Earshot Jazz :: Practice This!

Practice This! is an educational project of Earshot Jazz with sponsorship from The Seattle Drum School. Each month in Earshot Jazz a new lesson by a different local jazz artist will appear for students to learn from and for non-musician readers to gain insight into the craft of improvising.

Practice This!
March 2009

Hadley Caliman on Misconceptions about Key and Tonic-Versus-Dominant

Caliman described one problem most young players seem to have: understanding and hearing key centers. “You cannot stretch a key,” says Caliman. “You have to chop it up into pieces.” Most students are told to play one scale for the tonic, and one scale for the dominant, yet, according to Caliman, this system just doesn’t help students hear the overall feeling of tonic and dominant and the motion from tonic to dominant. “It’s basically the idea of blues harp, where blowing out is tonic, and sucking in is dominant. These two things work hand in hand to give us the sense of key, but they are both OF the same key. Most of the time, students are taught two different ideas and they don’t tend to relate.” Caliman recommends two simple exercises to help students hear this symbiotic relationship.

Exercise 1: In the key of C, play the seven modes in the following way: C major ascending, D Dorian descending, E Phrygian ascending, F Lydian descending, G dominant ascending, A Aeolian descending, B Locrian ascending, C major descending, B Locrian ascending, A Aeolian descending, G dominant ascending, F Lydian descending, E Phrygian ascending, D Dorian descending, C major ascending. “This way, all your ascending scales work on the tonic (C major) and all the descending scales work on the dominant or turnaround (G7 or Dmin7-G7),” says Caliman. Remember, these are all just the C-major scale–it might be easier to think about it this way, rather than thinking of all of the modes individually.

Exercise 2: In the key of C, play the following series of notes: B-C-D-E-F-E-D-C-B-C-D-E-F-E-D-C-B-C-D-E-F-D-C-B-C. “This is a classical flute exercise, but it really helps us hear dominant-to-tonic motion,” says Caliman. From here, you can go to the key of Db, where the C you ended on in C Major becomes the leading tone in the key of Db Major.

These two exercises, when learned in all twelve keys, will give any player a stronger theoretical and aural understanding of the relationship between tonic and dominant. “I think of the tonic as the Papa and the dominant as the Mama—you’ve got to have them both to get a sense of key.”
In Part 2 of our series with Hadley Caliman, we’ll look at some of the things he practiced “back in the day” and see what drove the direction of his practicing.