How Jazz Started To
Incorporate Modal Harmony
If you’re a fan of jazz then it is almost guaranteed that you’ve come across Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. At the time of recording, it wasn’t seen as anything monumental but in the years since, has become the best selling jazz recording of all time. Like most, I became familiar with the album within a few years of pursuing music seriously when a friend of mine suggested we play All Blues at a gig. Not being familiar with the tune, he helped me along for a few choruses until I picked up the feel and the chord changes. As soon as I got home I went searching online for the record it came from and before long I was introduced to modal jazz for the first time.
I don’t remember my initial impression but it didn’t strike me as anything special compared to some of the other albums I had already come across in my journey. Realistically, that was more a reflection of my musical taste at the time and my immaturity as a jazz musician. In the following years I grew to love the sound of Miles Davis, with Kind of Blue being the conduit for me to find others such as John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, not to mention bassist Paul Chambers. Although I had learnt a number of solos from the record, I didn’t really understand any of the concepts behind the compositions and it was only when I pursued music further at university that I started to grasp what was going on. Fortunately, through a few classes both in improvisation and arranging, I was able to see just how amazing one or two chord changes could be instead of the normal bebop inspired approach. That there could be so much color drawn from only a few notes and that you didn’t need long strings of complex chords in order to create a great jazz solo or arrangement.
As we now live in a time more than 60 years after the initial release of Kind of Blue, the concept of modal jazz can sometimes feel somewhat insignificant due to so many other innovations having taken place since. But at a time when the status quo was to follow chord changes functionally in jazz, the creation of a non-diatonic approach offered a completely unique alternative that sounded unlike anything that had come before. Brief explorations had occurred in the years leading up to 1959, but Kind of Blue is often seen as the definitive starting point of the style as the whole album leant more heavily towards the modal concept compared to just a singular track or solo section in the past.
Fortunately for us, the concept behind the album and modal jazz in general doesn’t take nearly as long to unpack in comparison to some of the other jazz styles I’ve covered. In fact, there is really only one technique that is used and it is rather straightforward to explain. The tricky part though, is that the term modal jazz is specifically linked to a harmonic technique rather than a set of musical characteristics. As a result, it is possible for modal harmony to be used in other styles such as hardbop, meaning that some pieces can belong to multiple categories. However, that isn’t really that big of an issue and hopefully by the end of this resource you’ll understand how there can be an overlap between modal jazz and other styles.
Russell & Davis
In the mid-to-late 1940s, many musicians would frequent Gil Evan’s 52nd street apartment, including two individuals soon to be at the heart of modal jazz: George Russell and Miles Davis. At the time there wasn’t anything special about these two individuals, they were both simply musicians living in New York and trying to make a living. Like many of those who frequented Evan’s basement apartment, the two would discuss musical ideas and concepts, trying to push the current state of jazz in a new direction. Somewhere along the way, Russell was inspired by a conversation with Miles about trying to capture the sound of a certain chord, a concept that didn’t really make too much sense in the context of jazz at the time. Coming away from the conversation, Russell sat down at the piano with a singular purpose, to find the scale which best fit the sound of the major triad.
The most obvious starting point was the major scale, but after stacking all seven notes on top of one another he found that the tension created by the 4th degree didn’t align with the stability found in the major triad. The next logical step was to try a similar sound which didn’t have the natural 4th, so Russell started experimenting with the lydian mode which has a raised 4th. What he found was that this particular mode actually better fit the sound of the major chord because it had no sense of dissonance or resolution. You see, the natural 4th in a major scale is one of the main reasons behind functionality in western harmony. The dissonance it implies creates a pull to the 3rd degree which is how we get cadences and diatonic chord resolutions. By replacing it with the #4th, there is no longer a pull downward, instead the note feels quite content and has no desire to move either upward or downward. Russell’s findings led him to come to the conclusion that the best scale to be associated with the major chord was the lydian mode.
With the connection between a chord and a particular scale now established, Russell wanted to push the idea further thanks to his conversations with Miles. Instead of improvisation simply being the outlining of chord tone resolutions, he had the idea that improvisers could explore the linked scale or mode with a particular chord itself. For example, instead of playing a set of chords such as Dm7-G7-C where the most common option would be to follow the guide tone line C-B-C or F-F-E, what Russell was suggesting was to explore the sound of the scales linked with each chord. In this case that could be D dorian for Dm7 or G mixolydian for G7. In order to do this properly, more space would have to be allocated to each chord to allow the improviser adequate time to explore the associated modes. Russell did go considerably further with this idea and ended up developing the Lydian Chromatic Concept, a very forward thinking book which is dense with music theory. However, for the sake of modal jazz we don’t need to delve any further into Russell’s findings.
At a time where diatonic harmony reigned supreme in jazz, the concept of exploring a certain scale or mode while improvising went against all established norms. While Russell was the brains behind the idea, it was actually Miles who brought it popularity over the latter part of the 1950s. Starting in 1957, Miles was invited to create the soundtrack for the french film L’Ascenseur pour l’echafaud. Instead of writing any music, he decided to improvise the entire soundtrack while watching scenes from the film, giving a completely different sound to anything he had done up to that point. The opening track, Générique, predominantly featured the rhythm section playing in E minor while Miles explored the sound of that particular scale with some added blue notes. A type of improvisation that had never been done before in jazz and very much represented the idea of exploring the sound of a given chord instead of a set of resolving changes.
The following year Miles started to implement the concept further in two recordings, specifically in the actual chord progression of Milestones and in Gil Evans’ arrangement of I Loves You Porgy. In Milestones, the chord progression was built around two chords: Gm7 and Am7, with Miles taking the idea Russell created of associating the major chord with the lydian mode and expanding it to other sounds. As a result, the Gm7 was associated with the dorian mode and the Am7 with aeolian. Unlike the film soundtrack which was pure improvisation, this time around there was a set form, melody and chord changes, making Milestones the first proper example of modal jazz. Later in the year, Miles teamed up with Evans once again to record the album Porgy And Bess. The modal concept reared its head in I Loves You Porgy when Evans only gave Miles the notes of the F ionian mode (F major scale) with no indication of what to play. The result was an improvised melody which floated above the rest of the ensemble.
Milestones
Miles Davis
While it is easy to focus on the modal aspect of these three examples, arguably more important was the change in Miles’ approach to soloing. Due to not being bound by quick successions of chord changes, he was able to achieve complete melodic and rhythmic freedom, choosing exactly when he wanted to land on certain notes and not when certain chord resolutions took place. To some degree it represented an evolution of Lester Young’s soloing in the 30s where he would impose pentatonics over the blues, but this time it went one step further due to there only being a singular chord change.
Having now experimented a few times with Russell’s concept, Miles decided to dedicate the entirety of an album to the idea in 1959 which resulted in Kind of Blue. Not all of the tracks embraced the modal concept equally but there were two standouts which have since become the quintessential examples of modal jazz. Starting with the opening track, So What, the piece only featured two chords, Dm7 and Ebm7, both being associated with the dorian mode. Unlike Milestones, in this instance Miles did not opt for different modes and wanted to explore the relationship between two chromatic chords each with the same modal sound. This is quite the contrast to the closing track on the album, Flamenco Sketches, which didn’t feature a melody at all and was created by stringing together five modes for the players to solo over on cue.
So What
Miles Davis
Flamenco Sketches
Miles Davis
After the release of Kind of Blue, the modal approach to harmony had now become another branch of the ever evolving sound of jazz. It was picked up by multiple other artists, most notably Bill Evans and John Coltrane (both of which being sidemen on the Kind of Blue album), as well as others such as Oliver Nelson, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter. For the most part, the technique was incorporated in a similar manner to what Miles had established, with long stretches of bars dedicated to a singular scale sound, but it also started to be incorporated alongside functional chord progressions too. The new vocabulary brought an increased complexity to the sound of jazz, which now combined functional harmony with both colorful extensions and non-diatonic modes. But it’s probably best to save that for a different resource which explores the sounds of jazz in the 1960s.
Over three short years, Miles Davis had once again started a new direction for jazz thanks to George Russell, this time venturing into new harmonic territory and establishing the first major non-diatonic technique to be incorporated into jazz harmony. Although the change was primarily chordal, it did affect how improvisers approached soloing and introduced a more free approach while the accompaniment maintained a similar feel to other styles like hardbop. It also paved the way for chord-scale theory to become a predominant idea in coming decades, where chords now could be associated with different scale sounds as opposed to thinking purely through arpeggios and guide-tone resolutions.
The Takeaway
Modal jazz, or maybe more specifically modal harmony, is one of those techniques which can deliver an amazing amount of color and personality within the confines of just one or two chord symbols. It opens the door to many different textures with all of the modes of the major, and minor scales being up for grabs. Perhaps most importantly, the concept offers a drastically different view on jazz harmony, giving permission for arrangements and solos to not have to rely on so many resolutions and allowing melodies and solos to embrace more fluid rhythmic parameters. However, while modal jazz did push jazz away from diatonicism, another style established in the same year as Kind of Blue’s release propelled it much further into the world of the avant-garde. Up next we explore the world of free jazz, and how Ornette Coleman stretched jazz to its limits.