Re: The Great new jazz threads
mad_monk wrote:
So Brett and Dave, how do the left hand parts in DeGreg's book work for you in fifths?
Dave, I notice that your examples have more than an octave between tenor and bass, and the second one crosses voices, unlike the ones in the book. Do you find the LH progressions in the book easy to play?
Mad Monk.
Well you're thinking in terms of Bach chorale part-writing rules, which will inevitably be broken if you try to superimpose them upon jazz piano accompaniment practice. This is actually the same problem I mentioned in your thread, namely that you can't necessarily look at voices in the same way on a fifths tuned stick part written on a grand staff as you would a keyboard part. If one is insistent upon using Bach part-writing terminology then the upper voice in the left hand of Voicing B actually
isn't the tenor but would in fact be the soprano voice. Of course you could raise everything in the right hand up an octave to fix that (which looking at it now I would probably do for Voicing B, I made these away from an instrument so was going from memory).
What this does illustrate is that the most convenient left hand voicings with a fifths tuning will often have an octave displacement. By this I mean that 3rds and 7ths are generally more comfortably played as 10ths and 19ths. So for the least stretching I found that bringing the upper pitch of the left hand up an octave to be the easiest to play, which does change DeGreg's voicings.
But I would reiterate the point that getting locked into classical part-writing rules when analyzing something like this will probably give more headaches than help. Also be aware that the octave spacing rule applies mostly to the spacing between soprano, alto, and tenor, whereas most harmony texts allow spaces larger than an octave between tenor and bass (mainly because Bach did it
, but there's good acoustical sense to it as well as it matches the form of the overtone series with larger spans in the lower partials and closer spacing the further you go up the series).