From our free, Jazz Guitar Lessons Daily Series: Lesson 50
Fridays - Advanced Melodic Triads Concepts
3/19/21
What do Maj7 chords, triad pairs, liquid harmony, inner voice movement, and the jazz standard Misty all have in common? They’re all combined together into today’s lesson on harmony, comping, chord melody, and solo guitar work.
All week (lessons 46-50) we’ve been focusing on the Maj7 and how to get the most out of it melodically and harmonically. Today we’re digging a little deeper.
First things first, we need to know what the triad pair for Maj7 is. In melodic triads we would notate this triad pair as (t3) / T4. In other words, the melodic or STABLE triad is the minor triad built on the 3rd of the harmony, and the tension triad we can use to create drama and movement is the major triad built on the 4th of the harmony. You can learn more about thinking this type of way and how it applies to a variety of advanced jazz harmonies in the courses and resources available in our online study group.
So if we’re thinking about EbMaj7, the first chord in Misty, t3 would be the minor triad built on the 3rd of EbMaj7… G minor. So our stable, melodic triad is G minor. The tension triad is T4, which would be the major triad built on the 4 of EbMaj7… Ab major. Play around comping or arpeggiating G minor and Ab major over an EbMaj7, or even simply Eb, loop. This gives us six of our seven diatonic notes and SHOULD be enough information for your ear to notice that the G minor is more resolved an ‘in’ than the Ab, which should feel quite unstable like it wants to move. Listen to the first part of McCoy Tyner’s piano solo on My Favorite Things to hear this exact sound being used over an EMaj7. He vampes on G# minor and A major while playing very simple melodic ideas above it.
The next step is to create some inner voice movement using a liquid harmony technique. We’re going to use the quadratonic concept from our melodic triads approach to accomplish this. Instead of thinking of the Ab major triad is ONLY a triad, we’re going to think of it as a triad + tension 6. The tension 6 will be an F note, since F is the 6th above Ab. So every time you play the Ab triad, no matter what inversion, you will substitute the F note (tension 6) in place of the Eb note (5th of the triad) and then resolve it down a whole step back into the Ab major triad. This will create movement within a single voice of the triad which will then crave its full resolution back into the G minor...
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