Volume III · HarmonyStage 10 of 15
10
Movement: moving chords, borrowing, voicings
Turning chords into motion: scale of chords, borrowed diminished notes, drop voicings, families of chords.
- 10.1 Be a movement player Coleman Hawkins told Barry he played movements, not chords, and Barry made it a rule: harmony is how you get from one place to the next. The ear follows what moves, so learn the movements in songs instead of collecting chords.
- 10.2 First progressions to know Minor 6 -> diminished -> dominant, and other small moves Barry’s first progression for a pianist: a minor sixth chord whose fifth slides down a half step to the diminished, then another to the dominant. Learn it with other small moves, like major to relative minor to minor with the sixth in the bass.
- 10.3 Moving a chord through its scale into the next chord (6-6-6 instead of ii-V-I) Hear each chord as a sixth chord that belongs to a scale of chords, and move its voicing along that scale until the motion lands on the next chord: as a section of his workshop video puts it, sixth, sixth, sixth instead of ii-V-I.
- 10.4 Borrowing Diminished notes in place of chord tones Borrowing means putting a note of a chord’s diminished in place of one of its chord tones. Diminished notes are restless and want to move, usually back home to the chord, which turns a held chord into movement. Borrow one note, two, or all four.
- 10.5 Drop voicings Drop 2, drop 3, drop 2 and 4 (choir numbering) Barry numbered the four voices of a close chord like a choir, soprano 1 to bass 4, and had players drop one or two of them an octave: drop 2, drop 3, drop 2 and 4. He treated this as classical knowledge jazz needs.
- 10.6 Colour from the family Triads over a dominant, two sixth chords, two tritones/sus Barry added colour from related chords: family triads over a two-note dominant, one note of a major chord’s second sixth chord added to the first, two tritones moving into a sus. The colour had to be pretty, chosen on purpose and able to move.
- 10.7 Movements classical pianists know To II, to IV, deceptive cadence, IV minor Barry wanted jazz players to know the harmonic moves classical pianists know: getting to the II and the IV, the deceptive cadence, the relative minor and back. The one he named most was the IV minor on the way back to the I.
- 10.8 Endings and introductions Barry treated endings and introductions as part of the language: learn how Bud Powell, Art Tatum and Monk ended songs, then make your own from simple chords and the diminished. He found young pianists’ intros weak and wanted them built from real movement.