Workshop 61 — Melodic Minor as a Practical Color System: Altered Dominants, Lydian Dominant, Minor-Major Harmony, Locrian ♮2, and Choosing Tension by Destination

Workshop 60 taught us to stop asking:

“What chord comes next?”

and sometimes think instead in terms of:

pedal + upper structure + color.

Now we take one of jazz harmony’s most useful pitch systems and make it practical:

melodic minor.

This topic is often taught terribly.

Students get seven mysterious scale names and are told:

“Use mode 4 here, mode 7 there.”

Then improvisation becomes a mathematics exam.

We are going to do the opposite.

The goal is to hear melodic minor as a family of related colors, especially for four situations:

1. minor tonic
2. altered dominant
3. Lydian-dominant dominant
4. minor iiø–V–i

The central lesson is:

Do not choose an advanced scale because the chord symbol permits it. Choose the tension whose resolution you can already hear.