Talk:Jazz harmony

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This page is a little naive in it's elevation of jazz harmony over "traditional" harmony. As can be seen in other Wikipedia pages, mainstream European composers had incorporated many of the harmonic innovations a century before Coltrane, and the principles of even harmolodics is firmly rooted in Asian and middle-eastern music -- the jazz composers did bring some innovation, I don't discount that completely, but they were primarily synthesists. Among that first generation of World-Aware post-WWII composers, they were people who now knew first hand of the musics of Europe, Asia and (later) Africa, and thanks to field recordings (eg Lomax) and radio/records distribution, they were also keenly aware of the music that had preceeded them. Coltrane was a big fan of Slonimsky and many jazz composers cite Bartok and Scriabin and others as sources for the 'innovations' they adapted to the jazz idiom. Indeed, Wagner's "Tristan chord" is still bleeding edge.