Connecting Chords With Linear Harmony, by Bert Ligon.
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One of the goals of teaching jazz improvisation is having the students play rhythmically coherent and harmonically specific lines. Most improvisation students come to class with the ability to play lines that are harmonically and rhythmically vague.
With many great jazz solos, the rhythm section could be removed and the time, form and harmony would still be heard in the improvised lines. Too often beginning improvisers depend on the rhythm section to provide the harmony and rhythm, while they skate over the top. Many jazz texts and classes deal with jazz theory material related to individual chords.
Sonny Rollins talked of how Dizzy Gillespie could really connect the chords. This book examines the linear connection of which Rollins spoke, the connections between these chords in great jazz solos, This text is meant to augment other books by exploring in detail the linear—horizontal connections of jazz materials in the improvised jazz melody line based on solos excerpts from outstanding jazz artists.
Approaches to Improvisation
There are basically three approaches to improvising on jazz standards: melodic paraphrasing, improvising with the harmony, and motivic development, which may overlap the previous two. This book deals with the second area, improvising with the harmony. Techniques in elaborating the harmonic outlines discussed here may be applied to paraphrasing.
Approaches to Improvising on the Harmony
There are many ways of approaching the melodic and harmonic material in the jazz literature. After transcribing and examining hundreds of jazz solos, we find great jazz musicians approach the harmonic implications in three ways: harmonic specificity, harmonic generalization, or ignoring harmonic implications.
- Harmonic Specificity: Careful attention to the implications of harmony.
Reliance on proper thirds, sevenths, resolving appropriately. Adhering to alterations called for by the chord symbols or the melodic implications of the composition. - Harmonic Generalization: —Rather than deal with the specifics of the implied
harmony, reliance on blues ideas and scales. In the instance of a II – V, it’s often
generalized as a I chord, For example: with the progression:
Experienced jazz improvisers move in and out of the above areas. They are always able to play harmonically specific, and often after being general or vague they will return to the specifics. When an experienced jazz improviser plays deliberately vague, he does so knowing the harmonic implications, and therefore knowing just what tones to avoid.
The beginning improviser usually progresses backwards to specificity; playing mostly wrong notes in the beginning; discovering blues licks and harmonic generalization inserting throughout a tune; and after playing experience, practice and study, learning how to be more specific with the chord implications; finally integrating, blending and keeping a balance between harmonic clarity and ambiguity.
This book will help the beginning and experienced jazz improvisation student to achieve harmonic clarity in their improvised lines. The author has taken hundreds of melodic examples from the solos of several great jazz artists. He has examined them and determined the framework, their underlying skeleton, and divided them into three basic outlines. These outlines are like public domain melodies that are used by
almost every composer and improviser in a harmonic framework from Bach to Brecker, Adderley to Zawinul. For each outline, we discuss the devices several jazz artists have used to make the outlines musically interesting.