, if you can't hear it, you can't play it! I understand some of the theory's of modern jazz harmony, but I'm not going to pretend that I can improvise over any modern jazz progression off the top of my head. I can fake it but it feels terrible( can't be very interesting either). Check it.... If you are improvising over a I-IV-V blues progression, you are playing jazz.( yes, blues is jazz) You're young, man. Just keep listening to the masters( you know, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Frank Zappa...) and keep stretching those ears! A modal approach to improvising has helped my"Jazz" playing quite a bit.
practice as many II-V-I progressions as you can handle. Go around the circle(of fifths) till you know them all fairly well. And do some ear training. Play major/minor 7th chords till you can recognize the difference without thinking about it. Do it with all chord types. Then do inversions. It was probably one of my biggest issues with jazz - getting to "feel" the changes. It sucks, but if you sit and plug away at it till you're comfortable, it makes everything else easier.
I think my problem is when it changes key... If I'm in A major and I play II-V-I, I'll stick to a A major scale, with some colourful modal variation, but still it's A major all the time. What to do with chords like A7 (ok) then G7 (no G in Amaj???) then A#7 (???) or whatever weird change, that just doesn't fit in the key. Yet they keep making it sound good.
the circle of fifths only goes major or minor. The fifths will always be natural. They don't change for major or minor. Goes like: C-G-D-A-E-B But thats just one direction... partially. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_fifths when you're playing changes, you can use the scale of the chord you change to. Even if you're playing in A major and you get to A#7, you can play the A#7 scale because it fits with the chord. It might sound "out" depending on how much you stray from A major, but you wouldn't be wrong for doing so. If you look at a lead sheet, you'll see notes in the melody that don't fit the key of the song. Those notes come from the scale of the "out" chord. So if you come across and A#7 when then key of the song is A major, there is a good chance that there is an A# in the melody. Or something from the A#7 scale at least. The thing that would make it easiest is to find the different chord progressions in the song. Pick out all of the II V I's, any other V I's, III-VI-II-V-I's can be fun. Then look at everything outside of what you found. See if there are new progressions you didn't see before (perhaps there is a progression that doesn't reference the key of the song). Count up all your different and distinct roots from the various progressions. Count up all the other "out" chords you come across that haven't been grouped. Those are the basic scales of the song. Of course as you go on, you can start to change up the scales you play - vary your minor scales or start throwing in new chords (like a V-I into a ii-V-I) But all that is for another time
So that's how you play jazz... thanks for the explanation. It's totally a different system than the system I'm used to, I'm not sure I'm feeling it yet. But thanks. You see I was used to this : example key of A min Amin - Amin scale Bdim - B locrian scale or A minor scale Cmaj - C maj scale or A minor scale Dmin - D dorian scale or A minor scale Emin - E phrygian etc. Fmaj- F lydian etc. Gmaj - G mixolydian etc.
What I meant was ... the fifth can be diminushed to accomadate the key Relative fifths : A E B F C etc. (key of Amin) Natural fifths : A E B F# C# etc.
the circle is based around keys and their signatures. not scales or chords. You wouldn't need to use it to accommodate anything. Music works around the circle, the circle doesn't get worked around for music.
