The 7 Levels of Jazz Harmony

so you ever listen to a song and think songs fine and all but you could really use some more jazz harmony this songs fine at all but you could really use some more jazz harmony don't worry we have all been there so in this video we're going to be counting down the seven levels of jazz harmony starting from the most basic going to the most extreme and the way we're going to do that is we're going to reharmonization D minor this is what the original sounds like it sounds pretty good to me but even with that nice a flat over F in the second measure that's not really jazz this is what the jazz version would sound like this is jazz harmony level one bell pepper so this is a fairly typical jazz chord progression we're not using the basic triads anymore but we're using richer for note seventh chords like the first chord a D minor 7 the next chords C minor 7 and f7 art in the key of D minor they are non diatonic but that's ok because they are the second chord in fifth chord of the key of b-flat and they resolve to a b-flat six chord these two five progressions are really the meat and potatoes of jazz harmony there are a vehicle for tension and release and create a sense of forward momentum that gets us from one chord to the next this sequence is rounded out by an E minor seven flat five and an a7 the two and five chords of the parent key of D minor if we take a look at how the roots in this progression move on the circle of fifths we see that even if we skip around a little bit things generally cycle stepwise to the left this is fairly typical of the patterns that are found in jazz harmony okay so now that we have the basics covered how do we get to level two jazz harmony level two poblano pepper okay so now we have a little bit more color in the way that we got that was through tritone substitution where we take a dominant seventh chord and replace it with another dominant seventh chord three whole steps away the tritone sub ends up having two of the same notes of the chord that its substituting for the important third and seventh degrees of the chord which happened to form a tritone these chords had a fair amount of tension because they're generally non diatonic they aren't from the key like for example this b7 chord these chords release that tension by resolving down by half step to a chord that is from the key like this B flat six chord a rich vocabulary of seventh chords that create the sense of tension and release is really what this level of jazz harmony is all about a lot of classic jazz from the 1950s can be said to exist primarily on this harmonic level like for example working with the Miles Davis quintet or moanin by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers these artists were deeply influenced by the melodic and harmonic choices of earlier bebop musicians like for example Charlie Parker a lot of the harmonic vocabulary of this music exists in this level it is the bread and butter of jazz musicians everywhere but to quote Miles Davis if we're going to level up we have to not play the butter notes jazz harmony level 3 jalapeno pepper [Music] all right so there is definitely some more spice happening here and the reason for that is jazz harmony often uses what are called extensions in western music we build different kinds of chords by stacking different kinds of thirds on top of one another this is called tertiary harmony we can extend cords through chord extensions by over stacking thirds up and up without changing the basic identity of the core at the core of it though these chord progressions are just colorful versions of the meat-and-potato 2/5 progressions they're just dressed up in fancy clothes like for example this a7 flat 9 sharp 11 flat 13 is just an a7 chord but like wearing a gaudy hat or something this level is perfect for big band where you have a lot of different musicians available to play a lot of different extensions artists like of course Duke Ellington and later Thad Jones created dense and rich layers of harmony with their orchestras now in order to reach the next level we kind of have to leave the to five progression behind we have to move away from the meat and potatoes of jazz harmony and get into something a little crunchy ER jazz harmony level for piri-piri pepper [Music] okay so this was something called a pedal point where you have the same note that occurs across all the chords in a progression usually in the bass this pedal point grounds us in the key of D and because of that the chords changing on top don't have to be functional in other words they don't have to point to anywhere in particular they don't have to have that same sense of tension and release instead you can pick and choose basically whatever so long as it doesn't clash with the melody a lot of modal jazz from the 1960s existed on this level especially with the piano playing of McCoy Tyner with John Coltrane on albums like my favorite things and a love supreme this sort of style paved the way for the next level of jazz harmony level five habanero pepper okay now we're getting spicy we've now entered the wonderful world of none functional harmony at this level chords don't need to point to any particular key or chord they just exist as islands rising up from the seabed of harmony unconnected from one another for example if we take a look at the second chord in the progression D flat major nine it's not in the key of DEMA nor does it point to any particular key one way to think about it is that this chord is not the result of any other chord it exists purely because the melody note C works well with the chord because it's the chords major seventh by the time we've reached level five musicians just aren't formalizing their harmonic choices as much instead they're pretty much relying purely on their experienced ears to guide them with their aesthetic decisions now by the late 1960s the jazz avant-garde largely abandoned harmony as a guiding principle in composition but you could still hear level five harmony and albums like mild smiles by Miles Davis these level five albums would greatly influence the harmonic choices of later fusion artists like Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea so now that we can basically use whatever weird chords we want and call it jazz where can we possibly go from here well Fermi level six ghost pepper [Music] [Music] this level is the spiciest of them all level six is the land of liberated dissonance poly quartz mirror twelve tone harmonizations basically anything and everything that arnold schoenberg and igor stravinsky used now we can use in jazz harmony so let's take a look at this b-flat minor major seven over F major seven over C sharp five we have three unrelated chords stacked on top of one another each conflicting in various ways for example the G sharp of the C sharp five creates a minor ninth with a of F major seven which in turn creates another minor ninth with the B flat of the B flat minor major seven these overtones are at war with one another it's a dramatic and intense moment and because of that it should be used quite sparingly as Ludmila you Leila would write in her book contemporary harmony this type of musical phrase is so related to the structure of a composition that cannot be used indiscriminately so just like ghost peppers level six jazz harmony should be used extremely rarely and in very small doses otherwise it might ruin a perfectly good dish examples of level six harmony might be Bob Breton Jers arrangements for the Stan Kenton orchestras album a city of glass or maybe anything by Dave Liebman he's a spicy boy so now we have jumped completely off the deep end how are we supposed to get to the final level Oh Myles Davis Prince of Darkness show us the way show us how to not play the butter notes show us the way to jazz level seven jazz harmony level [Music] all right so what is going on here well this is an example of in tonal ISM where the chords have been tuned to the melody so the melody has stayed in our normal twelve-tone equal tempered system that we all know and love but the chords have been tuned to just intonation ratios based on the harmonic functions of the melody notes that they're paired with for example the G here on this a minor seven is the minor seventh of the chord now there are different just intonation ratios that can be used for minor sevenths depending on the context but this one we used a 9 to 5 ratio this 9 to 5 ratio happens to be about 18 cents sharp from its equal-tempered counterpart so to compensate the court has to be detuned by 18 cents just to make sure that the G of the melody is still an equal temperament that's the basic idea behind the process we tune the just intonated chords to the equal-tempered melody but some interesting things can happen when we use different ratios for the same interval for example we could use 7 to 4 for G on this a7 sharp 9 7 2 4 is $0.33 flat from its equal-tempered counterpart so we have to tune the whole chord up 33 cents to keep the G of the melody in equal temperament we think of the roots for both of these chords as a but because the minor sevenths are defined differently and G stays the same in the melody the root notes are almost exactly a quarter tone apart you we could say that level seven jazz harmony is Zen harmonic it exists outside of the realm of our normal twelve-tone equal tempered system these tuning shenanigans are how Jakob Collier of course famously modulated to G Hoff sharp major and his arrangement of in the Bleak Midwinter but other artists like Steve layman have experimented with this sort of thing with his spectral compositions what's interesting is that this harmony can be very subtle as you heard in comparison with the bombast of level six to me though these chords feel like nothing else they feel like they're almost piercing through at me rather than laying on this bed impassive I'm not really quite sure if that makes any sense so I'll play with a twelve tone equal tempered version of these chords back-to-back with the in tonalist version so that you can hear for yourself [Music] [Music] so I might sound a little off a little out of tune but in a good way to me at least it almost feels like that cassette tape sort of vibe that lo-fi sort of vibe in fact if you slowed it down and just put an anime girl studying on top of it you'd have lo-fi hip-hop [Music] right and there we go just intonated cords of her Gila beads gives us the seventh level of jazz harmony if you enjoy this video check out my patreon because it's my patrons over at my patreon that make these videos possible thank you so much for watching [Music]

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 2,642,988

Rating: 4.9571762 out of 5

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: lz3WR-F_pnM

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 30 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/pimentogh]

jazzcirclejerk is going to have a blast with this I swear

[u/[deleted]]

Just a reminder, Herbie Hancock is only a Level 5 in Jazz Harmony

[u/jacob100400]

What channel is this?

[u/kaipapar]

Level 1: not laid back Level 7: laid back

[u/JJam66]

Level 6 was horrid lol

[u/PlagonRD]

A fellow Adam newly viewer I see

[u/KConstantin]

loved the ending

[u/tsojtsojtsoj]

level 0: 0:27

level 1: 0:50

level 2: 2:08

level 3: 3:33

level 4: 4:54

level 5: 5:47

level 6: 7:13

level 7: 8:57

[u/mellovibes75]

Love it. Also, lol at the lo-fi hip hop ending