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Posts: 15953
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Jazz with Barry Harris and Eli Yamin (in reply to aaron peacock)
He eventually takes him to shoenburg’s concept that lowering the root of the Diminished 7th gives you a vanilla dominant chord (and by virtue that you can respell any of the notes of a dim7th as root notes, you see one voicing type gives you access to 4 keys).
He then criticizes Shoenberg that he should have also RAISED the root of the diminished to reveal the minor6 chord (he is getting at ii-V-I as derived from the diminished chord and scales). The answer to his question “why didn’t Shoenberg advise that”.....this ties in to my Diminished 7th post a while back. The reason is SPELLING as per the circle of 5ths doesn’t allow that, and what he is doing is creating an enharmonic device to relate to a different portion of the circle of 5ths.
By that I mean, when you lower the Root of the Diminished 7th and create a dominant, you are simply revealing the “minor key” chord scale relation. That being the VII chord of the Aeolian scale vs the harmonic minor. (C->Cb not B. Or B#->B). This phenomenon only occurs ONCE in any minor key, so doing it 4 times means you need to think of your starting diminished chord as a different inversion each time and respell it correctly. But when you “Raise the root” of the diminished chord, that is nonsensical. What he is REALLY doing is raising the b9th of the dominant 7th chord (if he spelled it correctly) to the natural 9th. However he has not only misspelled the chord, but inverted it so b9th is in the bass, so he can easily “see” the relationship of the Diminished 7th (in his specific case Cdim is actually the D# dim7 borrowed from E minor.) to the minor ii chord in major (F#m6 in E major).
If you watch subsequent videos he does more with the minor borrowing for major concept and arrives at a scale that uses the required notes and discards unrequired notes to create the “bebop scale”. However his concept of it is actually a hybrid of ionian and harmonic major (the flat 6). He calls it diminished major 6 or something weird, but the way he uses it (mainly it’s derived scale tone chords and intervals) is over the ionian harmonies. The result is a lot of “minor plagal cadence” type phrases all over the place. Like, in place of ii-V-I in C you hear over the ii7 chord a bunch of Fm6-Cmaj9 type cadencing phrases. And of course on the dominant he still gets to use the super locrian (Db lydian dominant).
Anyway, for me it was a fun ride to follow his enharmonic misspelled logic for a while until I ended up at a singular simple tonal landscape. In flamenco we use a similar device what would be over the G7b9 dominant harmony, in the Manuel de Falla type sense (transposed to por medio, that is D harmonic major over the A chord....only we keep the B natural out of the picture).
Posts: 15953
Joined: Dec. 14 2004
From: Washington DC
RE: Jazz with Barry Harris and Eli Yamin (in reply to Ricardo)
I had posted a comment on the following video, likely after this exchange. I had forgotten about this Barry Harris thing until it popped on my radar recently. Mostly I was addressing the main scale concept of his major 6th "diminished", or his scale that adds an Ab to the C major, based on the vii7dim (borrowed from C minor).
The thing I failed to point out is that you can reinterpret the entire concept in this system via the idea this scale is not actually C major, but rooted on A minor (so the whole system is rooted on the third mode), and you have a basic A minor with the variable 7th, G and G# (so Ab is spelled wrong in other words). This is so ubiquitous in minor key music that it sort of ridiculous how complex the 6-diminished trick becomes mentally to evoke/relate/translate a very simple thing.
Next we can see from the view the Ab is really a G#, we see this 8-note Spanish Phrygian scale thing that we have discussed till blue in the face over the years, however, rooted on the 5th mode of A minor, or E Spanish Phrygian (EFG,G#,ABCD). This phrygian octatonic thing gets at the heart of what Barry Harris is doing but all respelled and overly complicated. But it leads to some of the other applications, in particular his "minor 6th diminished". To translate this to flamenco again, the idea was to take his major version (CDEFG,Ab,A B), and flat the third (Eb), and then apply this scale to Am7b5 chords (Aka, Cm6 inverted where the Ab/G# is a leading tone to the bass). However, as this video clarifies (21:49), this can be used to substitute a B7 chord (his example is transposed up from B7 to D7). The little chromatic inflection (G-G#-A) within a B7 chord evokes the Manuel de Falla sound once again (#6).
Translated to Flamenco por medio, Parilla de Jerez has many falsetas that, over an A bass or chord, melodically mix F# and F natural. As that relates to Barry Harris, this is the "Bb minor 6 Diminished" scale (Bb-C-Db-Eb-G-F-F#-G-A), but over an A7 chord. There is a clash of Eb and E natural. Considering the connection between Harris and Miles and Coltrane, we can see how they easily tapped in to the Spanish sound/vibe, by re-reading this concept from the other tonal vantage point (from the view of A root rather than Bb major/minor).
Parrilla example (F# and F natural over the A bass)
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