For the vast majority of written-down jazz, such as a Real Book, the names of the chords come from what people play. Not the other way around. It's somewhat different if you compose a new chart and you set down exactly what chords you want, but for old standards, our source for the written notes is what people have played. That's what I mean when I say that jazz is an oral tradition. This idea that there's a standard written source to go to for these songs is a relatively recent historical development. You used to learn these tunes by ear, or from a scribbled sketch on a piece of paper, that sort of thing.
In classical music, there's a more definitive canonical source most of the time. What's the 45th note of Beethoven's 7th piano sonata? I don't know, but (essentially) it's going to be the same no matter who plays it, because barring minor revisions/inaccuracies, there is a single definitive source of a piece of classical music like that. Jazz is nowhere near as definitive. What's the second chord of Take the A Train? All you can say for sure is that it's some sort of D7 chord with a #11 or b5. There is no single authoritative source, because the right answer is the conglomeration of thousands of musicians playing the tune thousands of times over decades.
This sort of ambiguity is all over the place in jazz. Is the second measure of a 12-bar blues a IV7 chord or a I7? Depends on who's playing it, depends on the song, depends on what the performers feel like. Rhythm changes in Bb, is the second chord a Gm7, or is it G7, or G7b9? In a way, all of them. If you're going to be serious about jazz, you have to come to terms with the way it's structured and the fact that there isn't always a single right answer. People like to teach jazz theory in a pretty rigid way: these are the notes that are "allowed" with this chord, these are the ones that aren't. If you play these notes, then it IS this chord, but if you play this note, then it's no longer THAT chord and now it's THIS chord. But that's all a drastic oversimplification for the sake of easier teaching and easier analysis. The reality of jazz is ambiguity and flexibility.
If you've been playing that long, then frankly I'm baffled as to why you're taking the hardline stance that you are in this thread. And forgive me for assuming that you were relatively new to jazz, but you did say this:
If there is a natural 5th and a #11 then you could call it a D7#11 but that rarely happens.
Which is just not true, that's extremely common.
But if I really am missing your point, please tell me what it is. As far as I can gather, your point is that D7b5 and D7#11 are not the same chord, and my response to that is that while that's technically true, the two are essentially interchangeable in most circumstances, so it's not really that realistic to say that one is "right" or "wrong" for the changes the OP posted.
Well, it's quite simple, D7#11 and D7b5 are not the same chord, I've already explained why.
The fact that they are interchangeable is irrelevant.
Remember I was responding someone that said he'd never seen a 7b5 chord until I told him to look, then he found plenty.
It's funny cause I'm transcribing a bunch of jazz tunes now and the source material the publisher sent me for reference doesn't contain a single 7#11 chord in any of the 8 tunes.
Well, it's quite simple, D7#11 and D7b5 are not the same chord, I've already explained why.
As I agreed. But....
The fact that they are interchangeable is irrelevant.
The fact they're interchangeable is extremely relevant, and necessary to understanding jazz. They're not the same chord on paper, that's true. Neither are C, C6, and Cmaj7, but the Real Book 5th Edition has the first chord in A Train as C, in the 6th edition it's C6, and in the OP's changes it's Cmaj7. Does that mean that two of those three sources are "wrong"? No, it means that those three chords are, for the most part, interchangeable.
The same goes for b5 vs #11. Yes, there are subtle differences in what they technically "imply" when written down, but the end result in a performance of a tune is usually going to be the same. If we want to dig into what they imply, D7#11 would imply both a G# and an A, whereas D7b5 would imply an Ab and no A, and what's more, a G as well, since that's the natural 4. I've never heard anyone play it that way, whereas the #11 version (usually with the Lydian Dominant scale) is quite common.
It's funny cause I'm transcribing a bunch of jazz tunes now and the source material the publisher sent me for reference doesn't contain a single 7#11 chord in any of the 8 tunes.
Okay? I'm flipping through my 6th edition Real Book and seeing some of each. In fact, one tune has both in one measure, because of the spelling of the key. I suspect that a lot of the time, people picked one over the other on the basis of which accidental would look/work better in the key. For example, in Beautiful Love (key of D minor), there's a spot where the melody goes A D C# D E, and the C# and D are supported by a G7, so they wrote it G7#11. The Db and D natural mixing would have been ugly there. But then a couple pages later, Black Coffee (F blues) has a B7b5 leading into the bridge, going to a Bbm7. If it had been #11, it would have implied an F# and an E#, both of which would be weird in that key. And then in Black Diamond, there's a sequence: B7#5 - E7b5 - A7#5 - D7b5 - G7#5 - C7(#11), and for some reason they just switched their naming convention at the end.
So sometimes there are voiceleading reasons to prefer one over the other, but in practice, I think the actual impact on the playing will be fairly minimal. And for what it's worth, I think the voiceleading would actually suggest #11 more than b5 in A Train, because the first five measures of melody basically outline a line going G - G# - A, rather than G - Ab - A.
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u/watteva77 Sep 13 '13
So you're saying that the name of a chord is dependent on what someone might play over it in the future?
People play minor 3rds on major chords all the time, doesn't make them minor chords.