Enjoy the benefits of a premium membership!
Upgrade Account
-
TalkBass has been independent since 1998. Add your voice.
Create a free account to reply to discussions, view embedded media, and browse with fewer display ads.
Join free Log in
Want zero display ads or expanded classifieds tools? Compare plans.
the myth of modes
- Thread starter HandsFree
- Start date
Agreed, but you don't need modes to know how to do this.
Modes didn't really enter the thinking of any jazz bass player until the post BeBop era. They did fine....and arguably better than the modern versions which too often sound like complex math posing as music.
Buy and read "Thinking In Jazz". It explains, using their own words, how the guys most of us would want to play with or play like learned what they did and how they thought about the music while playing and composing.
There are a ton of transcriptions in the second half (maybe 25% of the book) where various solos, conventions, ect. are explored.
Know the fretboard inside out by note and interval name.
Song choice depends upon your tastes and who you want to play with, but the Blues form and Rhythm Changes both provide a structure to learn jazz harmonic norms. Get good at them before bothering with actual songs because you will find many of the components of the former in the latter.
Best jazz bass book I've seen thus far: [Invalid or Expired Link Removed]
There is more to jazz bass than walking bass lines and this book is pretty thorough in exploring the other aspects as well.
Be Bop-ers were not using modal thinking to play or write.
They were using chordal thinking more than anything else; substituting chords, superimposing one chord over another, using enclosures, chromatics, ect.
Mile's big complaint to the players on 'Kind Of Blue' was that he had to break that way of thinking so they could play modal.
Being able to apply modes after the fact isn't the same thing as using modes.
This is what people seem to miss.
Particularly when you look at jazz, which I think has the most carryover to most of what most people what to play (Just think of all the pop/rock/soul session folks who were jazzers first and then listen to the current batch.), you have to look at the historical development of the music to understand how they were looking at it.
I'm not saying that someone has to master every previous development of music before making "modern" music, but knowing how they came at it will open up your own approach and it will actually provide a method of advancing your knowledge and theory that we KNOW works.
The way music is taught now is because of developments in academia NOT developments in music.
A bunch of theorists have come up with a great way to organize and teach music, but that doesn't make it a great way to learn it or to think about it while writing or playing.
Can you become great with it? Of course!
Are there better ways? Hell yes!
I would say fractal...
A mode in a chord progression and a chord progression in one chord.
Exploring worlds in one chord, unify a chord progression with a mode.
A mode in a chord progression and a chord progression in one chord.
Exploring worlds in one chord, unify a chord progression with a mode.
okcrum
in your chest
Not all of them. When I worked with someone who was there (Nick Brignola) he showed me you could look at playing changes (even in bebop) either way. And he did so.
You're right, though. Most jazz from the 1920s-late 1950s was played chordally.Here's a confession.
I have in the past spent quite some time learning music theory and most of it has been very benificial, but I have never ever seen any use in the concept of modes. And yes, I play jazz(y) music primarily.
In my view the whole mode thing is a big misunderstanding (yeah, I like a small dose of provocation, now and then).
Say a song is in the key of G major and at some point you have a D7 chord.
Now I've heard teachers pointing out that the D mixolydian scale would be in order there.
Sure, when improvising a bass line you would use a c rather than a c# there. But that is because D7 has a c in it. And that is because you're in the key of G. The mere fact that Gregorian chant has used a mode were whole and half steps occured similarly is completely irrelevant.
And also, in a D mixolydian mode, the tonic would be D, not G.
In classical music this occurs all the time. In a Mozart sonata you may find a scale d-e-f#-g-a-b-c-d running up and down over a D dominant 7 chord (D7) and nobody will say that Mozart used the mixolydian church mode there. Because he didn't. He used the tones that were applicable to the key he was working in.
Using scales in pop or jazz music isn't any different.
Of course a D7 chord may appear in other keys than G major, and it can be interesting to analyze that, but when I am reading from a chord chart and see a dominant 7 chord, I just use the appropriate tones to that chord, including a minor 7th.
Again, the whole notion that a church mode existed with a shifted tonic doesn't come into play.
Also note that D mixolydian is not G major played from the 5th tone. That's just a memory aid. It's not like the ionian mode was the mother of all and the rest was derived from that.
Well anyway, I know most don't agree, but I strongly feel that studying modes in pop/rock music is clouding the vision of how chords function in a tonal (not modal) context.
Songs exist that are based on true modality but they are a minority and in my view don't justify the extreme focus modes receive in music teaching.
Feel free to disagree, obviously.
[\confession]
I didn't read the whole thread but mode is like :
your D7 act as the 1st chord ... so if you had a I-IV-V kind of progression you would have D7 - GMaj7 - Amin7 instead of GMaj7 - CMaj7 - D7
Also mode do have a different feel to them ... It isn't starting the scale on a different degree and voilà ! It is a sound. Program a GMaj7 - CMaj 7 - D7 progression and make sure all your phrases has E as the tonal center even though you use mostly GMaj accidential.
Last edited:
Not all of them. When I worked with someone who was there (Nick Brignola) he showed me you could look at playing changes (even in bebop) either way. And he did so.
You CAN look at it any number of ways retroactively. That doesn't mean anyone was looking at it that way THEN.
There were some folks who came to jazz from a classical background, like Bill Evans, who may have thought of how Be Bop can be related to modal thinking, but even he was likely not thinking in those terms to decide what to play because, just like we use certain slang and "trade" specific language when with certain populations, he likely did the same with Be Bop folks.
Even If we find it to be otherwise....who cares. Dizzy, Trane, Ray Brown, and whomever else was not thinking that way.
We should never base our decisions on how to approach something based on what works for the few, because the odds of us being one of the few is very unlikely.
okcrum
in your chest
True. It's also true that modal playing grew through the 50s. It didn't just appear suddenly when Miles did Kind Of Blue. It became "the thing" then, of course. Just because I played with Nick later doesn't mean he and others weren't already doing it then. The leading proponents of the last big thing are often the last to change to the new big thing.
They were exploring it, along with other things like the crazy poopie Trane was doing with math-like stuff, but they were the minority and I highly doubt that it was being used in their playing and writing of Be Bop except as "Hmm. That's interesting." afterthought.
I could be wrong, but there don't seem to be much of what we could see as transitional albums before the explosion of it around the release of 'Kind Of Blue'.
okcrum
in your chest
Well, I doubt you could get away with more than a few modal bars at a time on a hard bop gig back in the day if you wanted to get hired back.
Most of the innovation then happened in the loft jams and after-hours clubs. It's very rare that any of that was recorded. So the impression left now is that the 50s were chordal and the 60s were modal. Were it like today, when everything gets recorded, we might view it differently.
I just listened to your music and sorry but it sounded crappy ... Most of the time a min7b5 is part of a chord progression that make sense ... here it doesn't make sense unless you wanted to go the atonal route or if it was some heavy metal
If modes are a tool for you to utilize in your own playing, fine. If you use them only as a reference point to understand the improvisation of others, that's fine. If you are a teacher and you use them as building blocks, great. If you try to ignore them, that works, too. They won't go away, but you may not need them. I bought an extension plug wrench once for a van I used to own. The van is long gone, but I still have the wrench. It works perfectly, but not for me.
That is a bold statement to say modes did not enter any bass players lines/mind until bebop???? Your probably referring to songs like "Impressions" or "So What" among many more that are modal. I am referring to everything from Take the "A" Train to to every song that has more than "2" chords in them. From Country to Rock, Blues to Funk and obviously Jazz.
Song in Key of C with walking bass line not written out.
C - F - Dm - G7 - C - Am - Dm - G7
Inexperienced players may think every minor chord is the same minor mode, or shape and they may think the same of the major chords as well.
However, by knowing the difference you have the knowledge and mental map to play a correct line (not referring to a walking bass line full of chromatics in it)
C - Ionian - cdefgabc
Dm - Dorian - defgabcd
Em - Phrygian -efgabcde
F - Lydian - gabcdefg
G7 - Mixolydian - gabcdefg
Am - Aeolian - abcdefga
B° (line should be through the circle) - Locrian - bcdefgab
In the end, no matter what you know or do not know. If it sounds good it is good.
Spoken like a true bass guitarist.Sure, folks have done it with success, sure. But you really have to be a great player to make it sound like you're not running scales. Way too ambitious a project for me
You're pretty lucky. I'm not sure 50% of the guitarists I've played with could identify the notes on their guitars, let alone a mode.
