Aebersold Theory on Scales/Chords over Jazz changes?

First of all, this woman is either a complete idiot, or she's acting like one. Or, put in the language of some of my younger students, she's got some "issues".

Yes, Jamey does teach chord scale relationships, and he does teach that every chord has a corresponding scale...and sometimes, when he plays that way, he plays some things that I wouldn't play because I'm hearing the tune differently. But he ALSO teaches a right brain/left brain approach to improvisation, which translates into PLAY WHAT YOU HEAR. He's big on singing lines over chord changes, and if you can do that, he almost never has an issue with chord scale relationships.

I've talked about the whole chord/scale relationship thing with him on many occasions, and there are some things that we don't agree on...but the beautiful thing about Jamey is that he doesn't insist that you always agree with him, or that you always teach the same approach that he's teaching - even when you're working for him at the camps. It is common for a student to get up in the morning and go to one of his theory classes where he's talking about "every chord has a scale", and then walk into a master class of mine and hear me talking about thinking of key centers and tonalities within a tune instead of a new scale for each chord....and he's cool with that. In fact, he encourages that kind of thing because it exposes students to different approaches and ideas. And it's not like he's not aware of the concept that often times one scale can cover the changes to a series of chords, and he points this out in his materials again and again.

Should you play a tune the way the composer "hears it"? Well, if the composer is in the room and he/she is your teacher, you should try to open your ears and hear what they're trying to get across. Duh. But if you're playing the tune for your own purposes, you should play it - or ANY TUNE, for that matter - the way you hear it. If you're not happy with what's coming out, you might try woodshedding the difficult parts and re-training your ear on those, but when it comes time to play, you should only play what you're hearing...if you aren't doing that, you aren't really playing music.

Is Jamey teaching a method that the classic performers don't follow? Yes and no. The "classic performers" each learned in their own way, and played what they heard. Depending on which "classic performers" you're talking about, you could argue that approaching the jazz idiom from the theory end of things first is an ass-backwards approach, and in many cases, you'd be right. But then again, any time you're teaching music theory, all you're doing is giving people tools.....tools which you hope will help them open their ears to some new sounds.....sounds which will (you hope) EVENTUALLY make it into their active vocabulary.

Spices aren't food, but lots of food contains spices. Give a master chef a pile of ingredients, and they can create something which will melt in your mouth. Give the same ingredients to a Burger King grill guy, and it'l likely as not come out like some kind of weird WHOPPER. It's not the fault of the ingredients when this happens.

 

BRUCE BIGELOW - JAZZ DETECTIVE,

As to the rest of your post, I'll have to wait until there's more time to answer, but of the four chords listed above, only three TECHNICALLY support the G diminished scale: G7(13), G7b9, and G7 (assuming friendly color tones). The diminished scale has a natural 5 and 6, so TECHNICALLY the #5 in the other chord would clash. But if that's what the guy is hearing then we can assume that it's what he wants. Either way, we're talking about a difference of one or two notes in the overall tonality, and not 4 separate scales.