Havona and Teen Town Chord Progressions. Explain and discuss.

[The_Orlonater]

I'm having trouble with how Jaco composed these two pieces the chord progressions seem a little odd. I've noticed Havona has a lot of Lydian(Major b5) bars and Major bars with a few chromatic notes ,but I'm not the best at Jazz theory so feel free to explain the piece to me and it's chord progression.

I know my explanation may seem a little vague ,but bare with me.

[onlyclave]

I'll take a shot. According to a fake book transcription of Teen Town I have the chord progression is ||:C13 A13 F13 D13:||. This is just four chords descending by thirds which has a very jarring quality in that each key center root is modified over the previous one (C > C#, F > F#). This major third relationship is a neoclassical harmonic technique and so it doesn't follow classical functional harmony.

The melody for Teen Town stays right inside of each bars' corresponding tonal center an the only nonharmonic tones function as passing tones, some accented and some unaccented. If you wanted to blow over these changes pretty much anything goes since they are all dominant chords. You'd probably want to avoid the natural 11th on these chords though because playing it over the third creates a minor 9th in an inner voice which sounds like crap. Try taking one bar at a time (like the first bar of the melody) and transpose it to each of the 4 tonal centers and see how it sounds.

Havona works similarly. Emaj9(#11) to a Cmaj9 a major third away, so the tonal centers would get 4 flats (or lose 4 sharps, depends on what key you want to play it in), then it moves the whole chord down a half step to Bmaj9 which is another neoclassical technique called planing then to Gmaj9, same progression as bars 1-4, take away 4 sharps. It then goes to Em9 which is basically the same chord with a different bass pedal tone anticipation as the chord progression then repeats again, Emaj13(#11) > Cmaj9, Bmaj9(#11) > Gmaj9. Soloing over these changes, you wold want to stick around major sounding tonalities since the melody is hanging out on major 7ths and major 9ths. Lydian and whole tone over would sound pretty cool but stay away from the roots. The melody has a gliding quality that comes from playing in the upper structures of the chords.

Hope that helps.

[HaVIC5]

Yeah, onlyclave explained it pretty well. The main thing to keep in mind when talking about more modern jazz chord progressions like Teen Town and Havona is that they're based on something called non-functional harmony. When you're going through the basics on up through the intermediate levels of music theory and jazz theory, you're dealing exclusively in the realm of functional, or key-based harmony. Every chord you're dealing with has a specific function (roman numeral analysis or functional analysis) within a specific key. When you're looking at a tune like Havona, you're not really dealing with keys or key centers per se, you're just dealing with chord colors and constant structures that are manipulated in a lot of different ways that don't really give a sense of key - just chord progression. Learning to write non-functional harmony is something thats completely removed from what you'll typically learn about jazz harmony.

There's a book out by Advance Music called "Beyond Functional Harmony" by Wayne Naus that gets into the the nitty gritty of writing this way. It's pretty, well, advanced, but if you're up for the challenge, its a good read.

[The_Orlonater]

3rd between chords?