Today when we want to look up anything 'factual', we go to Wikipedia. It's touted as a "Free Encyclopedia" where anyone is meant to be able to contribute, but the reality is totally different. It's really a castle full of gate-keepers, where the only information that ever gets out is the information that they deem worthy. It's a one-world view.
Sure, if you want to know about the size of an emperor butterfly's wings or the type of soil encountered in the rainforests of Brasil, you can get pretty much the right info. But go to the Wikipedia page on the 13th chord and all you will find is a mish-mash of gobbledygook. Go to the 'Talk' page and read the thwarted attempts by musicians to get some sense into this article.
The particular individual responsible for this particular instance of gate-keeping our musical information is called "Hyacinth":
This is the person responsible for providing information that is meant to be for the benefit of humankind in general. Did you read the 'talk' page? It might take a few readings to understand what's going on. But this page sums up Wickedpedia, because like our whole society, it's a total sham. And they've got the gall to ask for donations every year, as if they're some struggling operation.
It's got a lot to do with 'academics'. These 'contributors' are often doing their wiki-editing in their spare time for free, most probably connected in some way with a tertiary institution. That means they think they're smart. They most probably either studied, or maybe taught (OMG) at some university. But if you've happened to come across any 'degree holders' in your life, or, God forbid, had to deal face-to-face with these people, you'll know that academic qualifications don't mean shit nowadays. Have you noticed the way they rely on 'peer review' so much? Your peers are your competition - in everyday terms. So to say something has been 'peer-reviewed' just means it's been OK'd by the gang, the club. How cosy.
Well, after having bagged the Wiki gatekeepers, I'd better come up with the goods myself.
So many songs, from the most basic to the most sophisticated, end with their final melodic resolution going from the 3rd to the tonic (e.g., E to C in the key of C). That melody note E is on a G7 chord, which makes it a 13th, heading for the C on the tonic C major chord, a V-I progression:
Audio:
As I mentioned in my previous linked post, the 13th can be considered originally a suspension, an appoggiatura for the 5th (of G7, that is the D), which over time gradually became incorporated into the chord itself. It replaces the 5th. This to me is the most natural interpretation of the 13th in general practice.
But the important thing to realize, as I said previously, is that the 13th is the quintessential jazz chord. Not only in its most natural setting, but with different bass notes, the chord quality changes:
Audio:
You will recognize this sound everywhere in jazz. Its characteristics are the minor 2nd (maj 7th) and the tritone (b5th).
For arrangers, the correct naming of chord symbols is one
of those topics where everyone has an opinion, and their opinion is right, everyone
else’s wrong. It’s a bit like when a singer hands the piano player a lead sheet
to a song: the first thing the piano player usually thinks—to himself, hopefully—is: “that chord’s not right there, that sequence isn’t the
best there”. But don't you think that this is the way it should be? Because in jazz we are
working within the realm of instant composition, arranging and performance, simultaneously, both consciously and unconsciously. So one needs to have strong views on 'how it should go'.
However unlike a set of chord changes, the chord symbols
themselves are meant to be a common language that everyone has agreed upon, and
whose meaning they can decipher, just like common word spelling in a dictionary. Chord symbols
are simply abbreviations, symbols which are meant to imply certain chord sounds.
The arranger’s use of chord symbols is indeed an arcane
and hermetic art. What is the common practice, how has it changed over the
years? When do we use say C9 instead of C7? When do we write C7#9 and when do we use C7alt? As much as some musicians would cry, 'who cares?', I would like to get into the thinking behind the use of these symbols.
Let’s start with the basics, 'common practice'. Or maybe that should be 'my' common practice, because as you'll see, nobody agrees on anything 100%. Let me give you my thinking, and then we'll 'compare and contrast' with other viewpoints.
In the beginning, as it
were, there was the triad. The third interval from the tonic C can be either major or minor, and so we have this basic division:
So we see that to name a major triad, the letter name is all that's required. Simple! No 'ma', no 'maj'. Just the letter name. For the minor triad, the lower-case 'm' is added to the letter name. So for those most commonly played chords - the major and minor triads - we have quite an elegant naming solution. No symbol at all for the major (most commonly played), and one little 'm' for the minor chord. That is what I call a good abbreviation concept. Inherent in this idea that only one 'm' symbol is used ever, the lower-case 'm'. That way when you hand-write it quickly, whether it looks like upper-case or lower-case, it means the same thing.
Next we move higher in the chord, to the seventh. Two options, as before: a major seventh interval from the tonic, or a minor 7th (or dominant 7th) interval. Now here is where it gets confusing to the novice. Our terms for naming the two possible 7ths qualities are "ma7" (or maj7) and just plain old "7" for the minor 7th. Let's look at the possible combinations extending the triads:
In our thinking we draw an imaginary line around the letter name, such that if we see the little 'm' after the letter name, we know it's some kind of minor chord. If we see Cma7, we know that the 'ma' part does not refer to the 3rd (i.e. the triad), but to the 7th, the major 7th interval from the tonic. If we see C7, we know that's a major triad with a dominant 7th.
Clear? Yeah, like mud.
Let me point out at this juncture that there is simply no way to get your head around this unless you have actually spent some significant time playing songs, playing chord sequences with their root notes, and gradually learning how to interpret chord symbols. You can't get it without hands-on experience: literally, hands on the keys. Doesn't matter if you don't play the piano; if you're a jazz musician, or really any kind of musician, the piano is your workbench, your desktop.
Anyway, let's now look at what the respected elders have advised on the subject.
First of all we see that he uses 'mi' for minor triad, so right away we have a different idea from your present author. Roemer still uses just the letter name for the major triad ("G"), but wants to use "GMI" for the minor triad. His thinking is to consistently use a smaller, yet upper-case 'M'. Because as he shows in what not to use (a very good instruction technique), and as I mentioned above, there has always the been the potential for confusion between an upper-case 'M' and a lower-case 'm' - especially when hand-writing music, which was the norm until the recent computer age. And still today not everyone uses the computer. But to my way of thinking, Roemer here is going one extra step, a kind of second-guessing defence which just adds an unnecessary layer.
As an aside, and I love asides, did you know Roemer was Stan Kenton's copyist? I went thirty years thinking of him as 'just' the author of the best book on music copying, and a jazz orientated, commercial and inherently practical one at that. Then one day I came across some of Kenton's scores and instantly recognized the handwriting. The funny thing my first impression was that it was a lot sloppier than what's in his book! But I shouldn't say 'sloppier', just written faster. It was all perfectly legible, and that's what matters. Like an extra lesson that is an addendum to his book...reality! So for me it's good to know just whose handwritten manuscript those great musicians on those classic recordings were actually reading.
When Roemer was around, there were more gigs, more live musicians working, more arrangements being required, and arrangers and copyists had to be able to work extremely quickly. In the making of a Hollywood production, the composer is usually the last man down the line, often getting a short window of a few weeks, if not days, before release to complete his work. In the jazz and commercial music world of a half century ago, the copyist was his equivalent - the last man down the line after the arranger got through with it. And we know how these arrangers can take forever! Back then it was no "print-out file to PDF", no instantly-formatted parts like today, with our whiz-bang music software. Then it was all black coffee, maybe a pipe, and keep going till it gets done.
OK, on with the chord symbols. this time from Gary Lindsay, author of one of the best arranging books out there, "Jazz Arranging Techniques" (2005). Let's see what he has to say:
Hmm...looks like I'm being outvoted here, and by the best! Lindsay and Roemer both go for the 'Cmi'. No one seems to like the 'Cm'. What does the ubiquitous Aebersold have to say?
Not even a plain old minor triad in there at all. And now all the triangles and minus signs!
Now I need a coffee and a pipe.
Over the years I've gone through different phases of chord symbol thinking, virtually going full circle. Before computers, arrangers of course wrote out everything by hand. Type-set or printed music belonged to sheet music and a published orchestrations, not the sort of 'everyday' arranging that might be needed for a 30-second commercial here, a sting for a radio or TV show there; a chart for big band, strings and vocalist, or a new jazz chart written in a few short hours by some genius in the back of the bus on the way to the next gig.
Even so, there are still many situations where you need to write out some changes or a lead sheet by hand. I must have written out the changes to "Autumn Leaves" and similar standards a hundred times or more, in various situations, over the years. When you're writing fast and it's gonna be played in five minutes, those chord symbols have to be recognized instantly. Nowadays, when I try to write a lead sheet fast by hand, by the time I get to the bridge, I'm almost getting RSI.
My last hand-written big band chart must have been about the mid-'90s. I'm don't know if it's 'better' to use computers for composing and arranging, at least for jazz. Back then, it all had to be worked out in your head, and you wrote it down, refining as best you could. Now, I can lay down some ideas like a potter throws down a lump of clay on his wheel; then press playback and instantly hear what I wrote. One thing is, I am so glad I learned to do it the old-fashioned way first.
Besides the sheer time-saving aspects of the modern PC - mainly copy/paste - there is one important advantage computers have over handwritten parts, especially for larger groups. When writing out separate instrumental parts from a score, an occasional hazard is you get missing bars, missing dynamics, slurs, all kinds of notations that the copyist sometimes doesn't exactly reproduce on every part. On the computer you write the score which instantly extracts parts, so you can avoid those basic kinds of errors. What you see on the score is what the parts will look like: you can see at a glance that all the sections have the same indications.
So now I would like to look at what happened at a key moment in chord symbol history, from the late '70s, when 'The Real Book' via Berklee entered the Jazzgeist. Man, did that book get around - for something meant to be sold under the counter. (I think they just raised the level of the counter.) Suddenly, everyone had a copy and everyone was playing the same songs, the same blues, the same standards, the same Bird tunes. Hey, let's narrow down the repertoire, let's dumb it right down! Praise the Lord, now we had our very own playbook! Our own book of Revelation!
Now, just on a whim, after writing these words, I got to thinking about the awakened ones who know about Gematria and just how important numbers are to our world. Gematria is the ancient practice of coding words into numbers, sort of like numerology, but with much more practical applications. So I decided to compare the Gematria of "Revelation" with "The Real Book", and lo and behold, look what I found:
Around this time the use of the triangle symbol for major, and the minus sign or dash for minor, starting to become common practice within the jazz community. Now just in case you're thinking I don't approve of the triangle and dash, I'd like to dispel that notion completely. I used them for years, and still do when quickly handwriting chord charts; but when I first went to computers I found these symbols didn't always decode as fonts properly in PDFs, so I went back to the old Cma7, Cm7. After a while I realized that the general musical public, aka one's customers, didn't always understand what was meant by the triangle and the dash anyway, so that in itself was for me a big reason to go back to the standard symbols.
But that's not the real issue I have about the use of the triangle and the dash symbol. It's about how they're being used today, about the essence of a symbol, and what an abbreviation should be.
See, what I think what is needed in jazz harmony is a generic symbol for "major 7th plus" - which simply means a Cma7 chord where you are free and welcome to add the 9th, 6th (13th), and #11 if you can get away with it. It might be a Cma7 in the key of G, that is lydian mode. It might be the Cma7 in "All The Things You Are", or the Cma7 in "Con Alma". Both are great places to throw in that #11th on the C chord, the Lydian side of C. That's because both are a surprise modulation - not part of a functional diatonic sequence. Even when you get the more diatonic "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" (key G), the song needs that lydian Cma7 because of the melody.
So if you're gonna use them at all, my thinking is the triangle for the generic major 7th, and the dash for the generic minor 7th - that's it, that's all, nothing else needed. And that's taken care of maybe 75% of the chord types you'll be playing in general practice.
Here I've put down big fat open voicings in the bass stave to really nail the foundation sound of the chords, Cma7 and Dm7. Those fifths in the bass really lock in the chord, don't they? It's good to see different ways of voicing the same chord-sound, like different hues of color for a painter. Like a color can have many different hues, so can chords - all subtly different, depending on their voicing (that is, how the chord is put together architecturally).
So: the meaning of the triangle symbol is a generic C chord, to which we are free to add the 6th (13th), the 7th, the 9th, and in some cases the #11. Likewise, the dash signifies a generic Dm7 chord, mostly as a II chord, to which one can add and sustain every note of the C major scale - "minor 7th plus". This generic Dm7 can support E, G and B, (9th, 11th, 13th) and still sound like a Dm chord, much richer or deeper, given the root foundation (i.e. a low D in the bass). And simply by moving the root to G, you have the dominant 7th 'half-suspended' sound that maybe started with Bill Evans, that is a G7 with both the 3rd and the 4th together, usually with the 4th and 3rd as a major 7th interval, like a superimposed Cma7 on an Fma7:
So these generic triangle/dash symbols means you can add the other notes from the scale, where it fits and sounds good. This process of adding notes to chords is of course what jazz players do all the time anyway; nothing new here. I'm just saying it'd be nice to have a more accurate symbol, a more elegant abbreviation, to describe the process and thinking behind what we're doing,
There is always the proviso that you're not clashing with the melody if it happens to be the tonic. Talking key of C, if you got a big tonic chord with a C melody note, you can't be bangin' out a B underneath it; if you got a G in the melody of that Cma7 chord, you don't put a #11 (F#) below to harmonize the G. The major 7th pulls the melody down and drains its power. It doesn't support the melody, the golden rule in harmonization.
To clarify, on this generic Cma7, there are many places in songs where you just can't or shouldn't add that #11 to a C chord when it turns up in different keys, different songs. Even more importantly, there is definitely no place at all for the natural 11th on a Cma7. If you some across someone trying to sell you this, you are witness to the telltale sign of someone who either knows nothing about chords, or is purposely trying to misinform you. They could be moonlighting for Wickedpedia:
In the first wiki-example above, the F clashes with the E a minor 9th below; adding the F (11th) defeats the whole purpose of having a major chord at all, which I suppose we could call Cma9 here. But adding the F is like some tone-deaf scientist stacking lego bricks; like pouring vinegar into wine, like going and coming at the same time. I'm not saying a very good arranger couldn't make something like this work, but in making it work you are really bending the tonal focus from one root to another, which is a kind of cheating or musical subterfuge. Same deal with their second example of a C11, another stack which has both the 3rd and 4th together. If they try to pass off this apartment block concept of stacked 3rds as a usable chord, they don't know shit about music. I guess the best we can say that it's in the realm of 'special circumstances'. Sure, we may find occasional instances in modern classical music; Stravinsky, I think the Ebony Concerto has these kinds of chords. But it's an effect rather than a functional part of a chord sequence. And here we are talking about general principles.
The closest I can come to finding anything like this in jazz is the chord in "Skyliner" by Charlie Barnet, the last two bars of the A section. But that is really an arpeggiated figure, really a melody more than a held chord when all notes are sounded together. The brass section play this melody as sustained separate entries, making what they call a bell or pyramid chord. The song is in Db, the last two bars of the A section is Ab7. This is the basic idea:
The band on the original recording had three trombones, three or maybe four trumpets. Later recordings, like the one in '58 had four bones; the added 4th bone just plays a sustained Ab. On the original, the 3rd trombone's C is heard prominently as the lowest note of the brass chord, sustaining till the 4th beat of the second bar with everyone else.
Have a listen to the original '38 recording with the three bones:
The action happens around 0:27 seconds in, Here you can play just the excerpt:
Now a snappier version from '58 with the four bones. The extra (4th) bone is playing the tonic Ab a third below the 3rd bone's C - the previous version's lowest note (and therefore heard more easily).
Here the action is at 0:24 seconds. Notice how much thicker the start of the pyramid (bell chord) sounds with the four bones, with the root and 3rd together, compared to the 3-bone version with the 3rd on the (middle) C. This illustrates an important concept in arranging of adding root notes in that region around middle C. The chord is Ab7, and we have that 4th bone on the high tonic (the Ab just below third bone's middle C). To me it's 'muddier'.
Getting back to this supposed example of a 'textbook' chord, hear how the trumpet playing the Db (i.e., the 4th degree of Ab7), a minor 9th above the lower trombone C - which is sounded for two beats only - actually resolves on that last quarter note - back to the 3rd, confirming it's 'Ab7-ness'. We never actually get that complete sounding of the 'textbook 13th chord' - all the notes hitting together, which after all is the definition of a chord. It's basically a plain old Ab7. The point is that this example only shows the 'textbook' chord concept to be merely an effect, not a usable chord played in varied situations, the sign of common practice.
[Don't forget you can click on any image on this blog to enlarge it so you can check it out properly]
On that last beat of the second bar, there seems to be a slight
modification; my (quick) guess is a kind of D9#11/Ab, or an Ab7+(b9); the
Ab in the bass.
The 'never' label I added to the first musical example above - the natural 11th (F) on top of a C major chord of any type - is for the benefit of the Wikipedians, or the real musical Comedians,
who seem to get quite attached to their academic theories of stacked chords in 3rds. Makes sense to
them, except they've never played a chord sequence right in their
life, let alone a gig, let alone a solo piano gig. They don't understand that chord shapes are made for the hand: 3 or 4-note chords are the rule, with extra notes being thrown in when you can get 'em in, for example, 2nds clusters with the thumb on adjacent notes. Soon we'll examine their page on the 13th chord - that one is hilarious! Read the attempts of musicians to get it right on the 'talk' page. It'll keep you laughing for months!
So, let's return to my original proposal for this idea of the generic major/minor symbol: the use of letter name plus either triangle or dash. Simple, elegant. Not likely to be misinterpreted by musicians sight-reading, when writing out by hand quickly. Some may ask, "why don't you call it 'C pyramid'?" If we start talking about 'pyramid chords' then we could be talking about the arranging effect, existing as long as there has been jazz arranging, known as a 'pyramid' or 'bell' chord - like the horns in "Skyliner" example above. So the potential for confusion is there.
Well now: what do we see everywhere nowadays when anyone writes out a song, a lead sheet, a big band chart? It's all triangle, dash plus a '7' after them! Or a 9, or whatever. It's gotten to the point where some people now think that the symbols for the basic major and minor triads are C∆ and C−. That is adding an extra symbol; where we had one symbol for the major triad, now we have two. For the minor triad, well, I suppose writing a dash is quicker than writing a small 'm', but only by microseconds. And then they still write the 7 or the 9 in as well.
So much for abbreviation.
How is this smarter? Like I said, we need a generic symbol for the more advanced jazz concept of adding extensions to basic chords at the player's discretion. We already have a great system for naming the major and minor triads. And we already have the triangle and the dash, waiting patiently to be properly employed. If we add a 7 or 9 or anything else to them, it defeats the whole purpose of those symbols as abbreviations, to my mind.
I realize I'm the only one I know who advocates this thinking, but I like being in a majority of one.
