Mo' Modal, Part 1

Modal jazz gives bass players a chance to stretch out on long durations of one sound, exploring sonic nuances and colors. In a modal jazz song you might come across four, eight, or even 16 bars of one chord/scale sound—a term that also refers to the mode we are using. Modal music is more about harmonic colors than about chordal movement. For example, play a G7 arpeggio and walk up and down the G Mixolydian mode (Ex. 1). Now play an Em7 arpeggio and walk up and down the E Phrygian mode (Ex. 2). Do you hear the difference in the color? The G Mixolydian sounds funky and bluesy, and the E Phrygian sounds more exotic and dark—even though they both are built from the same notes, those of the C major scale (a.k.a. the C Ionian mode).

Look at Ex. 3, the almost all-too-familiar C major scale. If you play a scale from D to D using the notes of the C major scale, you hear the D Dorian mode, a.k.a. the D Dorian minor scale. The Dorian minor is one of the most common scales used over a minor 7 chord in jazz. On a Dm7 chord, the pianist “comps” (accompanies the soloist) on chords built from the notes of the D Dorian mode. The bass player uses notes mostly from D Dorian to create the bass line for the static-sounding harmony (Ex. 4).

To better understand the Dorian minor scale in modal jazz, check out Paul Chambers’s work on the classic composition “So What.” (See also Chris Jisi’s Learn To Play Woodshed in November ’06, and the box on the next page.) The chord/scale progression to “So What” is: 16 bars D Dorian minor, eight bars Eb Dorian minor, and eight bars D Dorian minor. Listen to the original recording [from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue] and hear how the players develop their improvisations in an unhurried, cool style over the eight-bar modal sections.

The modal jazz style of Kind of Blue departs from the standard bebop-style song form where one chord always relates to the next chord with a specific function in a specific key. For example, “All Blues” (also from Kind of Blue) is a 12-bar blues in 6/4; the chord progression differs from most bebop-style blues songs of that era, because the first four measures are dominated by one chord/scale sound—the G7sus. Because there’s little harmonic movement in this section, “All Blues” has a peaceful, floating feeling.

On my recording Cologne [Fuzzy Music, 2003], with Peter Erskine and Bill Dobbins, we play my composition “Jog Left.” For the structure of this song, I use an A pedal tone as the underpinning for the first four eight-measure phrases: A Mixolydian, A Aeolian, A harmonic minor, and A Phrygian. The sounds become progressively darker as the tune moves through the Mixolydian (Asus7), Aeolian (F/A), harmonic minor (E/A), and Phrygian (A7susb9) modes. You can check out an audio sample of this track on my website at www.goldsby.de.

Modal music reflects sonic colors and feelings; next month we’ll take a closer look. Have fun exploring the sounds, and don’t forget: Play what you feel.