Yo Anonymous--

Hey thanks for th' hip exposition on the "Tristan Chord". I reckon that was in response to my comment in my "Woodface" post on there being no new way to spell a G minor 7.

This was interesting to me for a few reasons. The first is, while it isn't strictly a "new way to spell a G minor 7", (more on this later) it could indeed be construed as a "new way to spell" an F minor 7, i.e. by flatting the fifth, which in jazz is a perfectly acceptable substitution for a minor 7. Raise it a whole step, to G-Bb-Db-F, and you do indeed have something of "a new way to spell a G minor 7".

I'm guessing you know this.

The other thing is that if you take this voicing and put a G in the bass, you have a very sexy G dominant #5 chord indeed, which would resolve (as it does in several examples in the "Tristan" exposition) by raising the Ab, or #9, to a perfect 9nth (A). The #5 could resolve by moving a half- step in *either* direction to a 5th or a 6th.

Long story short, after some analysis, I have come to the conclusion that your "Tristan Chord", even in the original key of Ab, could be considered as "a new way to spell a G minor 7" in a jazz substitution kind of way.

You must have known that.

You're Phillip Glass, aren't you? Sorry I cracked that joke about you a couple of months ago. Can you look at my string quartet scores?

P.S. My favorite "modern" way to spell a minor seventh chord, for all you music freaks, is to play the root and a sus 4 chord a whole-step down. I- VII-iii-XI.

How sexy is that? Sounds great when, for example, a guitar plays an E sus (no dominant seventh, though- eek) and the bass plays an F#.

It positively detumesces the wang. I might venture a guess that not one single person on The Man's Warped Tour would have a fucking clue what I'm talking about. And that was cool in 1977, you know?

But I have decreed it to be LAME now.