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What is Modal Jazz? How is it different from regular Jazz? Find out by watching this Jazz Piano Tutorial. It covers everything you need to know, focusing on modal improvisation and modal harmony. This video could alternatively be titled Modal Jazz Explained.

Modal jazz is characterised by the following:
- Sparse chord changes where a single chord can last many bars
- No strict, written out chord progression
- Pedal points and drones
- Quartal chords – to avoid accidentally sounding tonal

The idea behind Modal Jazz is to give the soloist greater freedom and choice when improvising.

Before Modal Jazz, soloists generally thought ‘vertically’. By removing the ‘functionality’ of chords – modality allows a soloist to focus exclusively on the melody and not worry about the underlying harmony. You focus on creating melodies in a particular scale or key. This is called thinking ‘horizontally’.

Modality treats the chords as ‘decorative’ rather than ‘functional’. This gives you greater flexibility when improvising and, in fact, forces you to focus on creating interesting melodies – and not about just outlining the chords or modifying the solo to fit the chord progression.

But, even though a Modal Jazz solo is ‘freer’ than a tonal solo, there are, nevertheless, still some restrictions in modal improvisation. You should generally:
- Stick to the relevant scale/mode (with occasional chromatic passing notes)
- Avoid the diatonic tritone (as it sounds tonal)
- Emphasis the root note in the bass (to establish the tonal centre)
- Emphasis the character tone within the particular mode

With functional harmony there is a strong pull to the tonic (G7 wants to resolve to CMaj7). In modal harmony, however, because there is no functional harmony there isn’t as strong a pull to the tonic. However, because there still IS a tonic, there is still some tendency to want to resolve to the tonic. It is nowhere near as strong as in functional harmony, but it is still there.

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