On Sat Oct 3, at SaturdayOct 3 9:47 PM, Chuck Israels wrote:
Do you see Charles there in Montreal? Please give him our best.
He's my neighbour! I see him, his wife and his adorable young daughter quite often. I will say hi from you two.
I work with Barry Harris from time to time (pleasure for me), and he speaks about Monk calling an Am7b5 a Cmin6/A. I never did get why this was important to Monk or to Barry, who is usually into simplifying the way one needs to think about harmony rather than making it more complex. I'm not convinced that all theory is equally useful. Some things seem like going from NY to Philly by way of Cleveland.
I agree in that I prefer functional harmonic concepts. But Monk's nomenclature is useful for a couple of other reasons (for students, among others) in that it allows you to see instantly how to use a tonic minor lick on a pre-dominant area chord.
I do an exercise with my students where I ask them to come up with a melodic minor lick (no chromatics) and I use the Cry Me A River lick (9,8,5,3,2,1 for the non-jazzers) as an example. Then we play it in Fm for a Dm7(b5) chord, in Abm for a G7 altered chord, and in Cm for the tonic Cm6 chord. It is just to show how the same lick can be recycled with a new "feel" and musical meaning over a different chord, thus saving practice time and increasing understanding.
Understand, I don't live my life this way! But it is useful for showing how everything fits together more than it might seem at first.
Christopher _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
