Student’s question:
I’m curious about how to use the IFR Tonal Map for jazz fusion compositions that feature nonfunctional harmony such as Pat Metheny, Snarky Puppy, Alan Holdsworth, etc. I come from a music school background and I can already hear my growth with IFR, but I’m curious as to how music like this works in the IFR system.
Some ideas to think about:
What you’re learning in IFR will absolutely prepare you for improvising over jazz fusion compositions. You’ve already hit on the key feature of this music which is the use of nonfunctional chord progressions. By “nonfunctional”, we just mean that the chords don’t all relate to a single tonal center. Instead, this music is characterized by abrupt scale changes that feel much more like genuine key changes.
So how does IFR prepare us for improvising over this kind of music? The key insight is that while the chord changes in this music might feel abrupt and surprising, each individual chord is one that we study very deeply in IFR. I’ll show you an example. Let’s look at just the first two chords from Pat Metheny’s composition “Bright Size Life”:
│Gmaj7 │Gmaj7 │Bbmaj7 │Bbmaj7 │
If you listen to both the melody and the improvised solos, you’ll hear that both of these chords are being treated as if each were a 4 chord. So one approach to the song is to just treat this chord change as if it were a change of key. In the first two measures we’re improvising in the fourth harmonic environment where note 4 = G. And in the next two measures we’re improvising in the fourth harmonic environment where note 4 = Bb.
Key insight: Notice that while the chord change itself may feel new and surprising to you (hence its charm), both the before state and the after state are harmonic environments that you are intimately familiar with. This leads to a principle that holds true generally for jazz fusion music:
Jazz fusion = basic tonal harmony + key changes
This is really the most important thing to understand about harmony. No matter how abstract or complex a piece of music might be, what enables you to understand it is your mastery of the basic building blocks of music. You actually don’t master jazz fusion music by studying jazz fusion music. You master jazz fusion music by mastering basic tonal harmony, because jazz fusion harmony is just basic tonal harmony + key changes.
Taking our analysis farther
Now, you could also take the extra step of learning to visualize all of these sounds on a single tonal map, saving yourself the hassle of an imagined key change in the middle of your soloing. Given where the rest of the song goes, I would call that first Gmaj7 chord the 4 chord. This means that the key of the music is D, meaning that our Bbmaj7 chord is a major seventh chord built from the note b6. This gives rise to a new chord concept that you may not have studied yet, which we would call the “flat six major chord”.
Like any chord in the world, this chord and its complete harmonic environment can be sketched on your tonal map right alongside your 4 chord. So you could actually study this chord progression in the exact same way that we study more basic chord progressions. For this particular song, this is exactly what I would do. The entire song revolves very clearly around the key of D, so it lends itself very easily to the same treatment that we give to pop songs, jazz standards, blues songs or any other very simple harmonic progression.
But there are many jazz fusion songs that go to even more unexpected places, quickly losing all connection to the original tonal center. In these cases where there is no single key that dominates, it’s also perfectly fine to just mentally change keys for each new chord or scale that appears. The point is not to be dogmatic. You have infinite resources at your disposal for understanding any chord progression and improvising through it comfortably. Whichever way of thinking about the harmony gives you the best experience when you’re improvising, that’s the model you should adopt.
Your IFR studies will help you on these two different levels:
1) First, your IFR practice will make you deeply familiar with all of the individual chords and harmonic environments that appear in jazz fusion music.
2) Second, wherever there are opportunities to group chords together and visualize them all as being part of a single key, the IFR Tonal Map can help you notice all of the melodic connections between the chords, the same way it does for the more basic chord progressions that we study right from the beginning.
But again, using the tonal map to visualize multiple chords on a single landscape is optional. What’s indisputable is that jazz fusion is made from the exact same chords and harmonic environments that we study in IFR, just combined in creative ways with many surprising key changes.
