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82 jazz
broad general view of what the experimenters in jazz were driving at. They were trying:
(i) To broaden and deepen the language of jazz harmony;
(ii) To get more varied sounds from the jazz orchestra;
(iii) To increase the variety and subtlety of jazz rhythms;
(iv) To vary and extend the rather short-winded and primitive musical forms in which jazz had been cast.
Let us start with the harmony side of it—since many of the most important innovations in modern jazz were made in the harmonic field: complex harmonies and harmonic progressions, and improvisations on a modern harmonic basis.
We can best illustrate this by a series of very simple progressing examples (once again, these examples are diagrams that have nothing particular to do with jazz style):
On page 55 we had our simple 'come home5 sequence of chords that rounded off our progression and brought us home. The final chord gave us a stable feeling of security, and the chord before it seemed to lead up inevitably to our 'home' chord. To put it another way, we gain our effects by a harmonic state of tension giving way to a feeling of less tension.
Now, in the early days of harmony, a little of this 'tension' went a long way: the feeling of repose was represented by a unison or octave, and this was |
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