Modes and their application

Good question! As with most things, the real answer isn’t necessarily the simple one. I can tell you that when I play, I don’t think much about scales at all. I’m really playing “by ear” (which is what’s supposed to happen) but am deeply aware of the melody, lyrics and chords of the tune. And when I’m in the zone these things suggest tons of melodic ideas that certainly come from scales. What I really like to make a point of telling my private students though, is that we don’t “play scales” we “use scales” and there’s a world of difference in these two concepts.

Is it useful to practice scales and modes? Absolutely, but maybe for different reasons than you might think. I spent a ton of time (measured in years) practicing scales, modes and arpeggios in every key, all over the neck, but I was really training my ears to understand the intervals, hear them, feel them under my fingers, understand their relationship to the chords, etc., on a very primary level, so that when I play, all of this is just part of my natural language (in the same way as when I type these words, my fingers move on the keyboard and the thoughts are able to translate into letters automatically).

So the real issue is how do we learn music as a language? Stan Getz probably best expressed this in a famous quote:

It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about

So the guys who are just running up and down the alphabet aren’t really saying anything. You have to dig deep into it and study the language. Transcribing solos of great players that you love is one of the best ways to do this because you’ll be highly motivated and these ideas start to find their way into your own musical vocabulary. You can of course also be taking these ideas and working out your own variations. I find it most productive to be doing this in the context of studying tunes since you’re just focusing on solving the particular problems or issues that come up in a real-life context. Of course in order to do this, you need to have some grasp of spelling and the vocabulary you’re dealing with (and here’s where having a deep understanding your chords and scales help you tremendously).

In playing “tonal” music (and that’s mostly what we’re talking about when we discuss jazz standards), the main sounds are either Tonic (major or minor key) or Dominant. Then of course there are substitutions; for instance the Dominant gives us the most varied color choices; Dominant scale (Mixolydian or whatever you prefer to call it), Altered Scale, Lydian Dominant, Whole-Tone, Dominant-Diminished, Phrygian, Phrygian Natural 3rd, Phrygian Natural 6th, etc. Tonic Major has fewer choices; you can use Major, Lydian, or stretch it with Lydian Augmented, and even occasionally substitute Diminished. Tonic Minor is usually Melodic Minor but often it “goes modal” (as James Williams once told me) by using Dorian and introducing “modal interchange” chords for color, or sometimes it can go Harmonic Minor (for a more “exotic” color). And there are various ways of reducing the pool of notes created by the above scales such as Hexatonic and Pentatonic Scale constructs (which basically just leave specific notes out of the previously listed scales). But again: these are just the alphabet. Do you need to know the alphabet in order to write intelligently? Absolutely! But does anybody care how fast you can recite the alphabet? I think that question answers itself.

Anyway, a whole bunch of food for thought there!