The Book Of Jazz - online reference book

Its Nature, Instruments, Sources, Sounds, Development & Performers

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	210	ITS NATURE
	one beat of the bar), no literate jazzman would fail to see in it, at first glance, the first nine measures of How High the Moon. (By the same token it is the chord pattern for Charlie Parkers Ornithology and for other tunes of identical harmonic nature, though it was How High the Moon that created the pattern and inspired the other works.) How, the reader may ask, can this identification be made when not one note of the tune is included? The answer is that to the jazz musician How High the Moon is not simply the melody in whole, half and quarter notes that can be found on the sheet music, but a harmonic ski-trail along which ten thousand mu­sicians have traveled. The improvisational bases of jazz are not melodies, but chord structures. Thus the uninitiated listener who complains "Where's the melody?" must be instructed in follow­ing the new melody created by the jazzman, based not on the missing melody the listener is seeking, but on a harmonic routine identical with that of the unplayed tune. A similar misconception, prevalent among musicians academi­cally equipped to know better, is that jazz has its own scale. The manner in which the flatted third and flatted seventh are used in jazz (Ex. 2) certainly gives them a special status, but the example 2
	scales used in all tonal jazz are the normal major and minor diatonic scales. The non-jazz musician, who tends to think of the flatted third and seventh as if they were part of a "jazz scale," overlooks cer­tain basic values. The diatonic scale is, after all, merely part of the chromatic scale, bearing to it the same relationship as that of the vowels to the alphabet. All the notes in the diatonic and chromatic scale are fully used in jazz, as in most European music; the status of the flatted third and seventh might be compared with that of the letters W and Y, which in certain areas and contexts may be considered vowel members of the alphabet