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52 jazz
jar of pickled onions." Then the other partner would shoot back "5-5-4-1-" which would be deciphered as "Cut Golden Bar being smoked from a cherrywood pipe in a fog."
This story may seem very far from the point. But consider: it points to the way in which we should learn jazz harmony.
Learning Jazz Harmony
Harmony is notes sounded together. Each time you hear a harmony, you should record the effect in your mind. Ask yourself what notes are being sounded together, and how they are spaced. You will thus start building up a 'mental library' of sounds in combination, and soon you will reach the point where, on seeing any combination of notes written down, you will be able to make a fairly accurate guess at their sound.
Here is where the conventional harmony text-book may mislead you. Such books tend to start by laying down rules. There is nothing easier to teach than rules out of a book; and a lot of English music teaching is designed to produce not musicians but just more teachers of music. "We must refrain" the books tell us "from writing consecutive octaves or fifths".
What does this mean? It means that the following progression is "wrong" because the inner parts move in parallel courses a fifth apart, and the outer voices move in parallel courses an octave apart. |
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