Look no further than Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album released in 1959. I’m not even close to being a fan of jazz, but I could listen to that particular album over and over again. The reason for this is that the entire album was a study in modes.
In Kind of Blue, Miles Davis had his musicians play completely out of their comfort zone to push them to explore territories outside the conventional scale patterns, ultimately producing unexpected melodies that up to that point, no one had really heard.
The album is known for what is called modal jazz, which loosely means that the melodies fall out of the standard major and minor scales. I’m sure someone has taken the time to listen to the music and pick out the exact modes like, “Hey! There’s a mixolydian! There’s a dorian!” For me though, listening to that album as much as I have has helped me in trying out different things than the conventional.
Mind you, this isn’t meant to be an academic analysis and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a jazz player by any stretch of the imagination. But despite that, modal theory fascinates me. But for me as a learner, especially with music, I absorb information better if I have a context. Take the Dorian mode for example. If you asked me, “What’s D Dorian?” I’d intellectually know it as the second mode of the C major scale and its tonal center is D and it has a flat-3rd and a flat-7th.
Well, so what? It’s fine from an academic perspective and sure, I can drone a C, then play the D Dorian to hear it, but it’s not very musical. But on Davis’ Kind of Blue, you can hear it applied to the track entitled, So What. What those cats do with that mode is nothing short of incredible. Check it out…
Just listening to that puts the mode in perspective and clearly demonstrates what is tonally possible. I could never get that with just droning a note and playing a mode over it.
And that’s the point of this post. For me at least, no matter how many modes tutorials I’ve seen, it wasn’t until I actually heard them applied to a song that it clicked. What I wish some of these tutorials did was to have a section where they would apply a mode to an actual piece of music – maybe 32 bars or something like that. But instead they focus almost entirely on the note spelling.
That said, the academics are important. But I will submit that what we’re all trying to do is play music. And that goes way beyond academics.
P.S. Joe Satriani makes heavy use of Lydian mode in his music, so there’s another source to listen to how a particular mode is applied.
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Kind of Blue and Take 5 are seminal jazz albums. Take 5 is of course a study in time signatures. I never knew Kind of Blue was a study of modes. Do you know what other modes are used on which tracks? I’ll google it too!
I don’t know all of them, but my favorite song, “Blue in Green” uses Dorian, Mixolydian, and Lydian modes. You can hear the Lydian quite well in the A section of the song. Then when Coltrane starts doing his sax thing, that’s a mix of Dorian and Mixolydian – at least that’s what I hear. Such cool stuff.