Giant Steps

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Kenny Mathieson. Giant Steps

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Giant Steps

Bebop and the Creators of Modern Jazz 1945–65

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It might be worthwhile at this point mentioning a distinction which sometimes causes confusion for non-playing listeners. Chords were the building blocks of bebop (and later hard bop) harmony, and are described as the simultaneous sounding of two or more notes in a series of defined relationships to each other, generally dictated in Western musical theory by the major-minor (or diatonic) system of harmony. Chords are made up of intervals, which is to say the distances between each of the notes included in the chord, again within that same defining relationship in which the basic unit is the triad, made up of the first (known as the root), third, and fifth intervals of the octave (and there are major, minor, augmented and diminished versions of the triad). Bebop made much greater use of higher intervals, which were either underused or not used at all in earlier forms of jazz, including the famous flatted fifth and the popular seventh (a staple in blues), but also the more esoteric ninths, elevenths and thirteenths beyond the octave. Such intervals tend to unresolved dissonance and an implication of polytonality (the impression of being in more than one key at once which is produced by overlaying a triad with another formed by the higher intervals, which are simultaneously a triad, or part of one, in a different key), elements which gave the music much of its complexity and ‘new’ sound – the source of all those alleged wrong notes.

Chords are most strongly associated with the so-called chordal instruments like piano and guitar, where the notes can literally be played simultaneously (this is sometimes referred to as vertical harmony). However, a chord can also be played with the notes following one after the other: on a chordal instrument, that technique is known as an arpeggio, but that linear method of spelling out the notes which form a chord sequentially rather than simultaneously is the one which must be used by the reed, wind and brass instruments.

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