Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner - Non Classical what's the deal with modal jazz?

I totally agree with this. Kind of Blue is one of my favorite albums, and I have studied it extensively, but I am uncomfortable with the way the album has been characterized as beginning a new genre of jazz.

I would even go a step further and say that modal jazz is only a subtle difference in style - not a new approach to jazz theory at all. Even So What, which everyone agrees is "modal," does in fact have chords. It's just 16 measures of Dmin7, 8 measures of Ebmin7, and 8 measures of Dmin7. You play D dorian over the Dmin7 and Eb dorian over Ebmin7, but that is what a bebop player would do anyway. Cannonball actually departs from the modes somewhat, and plays in the same style that he normally would on a bebop tune. Modal jazz is nothing but fewer chord changes.

Yea, we learn to play the scale first as a student in order to play "modal tunes", but good soloists rarely stick to "defining the mode" when they improvise, and like you said bebop idioms does work well over "modal tunes" too. John Coltrane's solos and Bill Evan's comping on that album became one of the platform in which quartal harmony and use the pentatonic scales got developed in jazz, but both concepts are not necessary native the modal harmony. It's interesting, because cannonball and Wynton Kelly's solo feels like they managed the play the songs without really getting the aesthetic Miles was going for.

I do think that "kind of blue" contributed a lot in developing the modern/post bop sound, but I think people are over-simplifying things when they said that it single-handedly changed the world of jazz or somehow created this new music. IMO what Miles did with his quintet with Wayne Shorter/George Coleman, Tony Williams, Ron Carter, & Herbie Hancock (epsecially the plugged nickel sessions) are by far more revolutionizing then Kind of Blue, especially when it comes to innovation in rhythm.

Elij, I'd love to hear more about your extensive study of the album. Did you transcribed, analyzed the solos? did you do research on history surrounding that album?

Miles played some C# and G# notes (maj 7th and blue note) in his D minor So What solo.

I may have overstated by authority on the subject; I have not studied the album extensively in the academic sense. I am just an amateur who has read Ashley Kahn's book about the making of the album along with some other commentary, and has put together rough transcriptions of a few of the simpler solos. It sounds like you know more about jazz history than me.



I'm glad you mentioned Wynton Kelly's solo, and I could not agree more, but somehow it really works for me. One of my favorite moments on the album is the transition between Kelly's solo and Davis's solo on Freddie Freeloader. Kelly builds the intensity of the song with very traditional bluesy playing, and Miles takes it over with this incredibly smooth sparse solo with no drop in intensity. Until that moment, I feel like Freddie Freeloader does not really fit in with the rest of the songs.

He emphazies chord notes on down beats and circle the D minor with it's dominant. It's tonal!

Miles Davis' "So What" Solo Reduced to “Target Notes“
The chords changes are:
D-7 for 16 bars, Eb-7 for 8 bars
The pitches detailed here are Davis’s target notes (pitches to which he directs his melodic line).

Of these 83 structural or skeletal notes, Davis targets:

Roots: 21 times (D or Eb)
11ths: 15 times (G or Ab) 11= root of V
9ths: 13 times (E or F)
7ths: 12 times (C or D)
5ths: 12 times (A or Bb)
3rds: 8 times (F or Gb)
13ths: 2 times (B or C)

Although tonic pitches are targeted most frequently, Davis directs his lines towards pitches 7, 9, and 11 with regularity. These pitches (C, E, and G in D Dorian) form a major triad one whole step beneath the root of the mode in which Davis plays. These moments (such as bars 32-39) demonstrate points of true modality in Davis’s improvisation.