Elliot Mason Harmonic Sense

[VJOFan]

https://youtu.be/GqQ-OTXhb3Q?si=EdgSoIpCNELVIpD0

Elliot Mason is one of my favourite modern jazz musicians. I have good enough ears to hear that, as in the solo on this track (at about 3:00), he is able to play beyond the changes while still playing melodically strong lines.

My ear and theory knowledge are not good enough to be able to decipher how he does it. Anyone have the brains/ears to say a little about what Mr. Mason is doing here?

[Doug Elliott]

It's really the combination of his harmonic sense and his technical ability to pull it off . Very few players have that kind of facility to do absolutely anything on the horn... Hal Crook is another, but I don't know what he's doing these days and he never gets talked about here.

[EriKon]

The 1st chorus is basically all 'inside' playing. He starts to shift things in the 2nd chorus. I hear at least some sort of chromatic shifting (bars 3-4 of his last A-section in the third chorus are a very clean and quite easy to hear example). But besides that I can't hear lots of the other things. More guessing, but I feel like he sometimes uses some specific sound (like half whole diminished scale for example) and just puts it on top of the form to create that 'outside' sound. Like just playing Bb hw diminished on top of a whole A section. But could be totally wrong here.

That's what I always find interesting with Elliot Mason. Usually I can figure such things out just by hearing it a few times, but I just can't with him. I would really need to slow it down and transcribe it to see what's happening.

And yeah, Hal Crook is one of my absolute favorites since a few years now. No one plays like him. So much to learn and discover in his recordings. And to me it's a bit more clear than Elliot Mason (not meant as a critique, I like both) , maybe because of the sound. But I do see those similarities as well.

[GGJazz]

Hello all.

Elliot Mason is a fantastic player ! As well as Nick Vayenas .

I had lessons with Hal Crook at the Berklee College of Boston ; to me , one of the GIANTS of Jazz !

He told us that when you play outside a chord , you have to be really clear and "melodic" on this .
So , for example , if you are playing on Cmaj7 chord and you want to insert a F# - outside line , you can play things as : F# / G#/ A /F# /C# , etc. The line have to be recognized as a clear melodic one ; just played outside the main chord .
More , it is requested a fine balance between how much you play inside , and how much you play outside.

The Hal Crook stuff to play outside can be , among others : non harmonic triads , non harmonic pentatonics , non harmonic major scales , sequences of intervals , contracting/ expanding chords duration , etc.

You can hear some of this things in the Elliot Mason solo , as well as the balance of playing inside/ outside .
For example , in the 3rd chorus , on 2nd A section , starting on the third upbeat of the 1st bar , going until the fourth downbeat of the 3rd bar , you have a line of eigths notes ; even though some note are written with flats in the trancription below , if you read all this with sharps you will have a line upon an E Non-Harmonic Major scale : D#/E/F# | G#/E/F#/F/E/G#/F#/E | D#/E/F#/G#/D#/C# . If you play it slowly , you will find this line very fine !

Here the solo transcription


Great , fantastic , super- cool solo !!

Regards
Giancarlo

[JacobsianApostle]

I know that Elliot practices taking small cells of information like a pentatonic or a 4-note chromatic sequence and transposing them all over the horn, moving them around by half steps or by thirds or fourths or what have you. Michael Brecker practiced this way and so did Woody Shaw (especially with pentatonics), and those are two of the main harmonic influences I hear in his playing.

As always, most of what these great players do is actually simple but they have such facility that it can be difficult to catch, and something as concrete as playing F#- pentatonic over F7(basically expressing the 5th degree of the tritone B7) is dressed up with chromatic notes to make the voice leading smoother.

He’s really only doing the outside stuff on the A where there’s space get into his bag. On the B where the chromatic excitement is built into the tune he’s playing the changes pretty straight ahead. That’s also why his outside stuff works. Anyone can just play outside of the chords but it takes harmonic literacy to be able to get in and out of those sounds in a way that’s musical.

[heldenbone]

I know that Elliot practices taking small cells of information like a pentatonic or a 4-note chromatic sequence and transposing them all over the horn, moving them around by half steps or by thirds or fourths or what have you. Michael Brecker practiced this way and so did Woody Shaw (especially with pentatonics), and those are two of the main harmonic influences I hear in his playing.

Jiggs Whigham recommended just such a way of practicing key sequences in a clinic I attended about 100 years ago. He demonstrated with

[b c a, b c a, a b g, a b g] [a bb g, a bb g, g a f, g a f] [g ab f, g ab f, f g eb, f g eb] [f gb eb...

Starting with a simple rhythm, he slithered his way around the circle of fifths. On the next iteration he showed us how such a minimal scaffolding could support excursions far from the expected key center and still land solidly back in tonality land. It was pretty impressive from a harmonic and musical thought standpoint. Great improviser, so-so technic.

[VJOFan]

Okay, so to a certain degree, and guided by a highly developed musical sense, it's possible to play things that make sense to themselves over something where they technically shouldn't be and make it sound hip as hell.

The explanations above are very helpful and clear.

[Doug Elliott]

There are many ways to get from point A to point B and make sense along the way