Mike Le Donne on Barry Harris and "Negative Harmony"

 

“It's actually pretty simple, you need to know how harmony works but there's no substitute for using your own ears and your own instincts to find your own music. There's no easy way out or magic "concept". You have to put in the time and do the work like everyone before you did. Use your own imagination and aesthetic and take your time because it's a very personal journey and the journey is a lot more fun than watching that video.”

- Mike LeDonne, Jazz pianist, organist and bandleader

My Dad used to say that shortcuts generally took you in a direction you weren’t planning on going to in the first place.

Which was his way of saying that shortcuts weren’t worth much and usually resulted in unintended consequences.

I think he may have come to this conclusion based on Life’s experience, that is to say, looking for the easy way when “the right way is the hard way and the hard way is the right way” - another of his favorite cliches. 

Have you ever noticed the persistence of cliches? How they just keep getting used, time after time. Have you ever wondered why this is so?

My take on their frequency of use is because there’s so much truth in them.

The following borrowed from Mike LeDonne’s Facebook page is another example of why teachers with life experience are important to us: they help keep us away from shortcuts and ultimately instill in us that if you want to get good at something or learn something difficult, start at the beginning and work hard to master it - whatever “it” is - as the easy way is generally leads to nothing of consequence - or, in the case of what follows, something that is “negative.”

By the way, another word for “negative” is “nothing.”

“I saw an interview with Barry Harris where they asked him why in his advanced years was he doing the exhausting work of traveling all over the world doing clinics and master classes? His answer was because there are many people teaching this music today and they're all teaching it wrong!

To someone that doesn't know Mr Harris's history and artistry that might come off as a bit ego maniacal but the truth is he's absolutely right. I've also been all over the world and all over this country playing and doing master classes and the amount of BS being taught in the name of Jazz is astounding. Why? I don't have an answer to that except to say that it is very easy to come up with pretentious explanations of what makes this music click.

Case in point - I was looking around on Youtube and saw a video titled "Negative Harmony". Part of me wanted to chuckle because I'm pretty cynical to begin with and that name screams PRETENTIOUS BS! But I'm also a very curious person and that part of me kicked in and I thought wait a minute, check it out because you just might learn something.

Evidently Jacob Collier talks about it in some interview about his music, which I like, so I push play and off we go. The first 15 minutes of the video is mundane information about harmony for beginners getting them ready for the big moment towards the end when they let you hear how Negative Harmony can be applied to create substitutions for any tune.

The whole thing brought back memories of when I studied the Lydian Chromatic Concept with its creator George Russell in my years at New England Conservatory. I'm sure there are many ways to apply these "concepts" and come up with something you may not have just "heard" on your own, but therein lies the entire problem. It's all based on the fact that you are not capable of hearing anything new so you're supposed to "think" music and use mathematical formulas including graphs and slide wheel charts (almost like a game) to come up with something truly new. Your ear be damned and you can place your instincts on the shelf for a moment because you just follow the rules and you'll go beyond your own limitations into a new land of wonder and beauty.

This means you have to spend time relearning the names of the scales you already know because when you call them by the new name you've already stepped out of your box. In the case of Negative Harmony there is so much pretentious build up its hard to sit through, but I sat through it. The idea is that you split a scale into its positive and negative parts by splitting it somewhere between the 3rd and the flat 3rd which become the "Axis". Everything above those tones is positive and everything below is negative. Then you use a chart to map out each positive chord to find its negative counterpart. As an example - Cmaj7 becomes Abmaj7. Basically the positive harmony lies in the Ionian mode and the negative harmony is in the Mixolydian mode a whole step below so Bb Mixolydian or Bb dominant. Of course the way they lay it out it takes much more time and work to get those relationships but that's basically what it turns out to be.

Then you make this chart and place all the positive chords on top and their negative "reflections" below and you go about the task of replacing the positive harmonies with the negative and BINGO - you're there!! But wait a minute, they play Autumn Leaves with all it's negative reflections and IT SOUNDS LIKE SHIT! So the guy who made the video tells you he decided to replace some of the negative harmony with the positive harmony to make it work and guess what? IT SOUNDS LIKE SHIT! So in the end you wind up blowing a lot of time and getting a massive headache to make Autumn Leaves sound like shit.

This is why Barry Harris spent his golden years traveling the globe teaching. His love and passion for this music energized him into fighting back with truth and common sense that instead of being BS is actually THE shit. IMHO This music isn't meant to be taught from books using slide wheels and Chinese arithmetic. It's handed down to us by the masters who created it. While I find it interesting to check out other concepts and musical theories I am very careful not to get sucked into anything where the end result sounds like shit. I'm funny like that. I don't think something is heavy because it sounds weird, it's got to tickle my brain but also hit me in the heart.

It's actually pretty simple, you need to know how harmony works but there's no substitute for using your own ears and your own instincts to find your own music. There's no easy way out or magic "concept". You have to put in the time and do the work like everyone before you did. Use your own imagination and aesthetic and take your time because it's a very personal journey and the journey is a lot more fun than watching that video."