>The thing that he's trying to articulate is that he can slip
>them into the pop context because they are truncated into the
>rhythm playing rather than expanded out as harmonic chords.
>It's the rhytmic affect, and AFKAP speaks to that above as a
>nod to the cuban percussive use of instruments, hides what the
>chords actually are to the average pop listener so that it's
>not too sophisticated.


Since he recently died, I'd argue that Horace Silver was definitley pointing towards chords used more as a percussive sound-thing as opposed to a neccessarily functional harmonic tool even if he was still very much rooted in that tradition.

However, my favorite Cecil Taylor DEFINITELY started to use complex chords more as a sound/percussion-device than a harmonic sophisticated thing in the 60's; I don't want to stretch it too far and get ridiculous but listen to his comping during the solos on a song like "Bulbs" (EDIT:"Pots", NOT "Bulbs"!!!) from 61; James Brown is not too far away even if the groove is missing; the chords are percussive sound-stabs that happens to be complex because of how they are voiced but the voicing itself isn't really about providing harmonic complexy to feed the soloists but more about sheer rhythmic sound for its own sake and the same can be said about most of his music after 61; the critics interpreted it as uber-complex because they came from a classical, chord/scale-relationship background but even a total tool like me who still has a decent ear for music and some memory of studiying can hear that *function* wasn't the main point; if anything his music became simpler harmonically regardless of how seemingly complex the chords were...

And what about the voici9ng in fourths-rather than thirds-in piano-playing during the so-called modal era? Wasn't the main idea that they could play vague, ambiguous progressions without getting in the way of the soloist freedom while still feeding material and being in key? Again, since the harmony was frequently static for long amounts of time, the chords were frequently amore about rhythm/sound within the mode than to provide a strictly defined harmonic background for the soloist that he was forced to meet as a "deadline", actually, i think that was a core idea behind modern jazz in that era...

Even a standard like Herbie's "Maiden oyage" which is strictly based on sus4 chords; that's not how you are *supposed* to use sus4 chords in classical tradition and the soloists don't exactly care too much for the harmony provided by *that* specific chord, it's more about a sound that sounds cool and sets a "mood" which is frequently how Herbie played...


Anyway, I don't want to sound like an asshole becauswe you are great but it seems like you are arguing for the sake of arguing here; "everyone" knows that various ideas from jazz was used in more "populist" contexts; from chord-voicings to riffs to solos to even tiny fragments like the So What-Cold Sweat thing which was always obvious as fuck to me; not because they have the same groove-which they don't-or some other bullshit but rather because that very interval placed like that was played by the horns on a jazz-album that practically every "serious" muscan in the 60's-from Maceo and the soul-session musicians to Jerry Grcia and Carlos Santana maaan/duuude-adored; no reason to make it more indepth than that; context man!!!