Whole Tone Scale - Jazz Harmony

Jazz Harmony

The scale is also used extensively in modern jazz writing and jazz harmony. Wayne Shorter's composition "JuJu" features heavy use of the whole tone scale, and John Coltrane's One Down, One Up is built off two augmented chords arranged in the same simple structure as his earlier tune "Impressions". However, these are only the most overt examples of the use of this scale in jazz. A vast number of jazz tunes, including many standards, use augmented chords and their corresponding scales as well, usually to create tension in turnarounds or as a substitute for a dominant seventh chord. For instance a G7 augmented 5th dominant chord in which G altered scale tones would work before resolving to C major 7, a tritone substitution chord such as D♭9 or D♭7 augmented 11th is often used in which D♭/G whole tone scale tones will work, the sharpened 11th degree being a G and the flattened 7th being a C♭, the enharmonic equivalent of B, the major third in the G dominant chord. Art Tatum and Thelonious Monk are two pianists who used the whole tone scale extensively and creatively.

A prominent example of the whole tone scale that made its way into pop music are bars 3 and 4 of the opening of Stevie Wonder's song "You Are the Sunshine of My Life".

Read more about this topic:  Whole Tone Scale

Famous quotes containing the words jazz and/or harmony:

    The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.
    Imamu Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)

    We Americans have the chance to become someday a nation in which all radical stocks and classes can exist in their own selfhoods, but meet on a basis of respect and equality and live together, socially, economically, and politically. We can become a dynamic equilibrium, a harmony of many different elements, in which the whole will be greater than all its parts and greater than any society the world has seen before. It can still happen.
    Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)