aaron peacock -> Jazz with Barry Harris and Eli Yamin (Mar. 7 2021 5:07:16)
Ricardo -> RE: Jazz with Barry Harris and Eli Yamin (Mar. 22 2021 13:07:42)
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).
