Musical excercise on the bus[WARNING! There is a danger that you might not find this reflection worthwhile]
This morning, while riding the bus on my way to work I pleased myself by solving a little puzzle I had created for myself. One of my all time favorite CD is the first album from Screaming Headless Torsos, a masterpiece of jazz funk-rock. When I discovered the CD about ten years ago, I noticed the guitarist Dave "Fuze" Fiuczynski (try spelling that name!) use a very strange and interesting chord. On a guitar tabulature, it looks something like this (don't remember the key, here it is in Ab):
E - - - - - - - - X
B - - - - - - - - 12
G - - - - - - - - 12
D - - - - - - - - 12
A - - - - - - - 11 -
E - - - - - - - - X
It's kind of a basic G major barre chord, with Ab on bass. On the piano, you can get the same sound by playing Ab on bass with the left hand and substituting the Ab major triad on the right with a G major triad. The chord is a minor maj7th diminished, a weird one at that.
This morning on the bus, I started wondering the tonality of that chord. What kind of scale does it correspond to? After a lot of agonizing, I realized that indeed, there is a scale that fits. The sixth mode of the harmonic minor scale works, as it is indeed is a minor scale with both a major 7th and a diminished 5th.
I don't know the name of the scale, but you can try it by first playing a C harmonic minor on the piano: C D Eb F G Ab B (H in Europe) C, then starting the scale on the sixth, that is,
Ab, B, C, D, Eb, F, G, Ab
Anybody who has ideas on the context in which to use that chord, feel free to comment. A strange II in a minor II-V-I? A VI in an even more strange harmonic minor I-VI-II-V?
posted by Saku Mantere at 11:26 AM
2 Comments:
Hello Saku,
thank you so much for listening to my music. Please let me know which song your referring to. To me, the chord you're talking about is a slash chord: G/Ab
In other words, a G triad with the b9 in the bass. I would use a G 1/2 step whole step scale or you could think of Ab dim. G phryg maj (5th mode of C harm) would work, too, but i would need to see the context. You're correct, that the 6th mode of C harm min works: Ab lyd#9. G mixob9 (5th mode of c harm major) would work, too. I hope this helps.
best
Fuze
Wow... This is indeed an honor. The blogosphere can be magical sometimes. I wonder if I were to reflect upon some chord Wes Montgomery has used, would he reply to me from the depths of cyberspace? :-)
Fuze,
1. Thank YOU for the music. The first Torsos album is on my all time favorite top 10, and I do have quite a few CDs. It's encouraging to have artists who use their talent and discipline to push boundaries, but also doing that with a communicative intent. The work you do has all sorts of innovative things happening all the time, yet it seriously grooves. For me the Torsos album is a paradigmatic example of what postmodernity might mean in either the jazz or the rock tradition.
2. Now that I have your attention, to the chord. G half step / full step or Abdim, OK. I feel I posed myself a trick question on the bus that day: indeed, now that I think of it that would be the self-evident answer. I was so preoccupied with finding a modal solution to the dilemma that I forgot to think of a simpler way to approach the problem.
The chord on the first Torsos album I was talking about is the second chord in the opening riff of The Cult of the Internal Sun. Now that I listened to the album again, I find that the chord (sounds like a Ab/A to me: I remembered the key wrong) is not voiced the way I remembered it. It sounds like a cluster consisting of of Ab, a, c and eb. Am I right? How on earth did you voice that?
How would you characterize the tonality on that opening riff yourself? Would you say the intent was to sound bitonal or were you also aiming at a diminished feel?
3. By coincidence, I was listening to Ralph Towner's new CD last night and heard a familiar chord on "my Man's Gone Now". I think he uses the same voicing as Bill Evans in the Village Vanguard live trio album, that is, an altered E chord with a straight fifth:
0 --------7---
0 ---------8--
0 --------7---
0 -------6----
0 --------7---
x ------------
This is in the A section of My Man's Gone Now where the lyrics go "Whisperin' beside me" and the E is transformed from I to the V of a minor V-I.
Therefore: You could also interpret a Ab/A chord, especially voiced i the way above as an inversion of a F alt 7 chord with a straight fifth (the only scale I know of that would work there is F half step - full step or Gb dim).
Another context where the same voicing is prominent is B13b9. Again, the half step / full step -scale works, this time beginning from B.
This of course might be a trivial insight, as the half step - full step scale is symmetrical and the F, B and Ab scales are all in essence the same scale, being a minor triad apart.
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