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This Jazz Piano Tutorial is about George Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation.

George Russell says the interval of a Perfect 5th establishes ‘tonal gravity’ which pulls towards the tonic (like a Dominant Chord pulls down to the Tonic Chord).

So if a Perfect 5th is the strongest nonroot interval, we can build up a harmonically strong scale using intervals of Perfect 5ths. Starting on the C that gives us:

C, G, D, A, E, B, F#

So we get a scale with all the notes of the C Major scale but with an F# rather than an F – which is a G Major Scale or the C Lydian Mode.

A scale created by stacking Perfect 5ths establishes ‘harmonic order’ whereby each note of the scale is pulled down a 5th by ‘tonal gravity’ back to the tonic (root note). The F# pulls to the B; the B pulls to the E and so on until we reach C.

So by playing C Lydian instead of C Major, the following things happen:
We now have a scale with no avoid notes over a CMaj7 chord
By getting rid of a F, we remove the diatonic tritone interval between the B & F which is the basis of the Dominant chord and thus the dominanttonic relationship and thus we have, in a sense, remove tonality itself
All notes in this scale now work well over the chord without sounding like they need to resolve anywhere
Each note is related to the next via ‘tonal gravity’ and each tends back to the root note (C)

So we’ve had it wrong for the last 400 years. The scale that fits best fits over a CMaj7 is not C Major but C Lydian (AKA G Major). This theory was very influential. Bill Evans and Miles Davis used this theory when writing songs on the album Kind of Blue – arguable the most successful jazz album of all time and one that epitomises Modal Jazz.

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