An attorney with Berg Hill Greenleaf & Ruscitti, LLP, in Boulder, Colorado, Scott Perlov focuses on practice areas such as corporate and international law. Prior to pursuing a legal career, he studied classical piano at an Aspen music conservatory. Although he is an accomplished interpreter of the works of Frederic Chopin and Sergei Rachmaninoff, Scott Perlov also plays jazz piano. One area of interest is modal jazz, which was developed and refined by pioneering musicians such as Bill Evans and Miles Davis.
In styles of jazz prevailing until the late 1950s, such as bop, the music relied on a chord progression that repeated throughout the song and gave soloists a framework on which to improvise. Modal jazz, arising initially from the experiments of bandleader George Russell, represented a return to melody, with modal scales providing more freedom for musicians to explore and move between sounds. The comping instrument, such as the piano, no longer had to stay within standard chord voicings, but could shift the sound in a number of combinations within the parent mode. Seminal works employing the modal concept of jazz include Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue.”