Re: [Harp-L] Should the blues scale be revised?

["Rick Dempster" <rick.dempster@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

If you are playing the b3rd against a dominant chord containing a major third, then the harmony you hear is not  a 'minor third' sound, but a 'sharp ninth' harmony. I know some folks might kick against applying formal terms like this; OK, call it anything you like - ' Raspberry', 'Purple', 'canine' whatever, but an Eb played against C7th chord is a completely different flavour, colour, animal, to an Eb in a C minor chord.
To me, the sharp 13th chord (a favourite of funky soul jazz guys - and Jimi Hendrix too, come to think of it) is the filthiest chord alive.
All great posts on this topic.
RD

>>> Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxx> 7/03/2008 3:53 >>>
At 07:29 PM 3/5/2008, Zvi wrote:
>What about the natural 3rd? Why isn't it part of the scale? It seems
>that there are good reasons to include it in the scale.

This very question was posed by Bill Monroe and his fiddle player Kenny 
Baker.  They felt that the flatted third had burned its way so completely 
into the ear of their audience that the natural third, coming where you'd 
expect a flatted third, was actually more compelling as a blue note.  I am 
not sure when they started substituting the natural third in for the 
flatted, but it would probably be in the late 50's or early 60's.

This was told to me in the early 70's by a guy named Bob Fowler, who had 
just been Monroe's guitarist for a few years, while Baker was still in the 
band.

As with other highly formal Japanese arts, sumi-e ink painting places 
various kinds of balance requirements on the painter.  If you paint an 
object on one part of the field you are required to place one in a 
geometrically opposite location, to balance it.  My favorite solution to 
this problem was done on a three-screen work:  A bird is darting just off 
the 'ground', all the way at the right edge of the right screen, flying to 
the right.  As we often see when a bird is darting low to the ground this 
bird appears to be moving very quickly.  In the blink of an eye the bird 
will be gone, except of course that this is a painting, so it's there 
forever.

But the sense of the bird's high speed is so convincingly executed that 
your eye actually seems to see the ghost of a black line all the way across 
the bottom of the painting - the blur of the bird's flight path.  There is 
no black line, but the feeling that there is one is enough to satisfy the 
formal requirement for balance.

Monroe and Baker's blue-note innovation is parallel to this, for me 
anyway.  When they play the natural third as the blue note it sounds even 
bluer than the flatted, because the brain somehow hears the echo of the 
flatted third, too.  Very, very powerful.

Musical theory is essentially the recipes of how composers and players 
achieved their effects IN THE PAST.   Every musician eventually adds to the 
Theory when they achieve effects outside the existing theory.  Zvi's 
question is the kind of question one asks when one wants to make music that 
is one's own.

Ken

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