Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?

Subject: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 16 Oct 07 - 01:11 PM

Theolonius Monk is famous for it--and it sounds pretty cool--I just can't figure out what the method is--anyone?

And before anyone says anything to the contrary, jazz is both traditional and folk music, and it is the musical form that is the basis for lot of American musical traditions--

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: s&r
Date: 16 Oct 07 - 01:36 PM

Don't think the answer's that simple. Chords generally are concords (chords you can stop on) or discords (chords you have to move off) The skill is not leaving the discord, but how you do it. Circle of fifths is one well known method - eg jump from C to (say) B(anything) and cycle back through E(something) A (something) D (something) G (something) back to C.

The somethings might be sevenths, ninths, flatted this that or other according to the type of music and the performer.

Stu

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: GUEST,Ian cookieless
Date: 16 Oct 07 - 01:49 PM

s&r is right. They're not 'wrong' chords - that would be unlistenable - they are unusual chords for a particular note or sequence of notes. A dischord can sound beautiful - but awful if it's the wrong dischord in the wrong place. It's all about placement and timing.

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 16 Oct 07 - 01:50 PM

Every note can be found in a whole range of chords. So you can use an unexpected chord that contains the note that is required.

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: GUEST,Captain Colin
Date: 16 Oct 07 - 02:06 PM

There's no such thing as wrong chords.

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: Darowyn
Date: 16 Oct 07 - 03:20 PM

If the "right" chord is C, (C,E,G) a Jazz player could play G,Bb,D, which is clearly a chord of G minor, except where it's actually heard as a C9 chord with the root C and the third E missing. Sometimes this is called playing the extensions.
Another method is tritone substitution, where one or more note is replaced by the note a diminished fifth higher. F sharp instead of C for example.
It's easy- the difficult bit is knowing when it will sound good.
Cheers
Dave

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: The Sandman
Date: 16 Oct 07 - 03:59 PM

Captain Colin,really? try substituting d major when the other guitarist is playing e minor,it sounds horrendous.,and to my ears is wrong.
substituting the dominant seventh,try the dominant eleventh,[this will be succesful or unsuccessful depending on the melody note,]or a minor chord based on the fifth note of dom 7,so if your g7 was dominant chord, try d minor this works because g7 and d minor share two notes in common DF,and is more likely to work if the melody note isDorF .Dick Miles

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 16 Oct 07 - 05:31 PM

I am asking particularly about Monk's playing, which was way beyond using chord substitutions or extensions, or any of that sort of thing. He said himself that he was playing wrong chords--and if you listen, they sound wrong--really, really, wrong--

The ever observant Mr. Miles suggested D major over Em--and that is the sort of sound is what we're talking about here--he uses them as a kind of staccato rhythmic device to offset the melody--They aren't fat chords, and, strange as it may seem, they never overpower the melody--

If you aren't familiar with Monk, PM me your email and I'll bounce back a file of his take on "Honeysuckle Rose"--

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 17 Oct 07 - 02:17 AM

Actually one 'wrong chord' trick works well on the piano accordion. Some smaller boxes do not have a '7th' row, or any other of the 'extra' rows.

You can play a Maj instead of the 7th - eg G Maj - G Maj 7th and usually get away with it, because if you really NEED a G Maj 7th, you are probably going to be playing that '7th note' in the melody line that bar anyway!

This works very well when the 27 guitars in the session drown you out too! :-)

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: The Sandman
Date: 17 Oct 07 - 07:21 AM

mted might i suggest its a question of spreading the dissonnances.for example drop d tuning on the guitar DADGBE,an E minor chord over a D MODAL ,sounds fine,
but if i play on my concertina,def#gbe,all close together D TO E, E to f#,Intervals of a tone f#to g interval of a semitone,it sounds awful if i play them simultaneously .
but not if i play them for a beat, and hold the dissonance for half a beat,and then move on,or resolve them.
these dissonances usually work if you move to a chord which contains AT LEAST one chromatic movement.
for example d 7 df#a c to amajor7 AC#EG#[Chromatic movement c toc#],from a major7 to B7,AC#EG#,B EflatAF#[Chromatic movementEtoEflat]from B7 to g major,.
so you have progressed from your dom7to your tonic by an interesting route.D7,AMAJOR7,B7,G MAJOR.Dick Miles

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: PoppaGator
Date: 17 Oct 07 - 01:36 PM

I'm surprised to see M.Ted asking this kind of question; I think of him as one of our resident music-theory experts, someone who can usually be counted upon to supply answers.

Coincidentally, as I was reading the opening post to this thread here at work yesterday, the mailman was dropping a Netflix DVD copy of Clint Eastwood's documentary film "Monk: Straight No Chaser" into my mailbox back home.

So, as I watched (and listened to) the DVD last night, I was especially aware of Monk's use of dissonant chords, wondering why a particular choice "works" in a given passage despite its seeming unsuitability, whereas a different choice, of a different "non-harmonic" or "unexpected" chord, might not.

Couldn't come up with any answers. Maybe there IS no rule, maybe it just a matter of the player/composer's instinct at a given moment. If you're a genius, you'll come up with something "right"; if not, well, they won't be making any movies about your life and work.

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: treewind
Date: 18 Oct 07 - 04:52 AM

"No such thing as wrong chords"

I think this is an example of where the trendy phrase "differently right" is literally applicable.

Anahata

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: Nick
Date: 18 Oct 07 - 08:05 AM

My elder son was fascinated by Monk's 'Round Midnight' and used to comment that the chords were 'wrong'. I've got a copy of Monk playing it as a solo piece somewhere and he used to be confused as to how something could be both 'so right' and 'so wrong' at the same time.

There are a couple of articles on a site called "pianologist" which have quite a lot of info on that particular piece and some transcriptions and explanations that may be useful if you haven't found them - I don't pretend that they mean much to me especially the second link about Quartal voicings but they may help to confuse (!)

Round Midnight transcription and theory

Quartals in Jazz

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: GUEST
Date: 18 Oct 07 - 09:16 AM

"confused as to how something could be both 'so right' and 'so wrong' at the same time."

I think there's a big difference between "correct/ incorrect" and "right/ wrong". The correct chords aren't always the right ones..

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 18 Oct 07 - 05:21 PM

Interesting website--Nick--I can hear some of those Quartal voices in Monk's playing, as well, but there is other stuff, like seconds harmonized with the melody---particularly there are little dissonant progressions at the end of melodic phrases.

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: PoppaGator
Date: 19 Oct 07 - 04:23 PM

I fell asleep the other night before watching the Monk documentary all the way through to the end, and didn't see the rest of the film until last night.

In the final 15-20 minutes, there's a scene with Monk and one of the sax players in his octet going over chord changes, repeatedly ("Db7 to G7? Really?"), and also discussing what notes the horn might play at certain points in the composition. The next scene shows a group of musicians bantering about chords and harmonies in Monk's music. (It's the only color-film sequence in an otherwise black-and-white film, and it's pretty obvious that the discussion took place well after Monk has passed away.)

These scanty little bits of dialogue may or may not throw some light on the subject, depending upon how much the viewer already knows about harmonic theory. (I didn't get a whole lot out of it, but then I am pretty unsophisticated in this area. I can recognized chord patterns only as long as they're pretty standard three- or four-chord sequences ~ nothing fancier than, say, the circle of fifths.)

I'm passing the information along to encourage you to see the film if you think it might help. It's available from Netflix, so it's probaly available elsewhere as well. The full and correct title is Thelonius Monk: Straight, No Chaser.

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 19 Oct 07 - 05:25 PM

I am embarassed to say that I have that DVD, somewhere, but never watched it. More embarassing, I have know idea where it is. I'll go look for it, though, I am sure it will help a lot. It is amazing how much you can figure out from a just a little bit of discussion, if the people discussing it know what they are talking about.

The business about the Quartals is actually fairly simple--I just have to figure out some useable guitar fingering--

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: GUEST,Shimrod
Date: 19 Oct 07 - 05:35 PM

I don't actually understand the question ...





I'll get me coat ...

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 20 Oct 07 - 07:16 PM

The question is, Theolonius Monk was famous for playing far-out chord accompaniments to melodies--he himself characterized them as "the wrong chords". What I wanted to know was, how were these wrong chords derived?

The answer, or at least part of the answer, is that they were quartals, which are chords, or, more precisely note groups, that are substituted for chords, that are based on fourths--another part of it seems to be that the melody was harmonized with intermittent seconds, particularly at the beginning and end of phrases--

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: Tim Leaning
Date: 20 Oct 07 - 09:33 PM

You are all probably right but maybe he just felt them in the first place and played them and they worked cos they were wrong in the right way.
He he
My brain hurted again

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 21 Oct 07 - 02:29 AM

I'm sure you're right, Tim--we all play what feels right, even when it only feels right to us--

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: GUEST,.gargoyle
Date: 22 Oct 07 - 10:59 PM

Ignored this thread - bored on the board tonight.

The cycle of fifths is a very good place to start.

Like Doe-Ray-Mee in the Sound of Music

And just like the Trapps' Family!!!!......

PLAY and have FUN!!!

When you move over into blues and jazz there is Lots-Of-Room-For-Error.

Again....play and have fun.

I do not (from personal experience)consider anything a "wrong chord".....instead it is a "puzzle" "maze" "conundrom" that you need to "follow through" the "natural progression" and find a solution.

Sharp (or Flat) the chord moving into resolution....and like a matrix....you will descover another level.

Sincerely,
Gargoyle

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: PoppaGator
Date: 23 Oct 07 - 03:08 PM

After viewing the documentary, I was struck at how amazing it is to me that Monk's far-out compositions ~ which sound so much like stream-of-consciousness meandering, with little or no repetition and a very hard-to-discern structure ~ were being played by such a large ensemble: three saxophones, trombone, trumpet, bass and drums in addition to the leader on piano.

When the octet traveled to London for a "Newport Jazz Festival on Tour" engagement, group members were boarding the plane before finally receiving the sheet music for a full program of new original pieces. One of the horn players was reminiscing about how he and his buddies, sitting in the coach section, had to send a representative up to First Class to beg Monk for the music, and how they then spent the entire transatlatic journey feverishly copying page after page of manuscript.

They apparently succeeded in learning the tunes in time. The concert ~ at least those excerpts included in the film ~ sounded just fine. Countless "wrong chords" were voiced, one after another ~ not only by Monk's piano keys, but also by that five-piece horn section, and everyone took solos that somehow fit perfectly with the underlying counterintuitive chord progressions.

When I was younger, I found this kind of music completely incomprehensible and weird, and didn't like it a bit. Now I'm better able to enjoy a lot of it, but much of Monk's work is still a bit inaccessible to my ear. What I'm able to hear and comprehend is a series of passages, some quite lyrical and beautiful or swinging and bluesy, but others (interspersed between the stuff I can dig) utterly puzzling and seemingly random. Not at all like listening to (or even playing) a song structured as verse / chorus / verse / chorus / bridge / verse / chorus / and out.

Bebop, in general, has been around so long now that it has become more-or-less mainstream, and fairly accessible to lots of people. I certainly have no problem at all approaching the work of Diz, Coltrane, Bird, et. al., as 21st century "easy listening."

But that Thelonius Monk, man, he's something else. I'm not ashamed to admit that some of his music is still just a little too complex and unfamilar for me. His predeliction for complexity-upon-complexity probably comes from his being a pianist, while the aforementioned giants of jazz are/were one-note-at-a-time horn players...

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 23 Oct 07 - 06:03 PM

Just to show you how seriously I take this whole thing, PG, I got out a couple of random tracks--TM playing Caravan, and Bye-Bye Blackbird and Blue Monk with Miles Davis, and tried to hear what you're hearing. Have to say, I don't--he seems pretty easy to follow--in an "I can hear it, but I can't touch it" kind of way--his ideas are different, but they are really clear.

Still, the harmonies are often out there, which is disorienting to a lot of people. Frank Zappa said that he tended toward working with rhythm and leaving the harmonies pretty straight(for him, at least) because a general audience could follow elaborate rhythmic ideas, but would get lost with unusual scales and harmonies.

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: PoppaGator
Date: 23 Oct 07 - 06:38 PM

I guess I fit Zappa's description of a "general audience" member. I can pretty consistently enjoy TM's music, but to do so, I've had to learn to accept intermittent failure-to-understand, or perhaps more accurately, inability-to-follow (certainly inability to comprehend, and certainly to anticipate) every single measure. On the other hand, even the most complex polyrhythms don't throw me as easily as those unconventional harmonies and melodies.

And how those horn players in the octet could possibly commit those harmonic structures to memory boggles my mind!

Another observation from watching and listening to that film: Monk really attacked those piano keys like a prizefighter, resulting in an overall tone that could be described as urgent and spirited, but perhaps also as harsh and even aggressive. I was particularly struck by an interlude late in the film when another pianist covered a Monk composition. (It was one of the few scenes shot in color, indicating that it was probably recorded relatively recently, after Monk's passing.) The abrupt transitions and "wrong chords" were all there, but the tone was markedly different, much smoother. I'm not saying the reinterpretation was "better" ~ just different. That element of urgency was noticably missing, but the less aggressive approach made for a somewhat more lyrical quality.

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 23 Oct 07 - 11:29 PM

That rawness in his playing is the thing that makes it all work for me. It is liberating, in the way that punk or thrash music can be--the energy is like R&B instead of Jazz--he is a bit like Link Ray, in that he revelled in the noise--

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: Mick Pearce (MCP)
Date: 24 Oct 07 - 04:37 AM

Andrew Lincoln Collier in his The Making of Jazz has the following things to say about Monk's playing:

"The major distinction lay not in harmony, but on Monk's approach to phrasing. He was not phrasing on two and four, as the bop players tended to do...

Nor was his approach to harmony the same as theirs. To be sure Monk used as many altered chords as the boppers did, but he created them according to a different principle. Where a bob player used these "odd" chromaticisms in the context of a whole chord - that is incorporating the diminished ninths and flattened fifths into the basic triad either as a chord or in a melodic phrase - Monk tended to leave his chromaticisms naked. To put it another way, the boppers mingled the odd notes throughout their lines, so that their work had harmonic homogeneity - a characteristic flavour. If you slice a section out of a solo by Parker or Bud Powell you will find the approach to harmony roughly the same as in any other section. Monk, however, laid his chromaticisms in like plums in a plum pudding. As you eat the pudding you keep coming across the plums, which are quite different from the context in which they are set. He is particularly fond of setting off into a phrase , and then using at one or two important points - especially at the end - notes that are a half step away from what the phrase suggests they out to be."


So there you are - blatant unrelated chromaticism (I do this on the guitar with songs sometimes for fun - just play any chord that comes into my head - it sounds quite Monk-like! It's a bit like the comment to someone singing Benjamin Britten's songs to his sometimes odd accompaniments - start together and keep going, it'll sort itself out). It was Monk's artistry to make that convincing - perhaps that's why he never really had any disciples.

Collier also goes on to say that as time went on Monk played further behind the beat, often pared chords down to just two notes and left longer spaces in the melodies (Collier describes it as paring the flesh down to the bones as opposed to being a sketcher like John Lewis).

(And Poppagator "Db7 to G7? Really?" must really have been a sign of the times. Substitution of a dominant(G7) by the dominant a flat 5th above (Db7) is so standard these days nobody would comment!).

Mick

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 24 Oct 07 - 09:16 PM

I am always confused by what these music writers say about jazz, and I 've played jazz professionally--the idea of "harmonic homogeneity", for instance,isn't clear to me--and, though it is true that Monk's melodic phrasing was often different from bebop, it mitigated toward the older jazz style, excepting when he threw in the "wrong chords"--As to harmonies, he often used very straight stuff, like in "Blue Monk", which is just thirds--

I guess the thing is, Monk being one of the great progressive musicians, you can't generalize a lot about what he did, because he kept reworking things--

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: GUEST,Pete Sumner
Date: 24 Oct 07 - 10:15 PM

I once saw Martin Taylor playing here in Redwood City....In the middle of a blistering piece, he obviously lost the plot...a wonderful smile came over his face and he said to the audience,,'No mistakes, just oportunities'....
Not really relevant to Monk, but experimentation is what Jazz was built on,,,
Irish chordal accompaniment has come a long way from the styles in the sixties, and new bands are pushing the boundaries in rhythm and harmony, but it does not mean that a musician can't play a wrong chord.
Peter

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: Mick Pearce (MCP)
Date: 25 Oct 07 - 04:29 AM

M.Ted I assume by "harmonic homogeneity" of the boppers that Collier meant that although they'd advanced from simple triads and 7ths by introducing extensions and substitutions, that those extensions and substitutions constituted a recognisable systems. His quote about slice a section... I took to mean that if you looked at one of these solos you could see what they were doing in terms of the extensions and substitutions they used. With Monk, if you did that, you'd find your wrong chords coming in from out of nowhere, unrelated to what was going on around them.

Mick

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: Mick Pearce (MCP)
Date: 25 Oct 07 - 04:32 AM

(Or to put it another way, maybe Collier couldn't see where they were coming from!).

Mick

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 25 Oct 07 - 07:54 AM

The thing is, to me,"harmonic homogeneity" would mean that there weren't any notes outside of the key, meaning no altered chords--also, the "slice a section" would imply vertical, rather than horizontal harmony, the vertical being whatever chords were being played, the horizontal being the solo itself--

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: Mick Pearce (MCP)
Date: 25 Oct 07 - 08:26 AM

I think in Collier's context slice a section was meaning horizontal harmony rather than vertical. The altered chords don't take the music out of the key - they just spice it up a bit, and the ways they spice it up are systematic. I think his implication was that Monk's wrong chords don't fit into this system; they come from out of nowhere (to quote a song!).

I was thinking about this as I was walking the dog after I made my last post. I was wondering if an atonal analysis was more appropriate in the case of Monk's music, looking at pitch-sets (essentially groupings of pitches - octave not important - sorted by the intervals between successive notes. There are standard ways to code these - Allan Forte's The Structure of Atonal Music is the classic text on this). The pitches in a set might be used horizontally or vertically (or in a combination of both) and transposed to various base piches. Standard chords, quartal chords, semitone clusters all appear as different sets and in atonal music it's not uncommon for composers to make use of relatively few of these sets in a composition. It may be one way of looking at what material he used. Or (since a lot of this music does have a tonal centre) perhaps looking at it from the point of vue of less traditional harmony systems (like the quartal already mentioned or semitone clusters and other arrangements).

Then I thought this is surely the stuff of dissertations and sure enough when I looked for dissertations I found this (A Cornell thesis):

  Making the right mistakes: James P. Johnson, Thelonious Monk, and the trickster aesthetic. by Feurzeig, David Kahn. 9804968

That number at the end is the index number at UMI - Dissertation Express where you can order a copy (currently $68 or $44 depending on how fast you want it). There no abstract, so I don't know what approach was taken there.

I also found this bibliography page: The official Thelonious Sphere Monk website bibliography which lists several useful looking articles and dissertations on this topic (including the one above). Particularly interesting looking ones, I thought, were:

Kurzdorfer, James: Outrageous Clusters: Dissonant Semitonal Cells in the Music of Thelonious Monk Annual Review of Jazz Studies 8 (1996): 181-201

and

Kteily-O'sullivan, Laila Rose. "Klangfarben, Rhythmic Displacement, and Economy of Means: A Theoretical Study of the Works Of Thelonious Monk," (M.M. Thesis, University Of North Texas, 1990). (not available through UMI).

If you have access to the libraries you can probably look at these without charge.

(I notice also that Berklee are running a course on Monk's piano style).


Mick

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 25 Oct 07 - 03:38 PM

Isn't "atonal analysis" an oxymoron?;-)

I am dubious about dissertations, and disserters, for the same reason I am skeptical of reviews and reviewers. They tend to write from the "experiencer" mode--I am less interested in what someone hears when they listen to Monk than I am in how he described what he was playing, particularly to the musicians that he was playing with.

As you know, jazz musicians always discuss what the rules are going to be for any given piece--though often, especially between people who work together a lot, the discussions can be very abreviated, or simply understood. ( My old mentor, Uncle Albert, liked me to play three or four note chords that moved by half steps in the bass as much as possible, but never more than a whole step.) That's what would be useful to me.

Seriously on the atonal thing, the music Monk worked from was tonal, in fact, a lot of popular melodies--so the chording followed general rules, often with alterations and extensions--and there were rules for the way that chords were formed, the quartal thing, for example, consists of whichever notes from the extended chord can be expressed in fourths, i.e. C 11 could be reduced to a G-C-F triad. And "Blue Monk" is so straight ahead that you wouldn't even have to account for altered chords.

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: GUEST,Dr Hal
Date: 29 Oct 07 - 10:41 AM

My personal experience of this as a performer has always been that there really are no "right" and "wrong" chords (or notes), so long as you are aware/happy that if you take this approach, the effect you create will be one that could be described as dissonant.   The point is really about what rhythm you play, or what each sound resolves to next, or the shape the the sounds make over time - these are the things that make the music "make sense", "tell a story" or "be art" over the course of the experience. The actual notes/chords can't be right or wrong. Though they can be "wrong to sound like be-bop" or "wrong to sound like bach" or "wrong to sound sweet to western ears" etc. - So perhaps by "wrong" we just mean "Not confirming to a well established system or pattern?

As an experiment just I tried playing the piano picking as random and abstract a collection of notes as I possibly could, paying as little attention to harmonic "correctness" as I possibly could, but trying to have a good groove/feel/swing, and making the piece balance and evolve in an interesting manner. The result, while clearly not to many people's taste, was certainly something I would call musical, and I rather liked it.

Perhaps the interesting thing is that if you take this approach, while being totally open minded about what genre you are playing in, you tend to come up with something that people would classify as Jazz.

So perhaps one of the the key points here is that Jazz is one of the musical genres that is most forgiving of what actual notes you play, so long as you play them a certain way?

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: The Sandman
Date: 29 Oct 07 - 02:15 PM

M TED,CGF is also a C sus4 chord

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: GUEST,Captain Colin.
Date: 29 Oct 07 - 02:48 PM

Ah! Dr.Hal- thanks... I've been feeling a bit lonely since 16 Oct 02.06pm.

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 29 Oct 07 - 05:19 PM

Mr. Hal--Monk described a particular effect that he used as "playing a tune with the wrong chords"--what he meant was that he was using note clusters that were dissonant to play standards, which have generally accepted chord progressions--

As to whether jazz is a forgiving genre or not--I think it depends on what you mean. To a great degree, jazz is ideosyncratic--which is to say, everyone, and every group of players, has their own palate--what you might call a "bag of tricks" that defines what they do--so there is a lot of lattitude--it's the main part of what jazz is--

Given that, though, people who like and people who play one genre often have intense dislike for others--Bebop/swing often being one of the dividing lines. Also, there is a line drawn in the sand (for some people, at least) between bop and fusion. The differences are often pretty small, but that doesn't stop some people.

Subject: RE: Playing with wrong chords-how's it work?
From: M.Ted
Date: 30 Oct 07 - 11:14 AM

Capt Birdseye--it is true that a C11 has the same notes in it as a Csus4, but one of my pet nitpicky points is that technically, a suspended 4th isn't really a chord name, it imeans that an out of chord note is suspended over the chord and resolves to one of the pitches in the chord, usually the 3rd. The C11 is an extended dominant chord, and when fully voiced, includes C E G Bb D F.

As I understand the quartal thing--you would take that C11 chord and break it up into what you might call interior voicings, that is, triads from within the extended chord that are fourths--there are three C-F-Bb, G-C-F, and D-G-C. You'd use patterns of those chords as a substitute for the chord.

You could do that same sort of number on each of the chords in you chord progression and then you'd be able to do all kinds of things--how good they'd sound would depend, of course, but it definitely opens up a lot of possibilities--