Re: Chord Function?

"Orlando Enrique Fiol" <ofiol@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:MPG.22e9784653194720989690@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> tkorth1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
>>Of course, one can also take the view that jazz players "caught up"
>>(beginning in the 30's and 40's) with many of the "European Classical"
>>extensions of tonality that began in the late Romantic period.  Examples
>>abound such as Berg's use of 11th and 13th chords in his early (pre
1915)
>>works; the extended chords, "non-functional" progressions and unresolved
>>decorative tones of Satie and Debussy beginning in the 1880's, and the
>>symmetrical octave division key relation****ps of Wagner as early as
1860.
>>
>>For me there has been a great amount of cross-fertilization between the 
>>two,
>>but to say "Jazz musicians began utilizing a new array of harmonic
>>materials" ignores a great deal of music history.
>
> I agree. Jazz musicians borrowed advanced European classical harmonic
> techniques but used them for markedly different purposes than Wagner,
> Berg, Debussy or even Puccini did. In jazz, extended harmony is
> generally used to maintain the presence of blue notes in otherwise
> triadic structures by adding chromatic alterations to chord tones. Thus,
> a sharp 9 or 11 can be construed as lower neighbor blue notes as evinced
> by early Mississippi delta blues treatments of such approach notes to
> the fifth and third of a major scale. This is simply one example. In
> short, what I'm trying to get across is that European art music provided
> the tools, while jazz provided a different task for which those same
> tools could be used. Cuban and Brazilian musics also drew heavily upon
> those same tools, but often used them for different tasks than jazz.
>

Exactly.  Another example is Wagner's integral use of mediant
relation****ps 
(from Beethoven and others) compared to Coltrane's "Giant Steps", "Central

Park West", etc..  While I'm sure 'Trane was not directly aware of
Wagner's 
"Ring", those pieces can actually be heard as a clarification as well as a

development of what Wagner had done 100 years earlier.

Comparing the harmonic innovations of these two giants is music theory;
not 
classical theory, not jazz theory - just music theory hopefully describing

and illuminating salient musical relation****ps and improving performances,

no matter what the genre.

Tom K.