The Twelve Tone System; Introduction

Music is a language and like language it is logical. Musical notes are like words and like words they need to be imbued with logic in order to convey meaning. A single word really has little or no meaning by itself rather it is where and how the word appears in a sentence that gives that word meaning. If I walked up to another person and said the word “tree” and then walked away I would not have conveyed any meaning to that person who would conclude I was probably crazy. But if I said “That tree over there is starting to lose its leaves” or something of that nature I would have conveyed meaning as the words that come before and after the word “tree” have imbued it with logic that is understandable. Likewise if I said “Orange ocean begs down bags church keypad if up sooner pig cloud telescope” I would have conveyed no meaning or logic because it is also the order in which words are used that gives them intelligence and this same concept holds true for musical notes since music is a language.

Today many so-called jazz educators give their students a list of scale choices that accompany a given chord usually beginning with the most consonant choice followed by less consonant scale choices. What I intend to show you is how you can make use of all twelve tones with any given chord, this is called the twelve tone system. To do this I will be discussing how the musician lends logic and intelligence to his improvising by understanding the importance of where a given note is placed in a melodic line, in other words, like words, notes are dumb and it is the job of the musician to lend intelligence to them.

If you have little or no knowledge of functional harmony I would suggest you buy this book, Improvising Jazz by Jerry Coker and read the chapter on functional harmony before continuing with the method that I will be laying out for you. It is a short chapter but it is well written and will certainly cover just about everything you need to understand concerning harmony and how it works.

I would also recommend this book, Jazz Improvisation for Saxophone by Lennie Niehaus which has a series of written solos based on the chord progressions of standards that are very well written and are extremely useful for working on your swing feel which I will be discussing later. If you are not a sax player do not worry about the title as the solos can really be played on any instrument.