Improvisation in the Tonal Landscape: A Masterclass with Dan Tepfer

[00:00:02][Music] Hi, happy International Jazz Day to you.

[00:00:13]Uh, my name is Dan Teper and I want to talk about storytelling today.

[00:00:17]Specifically, storytelling in the context of free improvisation. Um, what even is storytelling? If you think about it in a really abstract way, uh there's this concept of classical narrative structure and that's uh used a lot to talk about the way stories are told in ancient Greek myths for example uh but also in virtually every Hollywood movie. Um you need several ingredients for a story and the first one is you need a protagonist.

[00:00:48]you need a hero to uh follow along on the story and um that's you know the first and maybe more obvious aspect of of the story. Uh so you know in a film typically you'll meet your your character at the beginning of the film and you you quickly understand that this is the main character because you're exposed to it uh a lot. So I've learned a lot about this concept of storytelling through Bach and I think specifically uh his inventions which he composed in 1723 are perfect microcosms of how to tell a story in music. So let's look at the invention in C major starts like [Music] this. So several things are happening there. We have we have that melody that keeps repeating. Um, and in fact the the the actual subject, the actual protagonist of the story that Baka is going to tell is this. And you'll see it keeps [Music] repeating. Here's something different happens.

[00:02:05][Music] And what is that? You might think that's a different character, but in fact, it's the same character. It's the same subject, same protagonist, um, just upside down. Okay? It's just uh a dietonic inversion of our main theme that then keeps being [Applause] [Music] [Applause] repeated. And I really think of this as like in a film, you keep seeing your character, but you'll see them uh in in from different angles of the camera, and you'll see them under different lighting, um maybe making different expressions. But this is what's happening here. We're getting to know uh the protagonist of our story and um something else is being established here by Bach, which is where the character's home is, where uh the character's space of safety is. This is really important in storytelling because typically in classical narrative structure in the first act, so classical narrative structure is in three acts. Uh but in classical narrative structure, in the first act, we meet our protagonist at home in the space of safety. So here Bach is [Music] saying he's saying um that's our protagonist and its space of safety is C major. That's that's its home. No doubt about it. We've literally only played white notes so far. Okay. So that's uh act one of uh classical narrative structure. And then act two, there's what we call an inciting event and something happens in the story and our our our hero is thrust into the unknown.

[00:03:56]Our hero um suddenly is not is no longer in security. And so that's going to happen just about [Music] here. Do you notice that we start having F sharps? And um we're what we're starting to have is is chords from the G major dietonic region. And we're going to get into that what what that even means. Um but unconsciously in our ear, we know we're not at home anymore. We know we're we something has really changed and there's a need um for resolution now. We were already resolved before. we are safely at home. But now there's a need for resolution. Um [Music] um and now we've arrived in G major. And notice how that feels totally like a new home. But still our ear has the memory of having started in C major. So it feels like a new home. Feels absolutely like an arrival point. And in fact what Bach has done is primed our ear to shift the center of gravity of where we are thanks to those F#s into feeling like once we resolve to G that is a new center of gravity, a new temporary home.

[00:05:27]Um, so we have uh gone somewhere new and uh we're going to get into what that means and and and what happens in this moment narratively like within this concept of classical narrative structure is that because we're empathetic beings and because we've gotten to know our protagonist at this point we ask ourselves um is is our hero ever going to make it home safely? Are they going to get back home? Are they are they going to be okay? And this is the essential um mechanism that makes this kind of storytelling so powerful. Um you know it's it's useful to contrast this with the kind of storytelling that happens typically in jazz like when we're improvising over a jazz standard. Um the harmonic structure of the melody keeps repeating right of of the the harmonic structure of the tune that we're playing keeps repeating and we invent new ideas on top of that.

[00:06:23]And in fact, we might do thematic development as in we might develop some kind of a motive um a short melody that we move through this harmonic structure.

[00:06:33]That's that's one strategy that people use. But still, every time the harmony cycles, you're going to be [Music] um stuck on the same ride, right? And of course, we can do um harmonic substitutions and and and change the color of that ride, but globally speaking, you're going to be on the same harmonic ride every time this harmony cycles. But what Baka is doing is different. The actual adventure of our protagonist has to do with where the protagonist is going in the harmony. And these are like largecale moves, right?

[00:07:05]Nothing is repeating um over and over.

[00:07:09]So, um, that's act two is our heroes thrust into the unknown and we wonder how, uh, they'll ever make it home. Um, so we're here, uh, in G [Music] major. Now we're in D minor.

[00:07:39]Now we're heading towards a [Music] minor. So we've nicely resolved to a minor.

[00:07:56][Music] [Applause] [Music] And this whole time we've been back in the dietonic region of C major, but without a sense of resolution yet. Now we have B flats which are leading us towards [Music] F. B natural again. and we're back in C major to end the invention. What's really amazing about these inventions is that they're so short, but Bach tells a whole really compelling story in that minute of music or whatever it is. Um, so which uh worlds have we visited here? Just remember this for later. We visited C major, G major, D minor, A minor, um back to C for a while, and then F major and then back to C major to end the piece. Um so, um basically that whole middle section, uh going to G major, well, the move to G major is the inciting event that starts act two in classical narrative structure. But then going to D minor, A minor and F major. Those are the adventure that our protagonist is going on in act two, which again in classical narrative structure, there's this adventure, there's this journey, this hero's journey um that is the whole question mark of the story because the question mark is h will they make it home? How will they make it home? And this is the adventure they go on. Okay. And then finally, act three is at the very end of that invention. Once we're back in C major, our hero is safely back home, but of course transformed by the journey. Okay, so we've we've covered uh one of the ingredients that we need uh which is the protagonist, this hero in this case. Okay, that's the character that we're going to follow on the journey. Um but as I've been touching on here, the the the adventure needs a world in which to take place.

[00:10:13]Okay, this is really a critical thing.

[00:10:15]Um, and when we're improvising over jazz stands, we we kind of take we tend to take the world for granted in a way because it's given by the harmony of the stand where we're playing over and that's the world in which we in in which the story is taking place is that harmony. But what if we didn't have that? What if we didn't have existing chord changes for the adventure to to take to take place in? Then we have to invent the chord changes. And that's really the subject of of my record, Inventions, Reinventions. Um, is how to improvise the harmonic landscape that the adventure takes place in. Okay. Um, and how to do it in a way that really makes sense. This is the thing is it's not it's not just following your nose from one chord to the next in terms of like what might sound good next. It's having a broader sense of a world in which we can move around and operate.

[00:11:09]And that's how Bach thought about the music. That's certainly how Mozart and Beethoven thought about the music. It's also um how pretty much all the harmony of jazz standards operates. Uh almost all standards function in this way. And we're going to talk about exactly um how this this does function. Okay. So, first of all, let's just say we're in C major.

[00:11:38]Okay, C major is a chord, but it's also a scale. So, the question is here, if we're in C major, what are the closest chords to the C major triad? Well, we have six other chords that fit over the scale. Okay, we have C major, D minor, E minor, F, G, A minor, and B diminished. So those are the closest chords and those are the chords we call dietonic chords of C major. Okay, so I've created a visualization. I've been coding since I was a kid. I I love to program computers and I created a visualization that'll allow us to see this a little better. Okay. So, we're going to build this world up little by little. Here's our chord C. Okay. And um I think of C as having the deepest gravitational well because it's the center of our story. It's it's as we've mentioned, it's our hero's place of safety. It's their home. And as we mentioned, C has these closely associated chords called diietonic chords of C. They're diietonic triads of C. So, here's C major, the home chord. Here's the two, D minor. The three, E minor, the four, F, the five, G7, the six, A minor, and the seven B diminished or half diminished if you're considering the seventh degree of that chord. Okay? And this is the world so far. It's a really simple world. Uh, but you'll notice that all these chords are very closely related to one another.

[00:13:27]They're not just randomly put together.

[00:13:30]Now, the question is, how much music can we make with just these chords? Okay, so we're starting to build up this world in which we can tell a story. And as I've mentioned, uh, we need a protagonist. We need a character to take on the journey we're about to undertake. Uh, and so, uh, I'll I'll just come up with with something random. Um, how about um that can be our character. That's enough. I mean, that's just barely enough, but uh that can be our character. And I'm going to improvise something right now for you that is only going to use those seven chords, C major, D minor, E minor, etc. that we just touched upon, the dietonic chords of C and and nothing else. Okay, so here we go.

[00:14:14][Music] Heat.

[00:14:36][Music] Heat. Heat. Heat.

[00:14:42][Music] Okay, so that was a simple story using a protagonist. We had do do uh and they were present practically the whole time.

[00:15:28]uh as in our center central character was on screen practically the whole time and um visiting this very limited uh realm of possibility that we've constructed so far this very small portion of the harmonic map just these seven chords and I think I went to every one of them here uh including B half diminished at one point um but actually even though I was only playing white notes and only visiting those seven chords you'll notice there's already a ton of freedom because nothing's telling you when you have to go to one of the chords or another, right? You can choose uh whichever one you want at whichever moment, which is really different from what we're doing when we're improvising on a jazz standard where the chord sequence is fixed. Uh and that's one of the aspects I love about this kind of storytelling. Um and so even though I'm only playing white notes here, hopefully you felt that there was still a real a strong sense of structure here, right?

[00:16:23]There's there's really it's not just random white notes. um this real organization. Okay. Now, we're going to add something really substantial to the map. We're going to add secondary chords. So, what are secondary chords?

[00:16:37]Secondary chords are like arrows that point at a chord. And they don't belong to the key. They're outside of the key, but they point at the chords of the key really strongly. So, for a moment here, let's remove the diietonic chords of C and just focus on C itself as just a chord. Okay, we can even forget for forget about the key. It's just a chord right now just to try it. And um I'm going to bring in these secondary chords starting with B diminish 7. This is the mother chord that explains all the others. So B diminish 7 has two trones.

[00:17:16]It has D A flat and it has B F. Both of which strongly resolve towards C.

[00:17:26][Music] And these other chords here that you see, they are arrived at by moving one of the notes of B diminish 7 by a half step. All right. So if we move that A flat down by a half step, we get G7, which of course you know very well because that's the perfect cadence. We use that all the time. That's the most basic of these cadences. If we move the B natural of B diminished 7 down by a half step, we get B flat 7, which you might know in jazz we tend to call it the backdoor cadence. D flat 7 we get by moving the D of the B diminish 7 down by a half step to D flat. And that one you might know as the trionee substitution cadence.

[00:18:17]E7 we get and that's a less used one but actually a very powerful one as well. And now we get to the family of the plagal secondary chords. And so F minor 6 you get by moving the uh B natural of the B diminish 7 up by a half step to C. And that's a beautiful color. And then you get a bunch of other minor 6 chords uh that that again are just by chromatic movement of the B diminished. This A flat minor 6 is actually the basics of the altered scale, but that'll be a topic for another time. B minor 6. And then finally D minor 6 is almost like G7.

[00:19:05]Okay, so these are all secondary chords that point strongly at C. But the amazing thing is if I bring back my diietonic chords of C, you'll notice that every one of these has its own little constellation of secondary chords that point at it. So for example, E minor has its own perfect cadence, B7 that points at it. Okay? And it also has its own tritone sub F7 that points at it. And you'll notice F7 has an E flat. B7 has a D sharp and an F sharp. Those are are tones that are not in C major. So what this uh what these secondary chords allow us is an incredible amount of chromaticism of notes that don't belong to the home key um but without ever leaving the clarity of this key. Okay. Okay. So, what kind of music can we now make that we've added secondary chords to our map? Uh, you'll find that even though I'm going to stay in C major, even though I'm always going to be aiming at dietonic chords of C major, the same ones as before, um, the addition of these secondary chords, uh, gives a ton of extra possibility. Um, I guess just for the sake of argument, I'll keep that same uh subject, the protagonist of our story as before. And I'll do a a free improvisation using this uh now more complicated map where I can aim at each one of these chords with one of those uh secondary [Applause] chords. Heat. Heat.

[00:20:49][Music] Heat.

[00:21:19][Music] Heat.

[00:21:29][Music] [Music] Heat. Heat.

[00:21:56][Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Okay. So, our world has gotten so much richer now because uh even though I'm still very much in C major, like that sense of gravity towards C major never leaves us. Uh I now have access to this unbelievably rich world of chromaticism of chords that just don't belong in C major at all, but that keep pointing towards the chords that do very much belong in C major. So, we have this really uh kind of deep hierarchy of harmonies that we can visit. And hopefully, you still got the sense of a story, right? we have this central protagonist going on a journey just visiting these different places and um kind of relishing in the tension and release that happens uh as we do that.

[00:23:01]Okay. Now um a little bit of an extra which is that we can add secondary chords to the secondary chords. So here's our map so far. We have our key center C. we have its dietonic chords and each one of those dietonic chords has its own uh secondary chords that point towards it. But now we're going to add secondaries of the secondaries. So for example here uh if we're looking at the four chord of C F uh it has its perfect cadence which is C7. But C7 has its own constellation of chords that point towards it. Um it has its perfect cadence. for example, G7. So G7 can point towards C7, which in turn can point towards F. And we can go as many layers deep into this as we want. Uh G7 has its own constellation of chords that point towards it. Uh for example, the ca the plagal cadence of G7 is C minor 6, which points to G7, which then points to C7, which then points to F.

[00:24:11]So, this basically makes our map infinite already. And we're not even um at the final stage of complexity here.

[00:24:19]You'll see that there's um quite a bit more to add. So, just a really quick demo of the secondary of the secondary.

[00:24:26]Uh for example, in rhythm changes uh for in B flat rhythm changes, the bridge goes D7 to G7 to C7 to B to F7 and resolves finally to B flat. And what is that? Well, really that's just one of these chains of secondary dominance that we that that that I just showed you because um none of those chords except for F7 is a d is a diietonic chord of B flat major. Uh and all the other ones just point towards F7 with a few degrees of removal. D7 points to G7 which points to C7 which points to F7. But we can do um all kinds of different versions of this, right? Like for example um let's say we're in C major again.

[00:25:13]Okay. And I want to uh go to the three.

[00:25:17]I want to go to E minor. Um, of course, I could do like a backdoor cadence to E minor. So, I'd be in C D7 to to E minor. Okay. Can do that. But I could proceed that D7 with its own uh why don't we do a plagle cadence. Okay. So we go C G minor 6 to D7 to E minor.

[00:26:01]So okay. So I went C major, G minor 6 to D7 to E minor. And uh G minor 6 and D7 are not dietonic chords of C, but E minor is. And the fact that I'm pointing there diligently with these secondaries and the secondaries or the secondaries will allow us to maintain that sense of being in C without feeling like we're just kind of going random places. Okay, so that's just another level of enrichment. But now we're going to go to something that to me is probably the most exciting aspect of the these harmonic journeys, which is modulation. So here's our map so far. We have our dietonic chords, we have our secondaries, and we have the secondaries of the secondaries. Um, and now we're going to add something really radical, which is modulation. So, in box time, um, not only could you visit these chords of the home key, but you can also actually modulate, as in change keys to uh, all of these different chords except for the seventh. So, you can't modulate to B minor, but all the triads here that are actual triads that are actual perfect triads, um, so the two, the three, the four, the five, the six, you can modulate too. And that's going to look like this. We have these other worlds that we can go to. And those worlds have their own diietonic chords and they have the secondaries pointing at all those chords. So for example, if we go to D minor, uh we're in this world, going to remove our secondaries for a moment. We're in this world where G minor is a dieietonic chord. Now that's really different from it just being some kind of a chromaticism. It actually belongs to D minor as does C sharp diminish 7. These are chords that we can just kind of land on as does F augmented. Once we're in this D minor world and this becomes its own whole area of the map that we can hang out in. And going from there for example to E minor is a dramatic change of color because this has its own set of completely different diietonic chords.

[00:28:18]And if I add back in the uh secondaries and the secondaries of the secondaries and the secondaries of the secondaries of the secondaries then we have again this just unbelievably rich array of choices available to us.

[00:28:33]So we're coming to the end of our time here together and um we now have basically a complete harmonic map of the style that Bach would have used. U Bach can use all these secondary chords. He can use all those dietonic chords of the of the home key, but he can also modulate to these other related keys.

[00:28:50]There's one thing that we haven't covered which will be a topic for another time which is going to the parallel minor or parallel major. Um but uh for now this map that I just showed you will be plenty. gives you so many possibilities. It'll be plenty for us to do a final free improvisation here. Um so why don't I keep the same theme as before? And um uh let's let's change keys. Let's go to um D flat major. Why not? And um because you know, one thing I didn't point out is that I've this map I've shown you I've been showing you in C major, but really obviously uh you would need to work on it in all 12 keys.

[00:29:27]Uh 12 keys major and then also all all 12 keys minor, which is a whole other can of worms. The the minor mode in in tonal harmony is a lot more complex than the major mode, but that's a story for another day. Um so yeah, I'll do right now improvisation in D flat um using that same theme. And why don't we do um a time signature is always useful. Uh really places things in a different context. Let's do 54 as a time signature. And um I'm going to be modulating, right? So if I'm in D flat major, I can modulate to uh E flat minor, can modulate to F minor, to G flat major, to A flat major, and to B flat minor. Uh those are the keys I can modulate to. And hopefully you'll hear me actually fully go to those other places as opposed to uh the previous free improvisations where I was um going to dieonic chords of C and you know using secondary chords to point at those but I wasn't really hanging out in those places and going to the dietonic chords of those new places. But here I'm going to be doing that. For example, if I modulate to uh F minor, I could use a chord like a flat augmented as a dieietonic chord or uh B flat minor um as as a dietonic chord or C7 uh which is like nothing, you know, C7 does not exist in D flat major. So there's so many possibilities there. And of course, I can preede each one of those with it with its own secondary chord. So let's let's uh let's see how that goes.

[00:30:59][Music] Heat.

[00:31:39]Heat. Heat. Heat.

[00:31:42][Music] [Applause] [Music] Heat.

[00:32:46]Heat. Heat. Heat.

[00:32:50][Music] [Applause] [Music] Heat.

[00:33:57]Heat.

[00:34:02][Music] Heat. Heat.

[00:34:27][Music] Thanks so much. Uh, you know, one thing I didn't mention here is the idea of of what the camera is looking at.

[00:35:01]Um, in a lot of these improvisations, we've been looking at our hero a lot of the time, like the the the protagonist of the story has been on screen a lot of the time, but in a film, you pan away a lot. You might just look at the landscape. Uh, or you might go to a substory with different characters for a moment. There's so many possibilities with this concept of of of storytelling in music. And um here I'm, you know, staying relatively didactic, but um really the sky's is the limit. And that's what I love about this. It's at at at once very discipline and organized and at once incredibly free. Uh and that's what attracts me to it the most.

[00:35:38]So anyway, happy International Jazz Day to everyone. Hope you enjoy this and uh see you out there.

[00:35:47][Music]