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.

I agree for the most part in your statement in that this page seems to take a naive stance on placing Jazz harmony above traditional harmony. Classical composers, for the most part, worked with complex and sophisticated harmonic concepts 50-60 years before the jazz cats caught on, and Coltrane and all of them took the extended harmony of the early 20th century composers and figured out how to improvise around it. What I don't agree with you is that jazz harmony is just a synthesis of classical concepts for a improvisers artform (what I'm taking your comment to mean). Jazz has approached extended tertian harmony with a rigor and vocabulary that simply doesn't exist in traditional analysis, mainly because it hasn't needed to. Jazz composers, especially starting in the 60's and 70's with cats like Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea, have extrapolated upon these concepts of extended tertian harmony in ways that no classical composer ever did. Speaking of extended harmony, though, where is that in this article? 06:00, 19 July 2007 (UTC)