Chord Symbol Nomenclature (Part Two)
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.
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 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.
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.
I realize I'm the only one I know who advocates this thinking, but I like being in a majority of one.