The Mighty "Alt" Chord?

[Ogg Vorbis]

I've encountered this in songs and always sort of "faked it" as best as I could. When confronted with this symbol: "G Alt" for example I never really absorbed what it is, how it functions.

Can someone give me more than a strict dictionary definition of how this harmony works? What are the alterations and why? What are the functions of the alterations? What are some good rules for voicing on a keyboard instrument for example? Do you try to cram every note in there?

Thanks to the hive collective for your wisdom!

[nuffink]

In jaath theory the quality of a chord is primarily given by the Third and Seventh (and their relationship to the root). So, if you play the root, Maj3rd and Min7th you're playing a 7. The chord can then be ornamented by any flavour of 9th (flat, natural or sharp) and any flavour of 5th (flat, natural or sharp).
The basic (fifthless) chord is "altered" to taste.

The more academic version is that it takes the 7th mode of the Melodic Minor scale, but that kind of misses the point.

[jopy]

There's lots of ways to think about altered chords, but I've generally heard them described in terms of tritone substitutions. So a C alt is a F#7(11+) with a C in the root (and in a functional sense, the C alt leads to either a B maj or an F maj.

On keyboards, there are lots of options I've used for making an altered chord, based on the scale tones from the 11+ scale. The core of the chord is still the 3rd and 7th degree, but you can use b9, #9, b5, or 13 and still be comparatively inside the harmonic framework. The most important "avoid" notes are the natural 2, the natural 4, and the natural 5 of the scale (in our C alt case, you'd avoid D, F, and G).

I should note in advance that I know other people might think about this differently so this is just one way of working that fits for me.

[zircon]

There really isn't a dictionary definition... they're just heavily altered chords, the performer can interpret them how they want. I've most often seen a combination of some sort of modified 9th, 11th, and 13th though.

[nuffink]

As jmeier notes, the more you lean on the unaltered notes the less altered it'll sound.

[egbert]

The ma3rd and mi7th define the chord as a dominant type as has already been said. So G Alt is an altered dominant chord and the other notes (besides the root and the 3rd and 7th) can be b9,#9,b5 and #5 - that set of seven tones makes up the super locrian mode which is a mode of the ascending melodic minor as said by another poster.

The 7#9 chord or the 7#9#5 chord are really common in rock and blues music (eg Purple Haze)and voicings make for very smooth progressions in the blues - you can play C7 9,13 and slip your 4 note rootless voicing (eg E,A,Bb,D or Bb,D,E,A) chromatically downward and get F7#9#5 (eg Eb G# A C# or A C# Eb A). You can choose the voicing of an alt chrord to make the right kind of chord shifts between the preceding and following chords and of course it can be exactly what is needed to harmonise a melody which has these altered tones in it.

[subtlearts]

The way it was given to us in jazz theory class is that an 'altered chord' (e.g. C7 Alt) is a dominant seventh chord with all possible alterations, i.e. of the 9th, 11th and 13th extensions. Thus a given voicing of C7 Alt can contain any or all of: a flat 9 (Db), a sharp 9 (D#), sharp 11 (F#), and flat 13 (Ab). Technically it should thus NOT contain any natural (non-altered) extensions - no D natural, F natural or A natural.

In keyboard terms, if you think of a seventh chord as a shell (third and seventh) in the left hand with extensions on top, you can build what are sometimes called 'upper structure' voicings which have a major triad built on a given alteration on top. Useful upper-structure voicings for C7 Alt, with an E-Bb shell in the LH, would be built on the sharp 11 (F# triad in the right hand, which gets you a flat 9 too) and the flat 13 (Ab triad in the right hand, your bonus is the sharp 9).

For a less altered voicing, use an upper structure based on the natural 9 (D triad on top, thus natural 9 and 13, sharp 11) or the natural 13 (A triad on top, thus natural 13 and flat 9). All of these can be subtly altered by playing different inversions of the triad in the right hand. They are fairly harmonically dense, but are spread out a bit so less jarring than a cluster chord... Still, best not to overuse them.

Now: practise in all keys, rinse, repeat.

Oh, and the seventh-mode-of-melodic-minor, sometimes called the Altered scale (or Super-locrian), is indeed a useful trick in terms of using chord-scale relationships for blowing, but remember: chord-scale relationships are pretty limited, solos built on them tend to be blocky and generally never really get beyond the 'one-bar-one-chord-one-scale' kind of thinking into playing across the bar lines and thinking of larger harmonic structures...

[Ogg Vorbis]

Great replies, thanks! Subtleart, you really know your shit. So my question at this point is: do the alterations have a voiceleading function (such as the regular b9 chord, the b9th typcially resolves down a half-step) or is it really for "coloration?" Or both?

[subtlearts]

hey, no problem. Being a professional jazz pianist has its perks, though lamentably few of them turn out to be financial in nature. Like I say when I book people for a gig... we'll probably have a lot more fun than money.

Your question is a good one! Voice-leading is generally in my opinion a better way to approach choosing voicings, a deeper well if you will - but of course there is a time and place to lay down a purely-color-oriented chord. I would say, just shooting from the hip, that the 'upper-structure' voicings I mentioned are somewhat better suited to the latter purpose, whereas four-voice 'Bill Evans' voicings lend themselves better to voice-leading-oriented comping. The alterations themselves are not really 'for' one thing or the other, it's really more in how they are used.

Next week we can talk about quartal harmony!

[Ogg Vorbis]

So Tob,

In "All the Things You Are" the lead sheet shows a dominant ALT chord to trans. from the bridge back to the head. Your explanation that this is a colorism makes sense. I wonder if Rogers and Hammerstein scored it as such?

Anyway, thanks for the great info. I am familiar with quartal harmony. It always reminds me of the opening notes of the original Star Trek theme!

Eric

[hybrid3]

...another one of those "Damn I wish I could spend more time reading KVR forum posts"-thread, really interesting stuff!

Are there any easily accessible/classic examples of this anywhere?

[subtlearts]

I'm going to go ahead and say that Jerome Kern (for it is he who wrote that particularly brilliant tune, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein) probably did not explicitly write an Alt chord per se... I'm not sure if anyone had called it that yet. But that 'interesting' note in the melody needs to be dealt with somehow; is it a raised 5 or a flat 13? It's on it's way (in standard key) from being a G# in an E major chord to an Ab in an F minor chord. Which is it in the C7 in between? Just don't play a natural 5 and you should be OK.

I don't know which lead sheet version you're looking at; there are of course a wide range of versions of the harmony of any standard, from the basic to the highly 'interpretive' if you will. Most people I work with don't think particularly highly of the versions in the classic 'Real Book' series, though the later books are a bit better. I have a guitarist friend who refers to the original as 'The Book Of Lies'...

I prefer to learn standard tunes by ear from classic recordings, ideally a few of them, and put together my own version of the basic underlying functional harmony. The only reason that altered chords should really play a part here is if they are necessary to support the melody, as in the ATTYA example above. Then you can add colors as you hear them, or respond to what the horn player's doing...

If you're going to learn tunes from a book I would recommend the Dick Hyman one, which takes a useful approach: the very standard functional chords are in black, and more 'hip' cool jazz chords are overlayed in red, if you want to use some or all of them. It also includes the often-ignored introductory verses for many tunes, which makes you even hipper - most people just know the chorus.

Incidentally in terms of learning resources for this stuff the best ones I know of are Marc Levine's books, 'The Jazz Piano Book' and 'The Jazz Theory Book'. They lead from very very basic functional harmony right through to advanced reharmonization. Great stuff, as far as books go; they still can't teach you to blow a decent solo on a blues though...

[Ogg Vorbis]

Whoops! Kern and Mr. Hammerstein...

I'd like to lift a version of ATTYA by Oscar Peterson or Art Tatum, but there's too many frigging notes.

[subtlearts]

Yeah it's generally more useful to go with simpler renditions unless you're specifically working on those styles. Vocal versions are great because then you learn the words too - amazing how many jazz cats can play hundreds of tunes but they don't know what most of them are about! (something I am guilty of in too many cases, I confess). Learning the words also means you can phrase the melody properly, or at least know what you're departing from.

Art Tatum is a particularly astonishing player - he really inhabits a different universe than most of us, one where nothing is really impossible, or apparently even difficult. Hmmm... a bit of googling just uncovered this:
http://alevy.com/tatum.htm
... of course the midi files are stiff and nothing like hearing the man actually play, but for study purposes it could be interesting! Looks like you have to pay real money for the full versions though (well, try to imagine the work that went into the transcriptions!). I have the recording mentioned in the blurb by the way, it's mindblowing.

p.s. note that Mr. Tatum plays the verse in the version of All The Things there! I bet he knew the words too...

[Ogg Vorbis]

Hmmm... a bit of googling just uncovered this:
http://alevy.com/tatum.htm

Good God, those changes are out there when he gets to the chorus...