Modern harmony and rhythm
The post-bop toolkit: quartal voicings and modal comping, upper-structure triads, triad pairs and intervallic lines, Brazilian and Afro-Cuban grooves, odd meters and polyrhythm, and the techniques of playing outside.
- Build and move stacked-4th voicings through a mode and comp a modal vamp with them
- Superimpose major triads over dominant chords to produce specific tensions, and build lines from them
- Improvise with adjacent triad pairs, hexatonic sounds and wide-interval, 4ths-based lines
- Play bossa nova, samba and partido-alto comping with an independent thumb bass, and a clave-based montuno figure
- Comp and phrase in 3/4, 5/4, 7/4 and 6/8, play 3-against-2 and 4-against-3, and execute a metric modulation
- Side-slip, use constant-structure harmony, spread triads and clusters, and control a modern guitar tone
Everything up to this point has been about playing inside: the right chord tones, the right tensions, the right voice leading. This module is about the vocabulary that jazz developed from the 1960s onward, when players such as McCoy Tyner, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson and, on guitar, Jim Hall, John Abercrombie, Pat Metheny, John Scofield and Kurt Rosenwinkel stretched that vocabulary without abandoning it. Quartal voicings, upper-structure triads and triad pairs are harmonic tools; Brazilian and Afro-Cuban grooves and odd meters are rhythmic ones; and the final lesson shows how to leave the harmony deliberately and come back. All of it rests on the shells, drop-2 shapes, arpeggios and time feel from Voicings II, Improvisation I and Rhythm and swing; if those are shaky, go back first.