I pride myself in a willingness to listen to different styles and genres of music. I have favorites in rap, heavy metal, Irish folk, country, classical, even opera. So my strong negative impression of jazz may come as a surprise.
To be fair, there is a lot of jazz I like, mostly the early stuff and the great singers. Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, basically back when jazz had melodies and was meant to be danced to.
Before rock and roll came along, jazz was young people's music. It's what people danced to, it was rebellious, it was accessible, it was listenable. Then something happened.
This lesson builds directly on the Chord Inversions interval,
so I suggest re-reading that one, if you have not read it yet.
That lesson introduced the slash
notation, for example, C/G, pronounced C over G. In that lesson, the slash
notation was used to choose an alternate bass note from the
notes that are in the chord. The notation can be expanded,
though, and you can play any chord over any other bass
note. Because of the way they are written, I call these
types of chords slash chords. You
might also see them called alternate bass
chords or compound
chords. All it means is you play a different note in
the bass, but it opens up a whole bunch of possibilities,
especially when songwriting.
Last lesson, I covered interval
inversions. You can re-read that now, if you want, though
it's not a big deal if you don't. To summarize, inverting an
interval just means measuring the distance between two notes
starting on the second note instead of the first note, for
example, instead of counting the distance from C to G
(perfect fifth), you can start at G and count up to the C an octave above, giving you a perfect
fourth.
A chord inversion is similar. It just means starting the chord
on a note other than the tonic note.
Ok, it's a trick question. The answer is it depends on which
octaves the notes are in, and specifically which note is
higher. That's the concept of interval
inversions that I will talk about here. I suggest
reviewing my lessons on The
Musical Alphabet and Intervals.
