Why Jacob Collier Disagrees with George Russell (Lydian)

i'm not sure george russell would agree i'm not sure if george russell would agree see jacob has deemed super lydian as being of his own creation so why does he care about what someone else has to say or whether or not they would agree who is george russell and what does he have to do with jacob and super lydian picture a major scale let's say i don't know c major and let's organize the chain of major thirds starting on the root note c great so now let's organize those same notes in a chain of fifths starting in the root note c lastly let's arrange these notes into a cluster okay okay so what is what is even going on like who cares well someone does meet george russell let's just call him george russell see back in the 1940s and the 1950s these particular arrangements of the major scale struck george as fascinating because that meant that scales could be more than just scales maybe they could be a source of how pitches are arranged and theorized in other words how scales produce and connect chords yeah like look at that train of fifths that's pretty satisfying i mean except that pesky f natural up there but no yeah this is great well george russell really really did not like that it bothered him so much it was quite unsettling so he asked himself what if one could just create a chain of fifths to create a scale from a root i mean if it's a perfect chain of perfect fifths couldn't you make a perfect scale isn't the perfect fifth the perfect interval of the overtone series that governs physics and our psychoacoustic physiology wow wow okay hear me out girl george said what if the real major scale is actually supposed to be the lydian scale laden comes from a perfect stack of fifths and major well not so much so yeah lydia let's do it in a parallel universe way out there jacob collier is discovering and developing music for himself he's exploring sounds and pushing many harmonic boundaries from what he has been taught though one particular sound struck him as arbitrarily capped lydian it is the same lydian that can be derived from a chain of stacked perfect fifths these are the seven notes that correspond to the c lydian scale so why would you want to add more what else would you add remember the arrangement of the major scale with the stack of thirds the same arrangement can be done for lydian but jacob wanted more as usual and he felt a strong pull from above above take note of that because it'll be important for later so jacob asks himself why not carry on the alternating pattern to another note c sharp we continue the alternating pattern of major third and minor third intervals okay well why not keep going a little more in the same pattern all right i'm gonna stop right there because some of you are like i know i know goes on forever like you did in your video okay well not here so let's return to the stack of fifths of the original scale and let's get rid of these extra notes we have the seven note stack of fifths corresponding to each of the seven notes of the lidding scale so let's continue this chain by adding the next fifth that would come in this pattern which is c sharp that makes sense right maybe if we compress it into a scale it could become problematic but as a train of fifths this this kind of works except not for george russell he actually acknowledges the power of the chain of fifths i mean that's how you create the living scale the most perfect of all scales right yes george actually calls it something in his book the leading chromatic concept of tonal organization he calls it tonal gravity as in there's tonal gravity in a ladder arrangement of fifths remember how jacob felt the pull from above well it looks like george feels a pull from below he claims that the f sharp yields or surrenders its tonical authority down to b and from b to e and so on down the ladder now picture this you're a note and you submit to someone a fifth below you that's george's theory that's power yielding ladder structure whatever thing but why wouldn't he add a c sharp to create an even stronger ladder of fifths that could all yield to its root which would be c well you see he's got a problem on his hands and it's called several centuries of western european harmony you can't just go and create a new theory on the living scale for music that's been based on the language of minor major diminished and augmented seventh chords yeah that's right george wanted to create a theory that encompassed the new sounds of lydian and at the same time included several centuries of common harmonic practice but all right he does have a solution frame all music as based on the lydian scale and alter the lydian scale to accommodate for chords that have a strong and long history of practice so yep that's what he did so what kind of chords is he trying to accommodate for well there's major minor diminished and augmented and seventh chords so he creates seven different variations of lydian that can produce each of these chords in a way that the lydian scale alone cannot here are the seven scales he produced as you can see with this scale the lid and augmented scale it can create an augmented chord on the root and the same idea holds for the lydian diminished scale being able to produce a diminished chord on the root but these aren't just seven random scales that can accommodate the historic use of chords there's a specific order to these scales now stay with me i know it's pretty out there for a theory it's yeah they're based on how chromatic or not chromatic they are with lydian being the least chromatic with the least amount of alterations so you keep adding alterations to the scales to get a higher order more complex version of the scale he creates his own chromatic order of tonal gravity for all 12 notes for c lydian it's c g d a e b and f sharp right that's what we've already seen is a tonal gravity structure for c so what comes next is it the c sharp nope it's a g sharp and that creates the first altered scale of c lydian which will be c lydian augmented see he could have just continued onwards in the stack of fifths to create a huge stack of fifths but no he's got to create c lydian augmented after introducing the g sharp he introduces the d sharp or e flat which is the flat three followed by the a sharp or the b flat which is the flat seven followed by the e sharper f which is the natural four and then c sharp or d flat which is the flat second can we take a moment to just look at how disgusting that is you break the pattern of introducing fifths here first of all and then you introduce what is seemingly another chain of fifths of extra alterations only to break that chain of fifths two so that's what the c sharp is to george last unimportant just stuck there haphazardly can you see now why george russell and jacob would disagree or why they actually do disagree i don't know jacob do you got beef with him let me know alright there's a chart in george russell's book that nicely pictures a journey along a river it's representative of the further concepts you learn in the book you got some chord progressions some some tonic stations okay that's cute we've got a melody that varies back and forth according to some ideas that we later cover oh nice we're going to st louis to memphis to new orleans okay oh it's the mississippi river and the key of a flat that totally makes sense right so how are we traveling well let's see we got the coleman hawkins local steamboat the lester young express yacht okay we got the ornette coleman rocket awesome can somebody tell me why this is not a

Channel: Leon Waves

Views: 201,489

Keywords:

Id: cLnJJ4mmBZA

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021