Quote:
Originally Posted by amyFB
http://www.jazzbooks.com/mm5/download/FQBK-handbook.pdf
This is the reference book that I pick up the most when I have questions about music theory.
Don't let the word 'jazz' scare you - it's chock full of information - jammed full to the brim, overflowing almost.
Go right to page 14 & 15 for the modes discussion.
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The book is indeed chock full of useful info, and has much to recommend it - but I suggest IGNORING anything to do with SCALES and CHORD-SCALE THEORY.
Jamey Aebersold deserves huge respect and admiration (possibly some kind of medal) for all the playalong CDs and booklets he's produced over the years. When I was learning jazz (80s/90s) all my fellow amateurs used them, and there were basically no other practice aids available. They were great because the CDs used real live musicians, so you had a pro rhythm section to play over. And books had the melodies (in notation of course) and chord symbols.
But where his whole system went too far was in its focus on chord-scale theory (CST) - one of the most misleading concepts ever invented in jazz theory. As far as improvisation goes, CST takes your eye off the ball. It's responsible for all those countless jazz amateurs noodling away aimlessly, producing solos with zero musical value. (And yes that included most of those fellow amateurs of mine, and even me on occasion - when I forgot all the lessons I'd learned about improvising from records before I ever studied jazz....
)
In particular, pages 14-15 are probably the worst in the whole book. Page 14 in particular deserves to be torn out and thrown away (you'd lose page 13 too if you did that, but that's no great loss either). There is certainly no "modes discussion" there. (It would be good if there was, but it's simply a list of scales, mostly useless, and the wrong emphasis on the few that are useful.)
Page 15 has a useful guide to jazz chord symbol shorthand (right-hand column), but gives the totally wrong-headed impression that
those scales on the left produce those chords on the right.
Yes, they do. But
music doesn't work like that.
IOW, chords as used in actual music are not derived from strings of different scales. They are derived first of all from the KEY (major or minor scale), and then by various alterations of that scale, introduced to make sequences more interesting with "chromatic voice-leading".
The jazz CST perspective is that those alterations suggest whole new scales - which indeed they can, but then the pedagogy (such as Aebersold's)
focuses on those scales, and not on their
function (melodic and harmonic). Students end up drowning in scales, scales, scales... learning them, practising them, memorising which chords they fit... then it's no surprise they can't actually
make music at the end of all that.
The idea of CST derives in the first place from modal and post-modal jazz, in which the old model of functional harmony (based on "keys") was broken down. In that music, you would have individual chords with usually no connection to chords either side. So you needed some kind of guide as to what notes would fit. CST answered that need. Indeed it supported a whole new way of making music.
But then some foolish people (and I'm afraid to say Aebersold is among them) decided it would be a good idea to apply this shiny new theory to old-fashioned jazz standards - the kind of tunes that have "chord
progressions". It's a classic category error.
As I say, there is plenty of great stuff in the book. Page 4, eg, is flawless; gold. Good stuff too on pages 9 and 10. You could do worse than keep those pages and throw the rest of the book away! (Obviously, if it's jazz you're into, you will find a lot more of use in there. But even if you're a jazz obsessive, please ignore page 14...)