>To me, these players are just creating melodies against the
>background of chords and I don't see how playing 3rds and 7ths
>is ever going to contribute to that end.
It is the 3rd and 7th that defines the sound.
>For me: "It's the melody, it's the melody...."
And many things may go into a melody. Clearly choosing the chord tones
could be an aspect, wouldn't you agree?
I would like to add to this:
Playing jazz is running changes with thier extensions. Period.
Composing a melodious phrase is the same thing with some editing for taste.
You can run changes in many different ways. For example, a Cm7 chord and its
extentions has 6 notes and in two octaves you can get 12 correct notes.
This gives 8^12 (BASIC notation) 8 note phrases just by running the changes
randomly. Everything that is played in this way will produce an adequate
musical sound against a Cm7 chord background.
Everything that has been discussed here is a subset of this.
What do you think of that!
jules