Question regarding "harmonic" vs. "melodic" approach

[mjzee]

This may seem an obvious topic to many on this board, but I'm hoping someone will indulge me with an explanation. I'm very much an intuitive jazz listener - I listen and decide what I like, without knowing the music theory that underpins the soloists' work. I've therefore seen many terms used here (and elsewhere) for which I need more fleshing out. One is the notion of "harmonic" vs. "melodic."

In the booklet to the new Hawkins Mosaic box, it mentions "one fateful Kansas City night late in 1933 when Lester Young countered every note that Hawkins aimed at him. In many ways, Young's style was an inversion of that of Hawkins. Hawkins' basic orientation was harmonic, whereas Young's was indisputably melodic."

What does that mean - that Young's improvisations are based on the melody of the tune, while Hawkins are based on the chord progression? Or something other? If this could be explained in a non-academic way, I'd greatly appreciate it.

[Chuck Nessa]

You have it right.

[AllenLowe]

you might say that Prez thought horizontally, Hawk vertically.

[mjzee]

You have it right.

So what are the ramifications for the soloist? It's probably not that soloing harmonically is "easier" than soloing melodically (I doubt that Hawk is any less complex than Lester). Is it that soloing melodically requires a more supple sense of time, because melodies are less tied to the backbeat than chords are? Does soloing melodically make for a more interesting solo, because the underlying melody provides more material than chords can provide?

[Big Wheel]

I'm sure one of the active teachers will chime in here also, but let me correct one thing to forestall any further confusion- you can play "melodically" without actually referencing or otherwise using the underlying melody. If I quote the Flintstones theme over I Got Rhythm changes or make up some similarly tuneful line of my own, that's still melodic playing.

With regard to your questions, fundamentally it's a matter of taste. Among most musicians the melody-first approach has generally become more preferred for a variety of historical and aesthetic reasons. To me a lot of it comes down to a left brain versus right brain way of thinking, the idea being that learning a large number of patterns based on the harmony doesn't require the same kind of creativity that really focusing on strong melodies does.

[CraigP]

This is a great topic. I've wondered how you can make this distinction, because the chords were chosen by the composer to support the melody, correct? So if you're playing "vertically", it's still tying back to the melody, isn't it?

[JSngry]

It's a question of degree, of focus. You can find some kind of harmony anywhere, and you can make a melody out of anything.

Hawk's main focus was making a melody by outlining the notes of the chord (and their extensions, and thier substitutions/passing chords). Prez' was in using the chord changes of the tune as an outline around which to create new lyric melodies. This manifests itself in each players' rhythmic proclivities - Hawk played with an more or less steady flow, since his game was connecting chord tones in any number of variations. Prez would break his lines up rhythmically, starting and stopping as he pleased.

Inevitably, there are areas of intersection and crossover (for one, Hawk whatever Hawk lacked in variety of rhythm, he more than made up for in being a master of melodic arc and contour, and Prez knew his changes inside out, as evidenced by how he'd pop outside on the spur of the moment and just as suddenly pop right back on in) , but that's generally what the terms mean in "real life".

As usual with anything, to make too much out of them as absolutes reduces the dimensionality of the music, and that's not a good thing, unless you like that sort of thing.It's not like you can put in in a box and have it stay there.

Edited May 30, 2012 by JSngry

[GA Russell]

Well, what do people mean when they say that Ornette's playing is so melodic? Other than his Contemporary recordings, I don't hear much melody to start with.

[CraigP]

I get it. I suppose one could improvise using the notes of each chord and the underlying scales, and to think of an extreme case, the song's melody wouldn't even matter. And to think of another case, "free" playing would be considered very "horizontal"?

[JSngry]

Well, what do people mean when they say that Ornette's playing is so melodic? Other than his Contemporary recordings, I don't hear much melody to start with.

Ornette plays constant melody, just not over a constantly recurring form. His solos are not too hard to sing if you can get the places where he pivots the key.

Of course, where this all leads is, inevitably "what is melody?", and the answer is...yes.

[JSngry]

"Playing changes" is where hard-bop got to be such a perceived dead end for so many players in the mid-late 50s, which is why the whole Monk/Rollins-leading into Ornette thing flowed so well for so many. It was time to leave some space in the cognitive math and start thinking "melody" instead of "harmony".

But I can't stress this enough - it's never an either/or dichotomy, and it's never just those two things that come into play - there's plenty of other factors like accent, tone, interior time, all sorts of shit. "Harmonic" vs "melodic" playing...left at face-value it's really easy jargon for easy thinking in the service of easy listening - aka music as lifestyle accessory. I mean, they're real enough, just not the reality.

And once again, the answer to any question about music is - rhythm. If you want the easy, final answer, there it is - rhythm. Take the same eight notes in the same sequence over the same two chords and play them in a fairly regular/steady rhythm and you're playing "harmonically". Play them in a rhythm that stops starts, leaves spaces, and you're playing "melodically".

Truth be told, no matter what you do, you're doing both. But if terminology is needed, there some is.

[Big Wheel]

Jim's posts in this thread are one of the best things I've read on this board.

I can't tell you have many teachers I've had (and I don't think it's a coincidence that they were generally white dudes who came out of a time and place that made them idolize Prez's post-bebop acolytes, chiefly Getz and Konitz) who said in the middle of rehearsals, "no, no. Focus on making a melody! It's all about the melody!" At which point I usually gave them a blank stare because I was wrestling with the exact problem Jim discusses here - how did the lines I was playing not qualify as a melody? What they should have said was "The melodies you're playing could be much more interesting. Here's some ways you could improve them."

Edited May 30, 2012 by Big Wheel

[John L]

Then there are people like Bird and Newk who take a vertical and horizontal approach at the same time.

[jeffcrom]

But I can't stress this enough - it's never an either/or dichotomy,

Except those Mezz Mezzrow solos composed entirely of arpeggios.

[JSngry]

But I can't stress this enough - it's never an either/or dichotomy,

Except those Mezz Mezzrow solos composed entirely of arpeggios.

Those are really, really annoying, aren't they!

But then you have the piano part to Ave Maria, which is also entirely arpeggios, and that's got a suck-you-in melodic hypnosis thing going on, so...go figure.

Then there are people like Bird and Newk who take a vertical and horizontal approach at the same time.

Yeah, how come nobody talks about playing diagonally?

[robertoart]

But I can't stress this enough - it's never an either/or dichotomy,

Except those Mezz Mezzrow solos composed entirely of arpeggios.

well this is some of the nicest aaarr-peggios I've ever seen...errr heard

[jeffcrom]

Yeah, how come nobody talks about playing diagonally?

I think you just described John Tchicai's style.

[JSngry]

My favorite is playing sideways, where you get through the changes without actually touching them...or barely touching them. Bill Barron was real good at that, as was mid-50s Trane. Alterations, extensions and substitutions. Kinda like navigating a traffic jam without ever having to stop, just knowing where the openings are and timing everything to where you take 'em when they open up.

Although, if you play sideways enough, you end up playing backwards, and if, like Warne Marsh, you play backwards enough, you actually end up ahead of everybody else. Wormholes or some such. They're there, that's for sure!

Like the guy on the old Second City side said, this is all decidedly "non-Newtonian".

[robertoart]

My favorite is playing sideways, where you get through the changes without actually touching them...or barely touching them. Bill Barron was real good at that, as was mid-50s Trane. Alterations, extensions and substitutions. Kinda like navigating a traffic jam without ever having to stop, just knowing where the openings are and timing everything to where you take 'em when they open up.

Although, if you play sideways enough, you end up playing backwards, and if, like Warne Marsh, you play backwards enough, you actually end up ahead of everybody else. Wormholes or some such. They're there, that's for sure!

Like the guy on the old Second City side said, this is all decidedly "non-Newtonian".

Very interesting once again. This may or may not relate to exactly where you are coming from but...

I have sometimes played through complex changes (well complex for me) where that is exactly what it felt like.

When this happens (all too rarely unfortunately) I will argue against the instincts of my perceptions and say to myself...you really still don't have the skill or harmonic knowledge to be able to play as well as you think you just did Which is probably the 'reality' of the situation...however

I have read about one of Ornette's great skills being described as 'motivic development', which is as I understand it, is the approach of taking short melodic statements or phrases and expanded and extrapolating them throughout the course of improvisation. I think this is why I can 'sometimes' sound successful playing over changes, because the chord movement (be it standard or modal) which I know OK but not expertly, provides the extra layer of harmony to make the melodic ideas work.

Whereas if I were to try to do this over a more freer approach, a la Ornette, I would not have the skill to really stretch the line or rhythm without the 'support bed' of the changes.

Anyway...blah blah blah...how does the concept of motivic development fit in with the harmonic/melodic insights you've written about earlier?

Edited May 31, 2012 by freelancer

[JSngry]

You're probably going to use your melodic sense to determine the shape/arc/duration/placement/etc/whatever of your lines, and your harmonic sense to determine what notes to use, and how to connect them. I think it's a good thing to pay attention to each in terms of study, but when it comes time to forget all that shit and just play, then...it's all the same thing then.

As far as the Ornette thing goes, that's just about being able to hear/feel changes on the spur of the moment, true melodic invention. Although, truth be told, Ornette has his devices too. Everybody does. Pure genius is a passing state, not a permanent condition. For some, it visits more frequently and for a greater duration than it does for others, but never does it just move in and stay put forever. Never.

It's tempting to say that the more you know, the more options you'll have at your disposal, but it might instead be that the more options you want/need to have at your disposal, the more you'll end up knowing. Does need drive knowledge, or does knowledge feed need? Or is is a dualistic fallacy to separate the two like that?

Also tempting is the maxim to always trust your ear, but...be careful with what your ear is hearing. It might just be trying to get you to play what you already know, only better. Or it might be trying to get you to play something you heard somebody else play that you like a lot...or that you saw that other people liked a lot. All of which is just fine, but only up to a point, and you can't always trust your ear to tell you where that point is. sometimes you gotta trust your brain. Or your gonads. Or your bank account. Or your inner godsense. Or....anything.

Point being simply this - if your playing is going to be alive, it's got to be as alive as you yourself are. And you know what all goes into that!

[AllenLowe]

when I was in high school and trying to figure out how to play more freely, I figured out that one of the ways to do it was by realizing that any note you play has a relation to multiple chords - so a C is the 9th of a Bb chord, the 7th of a D7, the major seventh of a Db chord, the third of an Ab, the flat 5 of Gb, etc etc - and realzing these relationships allows you to connect things in coherent ways (I think I got some of this from listening to Dolphy when I was very young).

so imagine my surprise years later when I was reading some interview with Jim Garrison, and he described Ornette's approach as exactly that - which, also, as I have somewhat determined, is the key to chromatic harmony.

be all that as it may, these ideas can also be used in regular changes - as long as you know how to resolve things. So over a c chord you might play Db-Gg-B7- C. Which is also, from what I hear, some of what Coltrane did.

And I also remember Charlie Haden telling me, at Slugs in 1969, that he basically followed Ornette wherever Ornette went - and if it required a chord, he played a chord.

[Mark Stryker]

I agree with Jim above. Re: Allen's point and Ornette, he gets at the same idea in this 2004 interview with him I wrote up in which he gave me an impromptu saxophone lesson:

-------------

Ornette Coleman knew that I was an alto saxophonist and jazz musician before becoming a journalist, so when I pressed for details about his harmolodic theory, he generously offered to give me a lesson right there on the spot. He pulled out his saxophone case, assembled the horn and handed it to me. It was a top-of-the-line Selmer Mark VI that the company gave him in the 1960s. An experimental model -- the company made fewer than 200 -- the horn has an unusual low A-key that allows the player to reach a half-step lower than on most saxophones. The horn was lacquered white, recalling the eccentric plastic alto that Coleman played on his early records.

Coleman had left his Meyer mouthpiece and reed attached to the neck of the horn the last time he played, and the whole apparatus was shoved inside the bell -- with no protective cloth and not even a mouthpiece cap to guard the cane. Any teacher who caught a student storing his instrument this way would have a conniption. Coleman apologized sheepishly: "I know I should have a mouthpiece cap."

In the harmolodic system, Coleman completely deconstructs normal Western musical syntax. All instruments are treated as if they are tuned in C. All instruments can read from the same part without transposing and still produce what Coleman calls a "unison." Improvisers are allowed to play in any key or any clef at any time.

He first had me play the notes A, C, D and E-flat, because in harmolodics these are considered a unison. "One note, four sounds," is a Coleman mantra. Then he had me play three chords that led through all 12 notes of the chromatic scale -- C major 7, E-flat minor 7, D minor with a flat 5, and a final A to account for the 12th note. "That's your first harmolodic lesson," he said. "You can use any tonic and play those same three chords and come up with 12 different notes."

Coleman asked me to improvise starting on any note but to keep in mind the intervals I had already been working with. He was trying to liberate me from conventional harmony, and it worked for a few bars before I relapsed into a bebop pattern. "Here," I said, handing the horn back to him. "Show me."

Coleman closed his eyes and played a fresh, leaping phrase that, like many of his ideas, ended on a high note that shivered with the aching cry of the blues. I noticed Coleman doesn't keep his top teeth on the mouthpiece, a highly irregular technique that allows the vocalized flexibility of his sound. "You can play sharp in tune and you can play flat in tune," is another mantra.

Coleman played a series of zigzagging lines. Some were aggressive blurs like the sweeping gestures of an abstract painter. Others were simple shapes in bold colors. Each idea was as natural as breathing. Each painted the air with swing. Several were melodies worth surrounding with a frame and calling it song.

"Don't let the saxophone tell you what to play," he said. "Let your ear tell you. The same note could be any one of the other 12. An E can be the major 7th of F, the minor 7th of F-sharp, the major 6th of G. If you start thinking like that, the saxophone is going to get smaller and smaller. No matter how much technique you have, you're not going to play no music if all you're doing is playing from how the instrument is built."

Edited June 1, 2012 by Mark Stryker

[Pete C]

"Playing changes" is where hard-bop got to be such a perceived dead end for so many players in the mid-late 50s, which is why the whole Monk/Rollins-leading into Ornette thing flowed so well for so many. It was time to leave some space in the cognitive math and start thinking "melody" instead of "harmony".

When I took a jazz history course with Chuck Israels in 1974, he made a big thing of how Rollins and Thad Jones, as melodic-leaning improvisors, were much more attuned to Monk's music, as they really got inside the tunes, as opposed to someone like Charlie Rouse, who pretty much blew on the changes. Same can be said of Steve Lacy's approach to Monk.

[BillF]

"Playing changes" is where hard-bop got to be such a perceived dead end for so many players in the mid-late 50s, which is why the whole Monk/Rollins-leading into Ornette thing flowed so well for so many. It was time to leave some space in the cognitive math and start thinking "melody" instead of "harmony".

When I took a jazz history course with Chuck Israels in 1974, he made a big thing of how Rollins and Thad Jones, as melodic-leaning improvisors, were much more attuned to Monk's music, as they really got inside the tunes, as opposed to someone like Charlie Rouse, who pretty much blew on the changes. Same can be said of Steve Lacy's approach to Monk.

I recently read Robin D G Kelley's biography of Monk where he reports that Monk was so keen that hornmen should continue to have the compostion in mind while soloing, that he was known to stop them in mid solo during public performance. This in mind, I was listening yesterday to Monk: Big Band and Quartet in Concert and thinking how Phil Woods certainly passed the Monk test, but that Rouse, who must have played more with Monk than any other hornman, did not. Strange!

[mjzee]

Is there an advantage to one approach over the other? It seems to me the melodic approach is favored by the critics, since Lester and especially since Bird. But is the harmonic approach more primal, more apt to make a direct connection to the listener, especially in a live performance? I think of the crowds going wild for Hawk in those JATP live recordings; is it possible that a melodic approach is more caressing, more subtle...perhaps works better on a recording for home listening? I think also of when I saw Sonny Rollins in 2000...he built the crowd into such a frenzy that by the end of the concert we were on our feet, screaming for a series of honks and long single notes that I'd have to think related to the chords of the tune rather than to the melody.