Thelonious Monk.
In a tune like "Straight No Chaser," again, another basic blues
you have this dichotomy between the major and minor third.
This is a very very important understanding of blues language and jazz language,
and any kind of extended harmonic language.
For example, if I have an F7 chord, I have F, A, C, Eb. If I add the 9th, I've got a G.
If I go up to the next 3rd, I have an A.
But there's something in between that G and an A, and it's an Ab or G#
If I sharp this 9th,
That is the quintessential, wonderful blues chord. Why?
Because you see, on the guitar, which is the primary blues instrument, the guitarist allows himself to bend
the strings. He can find the pitches between one note and another note.
I give the illusion of that same kind of raunchy bending by playing what we call a cross relationship
where the major third and the minor third coexist, but they happen to coexist an octave apart.
We call it a sharp 9 in the nomenclature, but it basically is this:
and they can be played either way. You can play it:
depending on how dissonant you want to make your music sound.
However, when it's played like that, it has a great progressive mysteriousness
which then allows us to move in all kinds of directions.
Never be afraid to play with this major minor relationship.
The more you play with it,
the more you can move around.
Now, what Monk does though, he doesn't do it like that. Monk is much classier than that.
He gives us that melody.
He outlines the 5, the 1, and the 3. He outlines the F major chord.
You can't get more stable than that F major chord.
But the way in which he really keeps it moving forward is he starts on the 5th
and he incorporates this chromaticism which is, of course, A to Ab.
And then he lands on that Ab.
Lands on the A.
Lands on the Ab.
Oh! He introduces something new here. It's the tritone. I'll get to that in a minute.
He's playing around with his major/minor, right note/wrong note.
Not only does he give us the tritone, but he punches it.
That tritone is beautiful, man.
As he expands the melody, he keeps on landing on the tritone.
In the Middle Ages, they called that the Devil's Interval, which always shocked me
because Bach used it all the time and he wrote the greatest Christian music in all of history.
Not only does he give us the tritone, he doesn't hide the fact that it's the wrong note — he celebrates it.
And because he celebrates it, he shows that these pitches now can coexist.
That tritone, the dominant, and the tonic, they're all coexisting. And they're all incredibly dissonant.
What's cool about it is that as the improvisor, you can begin then to play in two different, very foreign keys.
It's like being on the North and the South Pole.
South Pole: F
North Pole: B
Very hip. Why? It expands our language.
It's giving us 2 tonalities.
Now we could run the blues scale, which is 1 flat 3, 4, sharp 4, 5, flat 7.
And we can do the same thing in B. And what happens then?
We're adding pitches to our vocabulary. Pitches that normally would not exist.
And what's very interesting now when we have this dual kind of tonality,
is that when we go to the Bb and we're in B, we have the most dissonant intervalic relationship
which is Bb and B.
And we're saying that they coexist. And of course, then as the improvisor, you have the right to play
what we might call "the wrong note."
And of course, the more possibilities you have, the more you can then expand.