AhavaRaba by Any Other Name would Sound as Sweet...

 It's a Jazz Scale, but it's also a Traditional World Music Scale,

G  -   AHAVARABA

Call it what you want (and many people seem to do that ), this scale is derived from the Harmonic Minor Scale and is one of the most useful Jazz scales but is often overlooked in the Jazz texts.  It can function a solid foundation scale for improvising against a Dominant 7 (b9) chord, one of the MOST common chords  played in Jazz.  It easily adapts "Alt chords" with its inclusion of the 5th and the b13th so it works well against complex altered chords that have a b7, which is pretty much every other chord.

   It is simply the scale that results if you start playing a traditional Harmonic Minor scale from the 5^th note of the scale,  i.e. it is the “5^th Mode of Harmonic Minor" and is particularly useful in a tune where the chord is functioning as the V7 chord in a minor key.  BUT, in world music traditions, often the scale just sits there and vegetates and never really resolves as a V chord would, so it becomes the “defacto”  I chord.  In this case, the scale is derived from C Harmonic Minor, starting on the 5th note of that scale: G.

 To restate that in English, you could just jam on a G7 chord forever and play strictly from this scale.  The resultant music in this context would likely have an exotic quality that reflects  Jewish, Arab, Turkish, and Flamenco traditional sounds.  The first 2 chords in the "Key", in this case the key of G, are  Major Chords a 1/2 step apart ( G Major and Ab Major) - this is a really distinctive "hook" that comes out of this scale and is the basis for the compositions like  Malaguena ( YouTube video below).   One might argue that the two chords are what created the scale and the sound in the first place.   A G7 chord and an Ab Major chord, added together, contain every note in the scale!  (Keep in mind, that, in Jazz, this scale would likely be functioning in the key of Cm and would be used in a whole different way than it is used in, say, Klezmer or Gypsy Music.) 

In some Jazz texts, this scale is called the Spanish Phrygian, or the Dominant b2,b6 Scale.  In fact, in scouring other world-music sources, this scale turns up with all sorts of names and descriptions. From playing a lot of Klezmer Music I know it as "AhavaRaba" but it goes by many aliases:

Ahava Raba Scale,  Ahava Rabboh Scale

Freygish Scale

Spanish Phrygian Scale

              Spanish Gypsy Scale

Phrygian Dominant Scale

Altered Phrygian Scale

Chromatic Dorian Mode

Jazz Dominant  b2, b6 Scale

5^th Mode of Harmonic Minor

Major Scale with b2, b6, b7

Phrygian #3 Scale   (“sharp 3”)

  In researching the facts for this post I collected at least 32 other scales from around the world ( in addition to the dozens of Modes and Altered Modes, blues scales and Pentatonics) that will provide some fascinating topics for future articles - I am surprised that it is actually possible to generate well over 60 distinct scales from a mere 12 notes!     Stay posted as I sort through these. 

   Here is Stan Kenton's Orchestra playing Malaguena, a Bill Holman arrangement of Ernesto Lecuona's composition that owes it's existence to the AhavaRaba Scale, or whatever you want to call it: