The Composer at his Horn: Part 2

But for those who want to learn and learn from Shorter's songs, the technical aspects of his compositions are important. The biggest diversions from traditional jazz writing that appear in his music come in his harmonic structures. First, he makes frequent use of altered seven chords, sometimes replacing nearly all of the typical chords you'd find on a lead sheet. Chords like the lydian chord (maj7#11), the lydian augmented chord (maj7#5), the dorian chord (-6/9), the phrygian chord (7sus4b9) and entire families of altered dominants (7b5, 7#5, 9#11, etc.) appear in every song he wrote for the Miles Davis Quintet. He was not the first composer in jazz to use these chords – Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk beat him to the punch by decades – but he was the first to write music that centered around the colors of these chords.

These various chords – which could easily be referred to as modal chords – call for the improvisor to play in a specific mode, rather than the more flexible major 7 and minor 7 chords. There is some influence of Europe here: the music of Debussy and Ravel was largely based around these alternate scales. But if you look at a book of Debussy preludes, you'll find that he used almost exclusively triads and extended dominant chords (mainly 9 chord and 13 chords), with only a few minor 7 chords and rarely a major 7 chord. Like Debussy though, Shorter avoided the V to I cadence in most of his songs, creating a similar endless feeling to the music.

These modal chords also look back to the landmark recordings of Milestones and Kind of Blue, but the modal songs on these albums were built on only one or two chords. What sets the music of Shorter apart from these early modal jazz compositions is the rapid shifting of modes. Whereas the first sixteen measures of “So What” used the D dorian mode, only the first measure of “Nefertiti” uses the Ab lydian scale. For the performer, this means a shift in thinking from both the tonal and early modal methods of playing. Often with Shorter's songs, it's necessary to dispense with the idea of key entirely. In the ballad “Iris”, the first three chords – F-9, Emaj7#11, and F#maj7#11 – have no realistic relationship to one another. The soloist must begin to consider each measure as a modal area and switch between the necessary scales as the next chord arrives (some modern jazz theory books approach all improvising in the same style, saying to play dorian on a ii chord, mixolydian on a V chord, etc. but these tend to be modes of the home key rather than scales distant from one another). In some respects, this makes improvising on these songs much more difficult, as there's no home key to act as a point of reference for the soloist. But learning to improvise in these song forms quickly improves one's ability to play traditional standards, as the soloist must began to conceptualize the chord changes as a sequence of chord tones rather than movement inside a single scale, allowing them to highlight the chords tones with more ease on a song like “Stella By Starlight”.

For the most part, Shorter only wrote in this style during his employment with Miles Davis. His solo albums from the late 60's became looser in form and more harmonically ambiguous, ultimately leading to the free jazz found in “Odyssey of Iska” (it looks like this album was just re-released on an on-demand level by Amazon.com. It has been out of print for some time now) and “Super Nova”. But the pieces written during this period were highly influential in their time, and remain so today. Many of the songs written by the other members of the band during this period – Tony Williams's “Pee Wee”, Herbie Hancock's “The Sorcerer”, Davis's own “Circle” – owe much to Shorter's ideas. And along with John Coltrane's “Giant Steps”, his songs remain a bench-mark in ability for students of jazz.

Listening:

E.S.P.
Nefertiti
The Sorcerer