Staffay - Comprehensive Jazz Theory SI Lesson

Revision as of 13:23, 30 January 2010

Comprehensive Jazz Theory - Introduction, Backcycling and the "Parker Blues"

Introduction

In my mid-teens my father tried to pursuate me to listen to jazz - which was a quite hopeless intent since I was really into Van Halen, Deep Purple and hard-rock stuff. But some years later a heard a jazz-rock album by the well-known Swedish guitar player Jan Schaffer, where he plays a solo that totally knocked me off. It wasn't that fast, rather the kind of phrasing he was using, that interested me. My father had some records with Rune Gustafsson (another weell-known jazz-player in Sweden) were Schaffer also was present, and I realized where this kind of phrasing and strange notes came from. It was just pure jazz. (even that some people don't like the term)

I started to listen to players like Jim Hall, Joe Pass etc. and recorded concerts from the radio. (I still have one with John Scofield on trio, which I didn't understand a thing about back then) I was also picking up Pat Metheny's legendary record with Jaco Pastorius, and some others - but still I didn't get it. What were they playing, and why were they playing these notes with a feel that was completely odd to me? Back then, it was nearly impossible to get any books on the topic, but I managed to get my hands on one by Joe Pass, which I have never seen since then... I also started to transcribe from records and was reading some jazz theory and studied chord-progressions mostly on the piano - since that is more natural in my case. Later I played a lot of modern/classic jazz in different settings, but was forced to commercial music in order to pay the bills. With this and upcoming articles I want to share some of my knowledge about this wonderful kind of music - and even that Im not playing it myself rather than occasionally these days - I hope that it will be inspiring for some of You to read. I will start on an intermediate level and then progress to some very advanced stuff coming up in forthcoming articles. (at least I believe so) So let's start!

In the beginning there was blues - just those three chords in 12 bars we all know. Jazz players early made their own version that have a more varied style of changing the chords, which is often referred to as a "jazz-blues". Basically there is a sub-dominant added in the beginning as well as some dominant substitutions and a "turnaround" at the end. (see below)

In early jazz the players just improvised over the blues scale, rhtytmic approaches and riffs and the notes found in some bluesy themes rather than use a more thinking approach, eg. use specific scales for specific chords. Later, musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie and Bud Powell developed the Be-Bop approach, which consists of a more chordal approach in the improvisations - playing chord notes and lead-in notes to those as well as some scale-runs. Also the chromatism played a major role in their improvisations. But in order to take advantage of this "new" style of playing, they probably felt that the regular chord-progressions was a little too simple as a background for their improvisations, and they developed a system for chord embellishment known as "Backcycling". (at least its the term I use)

Backcycling is based on the fact that You can actually replace one bar in a static chord-progression with the dominant to that chord. Then the dominant itself can be replaced by the dominant to the dominant and so on. This will give us the famous "turnaround" that goes like this in the key of F: F - D7 - Gm7 - C7 Since D7 is dominant to Gm7 and Gm7 is a dominant to C7 (not really, since its a minor chord), we are actually "cycling back" to the root, which is our destination.

Below are three versions of blues in a jazz context that shows how the progression have developed: