BLACK MUSIC INNOVATIONS
A complete composer's edition built on the diminished and 9-Tone (augmented) systems, situated inside the Black creative lineage that gave them their visionary life.
✓ Living Tools — Geometry of Symmetry
Visualizer + Scale Navigation Tool
✓ Two-Part Masterclass(~50 min) on the 9-Tone
Method
✓ Four works that use symmetrical structures
as the primary compositional resource-Four
Big Band Compositions — full scores, parts &
audio
✓ Tutorial walkthroughs + reference catalogs
✓ Lifetime Access
For: Composers, improvisers, educators, and
culturally grounded musicians ready to go
deep.
Education as Remembrance
Symmetry in music is not a recent invention. Long before these scales were named in the 19th-century, African traditions were already dividing the octave into equal steps — and in the 20th century it was Black masters like Coltrane, Monk, and George Russell who turned symmetric harmony into a visionary language.
AFROGLYPHICS picks up that thread. The Composer's Edition situates the 9-Tone System inside this lineage — a tradition of symmetry, cycle, and proportion that Black musicians have carried, extended, and defined on their own terms.
This is not theory with the culture removed. This is theory as the culture — a map of sound that lets you study this music with full rigor without leaving its lineage at the door.
WHAT'S INCLUDED
A complete body of work — Living Tools, a two-part masterclass, four big band compositions, and onboarding — built on a system developed over 35+ years of practice, performance, and study. You get something coherent and original, not a feed of surface-level theory clips aggregated from other people's ideas.
LIVING TOOLS
The most visual and interactive heart of this Edition — the cultural-cosmological geometry of the music made visible and playable in real time. The Geometry of Symmetry Visualizer — interactive 3D and 2D visualizations of the diminished and 9-Tone systems, with the 81-chord and 64-chord catalogs, common-tone structures, and scale-subset maps built in. The Scale Navigation Tool — a real-time navigator that moves you between the symmetric world (diminished, augmented, 9-Tone) and functional Western tonal harmony, showing the common-tone bridges and substitution paths as you travel between them.
MASTERCLASS
Two videos · ~50 minutes total Part 1 — Foundations of the 9-Tone Method: how the system is built, its intervallic logic, and how it functions in composition and improvisation. Part 2 — A deeper dive into the 9-Tone Method, with visual diagrams showing how the 9-Tone and Diminished systems connect
FOUR BIG BAND COMPOSITIONS
Full scores, all instrumental parts, and reference audio — Ancient Future · Mr. Monk · Sigi Tolo · Seventh Journey. Use them for reference, study, or performance.
ONBOARDING+ ACCESS
Getting Started Tutorials — video walkthroughs of both Living Tools, so you can use them from day one. Lifetime Access — once it's yours, it's yours.
INSIDE THE LIVING TOOLS
The Geometry of Symmetry
Visualizer
The visualizations are not decoration. They reveal the sacred-geometric logic underneath the music — the same logic of proportion and symmetry that runs from African cosmological design through to the diagram traditions of Coltrane, George Russell, and Anthony Braxton, who all understood that some musical relationships can only be seen, not notated.
Cycles · Gateways · Subsets
3D + 2D visualization for the Diminished and 9-Tone (Augmented) systems
Catalog of 81 chords developed from the 9-Tone (Augmented) System
Catalog of 64 chords developed from the Diminished System
Common-Tone structures classified as "Gateways" leading to scale destinations— so you can logically build chord/scale substitutions using ambiguous or familiar sonorities using the structural elements of any sonority
Scale subsets showing how hexatonic and whole-tone scales sit inside specific 9-Tone scales
The Scale Navigation Tool
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A real-time navigator that moves you between the symmetric world (diminished, augmented, 9-Tone) and functional Western tonal harmony — instead of treating them as two languages that don't speak to each other
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Input any melodic idea, fragment or chord then see substitution paths emerge as the Scale Navigator list all the tonal systems, including Diminished and 9-Tone Systems, your ideas inhabits through common tones
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Saves you time by giving you immediate tonal options to enhance your music ideas during practice or composing you next great work. Ss
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Built for both the composer at the desk and the improviser on the bandstand
Masterclass
— The 9-Tone Method ®
Two videos. Approximately 50 minutes of direct instruction in the 9-Tone Method, taught by the system's creator. The conceptual foundation that makes everything else in this Edition — the Living Tools, the four compositions, the chord catalogs — fully usable.
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Part 1 — Foundations of the 9-Tone Method: how the system is built, its intervallic logic, and how it functions in composition and improvisation.
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Part 2 — A deeper dive into the 9-Tone Method, with visual diagrams showing how the 9-Tone and Diminished systems connect
$540 One Payment · Lifetime Access
or
4 Easy Payments of $135 (same total, spread across four months)
The AFROGLYPHICS Suite For Big Band
Four Compositions — Full Scores, Parts + Audio
Four works that use symmetrical structures as the primary compositional resource, each one a meeting place of ancient knowledge and future sound. Use them for reference, study, or performance — and study the method that built them.
ANCIENT FUTURE
MR. MONK
SIGI TOLO
SEVENTH JOURNEY
The melodic seed is drawn from an icosahedron — one of the five Platonic solids — used as a 3D scaffold for composition. Four pentagonal groupings, each counting its midpoint, generate four six-note sets built as Blues Palindromes, linked by common tone to the diminished and 9-Tone systems. The form itself is proportioned by phi: the golden ratio, calculated from the bar count, decides where each section opens. Beneath the melody, Gateway structures (6/5, 5/6, 5/5) voice the brass and rhythm sections while the woodwinds and brass carry on an unbroken African call-and-response. Ancient knowledge and future sound, built into the architecture itself.
The truest way to honor an innovator is to extend his method, not imitate his sound. Starting from Monk's "I Mean You" in F major, the Gateway structures generate a completely new set of chords — substitutions that resolve into a fresh harmonic framework in D minor, F major's relative minor. That D-minor framework becomes the foundation for the entire big band arrangement, with the diminished and 9-Tone systems filling out the orchestration throughout. A respectful nod to Monk's originality and innovative spirit — proof that his angular, symmetric thinking is a living tradition, not a museum piece.
Named for the Dogon star, this is the conceptual heart of the collection. It traces the ritual and cosmology of the Dogon people — messages sent by the ancients from the cosmos, received by Black folk and translated, across millennia, into mode after mode of expression right up to the present day. An African groove in 7/4 lays the foundation for an oral depiction of symbol, ritual, and myth drawn from Dogon cosmology, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the Olmec world. At its center sits the thesis the whole AFROGLYPHICS project is named for: that music notation is itself a hieroglyphic language — sonic ideograms, sounds that stand for ideas, objects, people, and places, read across and up and down like written speech, a specialized communication understood by an initiated few. It postulates that the ancient scribes may have been among the first musicians — and that those same scribes built the first systems of notation. Carried on the orchestral language of Duke Ellington and Thad Jones, Sigi Tolo is remembrance set to sound.
The collection's closing rite — and, written years earlier, the original prototype that Sigi Tolo grew from. Over an African groove in 7/4, the griot Sekou Shabaka speaks above Ashby Anderson's Afrikan Arkestra, its spelling a direct tribute to Sun Ra's Arkestra. It is a mental journey back to Africa: remembering and reclaiming lost history as the way to chart future destinations. The griot reclaims the engineering knowledge of the pyramid builders — shafts cut to receive the light of specific stars — the Black ancients' mapping of the constellations, the 26,000-year precession by which the heavens return to their place, the making of paper from papyrus, and the hieroglyphs inscribed on temple walls. Duke Ellington's orchestral influence runs throughout, crowned by a bright shout chorus that nods to Quincy Jones. Commissioned in homage to the African Burial Ground in Richmond, Virginia, the piece grounds all this cosmic memory in sacred local soil — the resting place of the enslaved and free Africans on whose lives the city was built.
“THIS IS FOR YOU IF”
This is for you if any of this resonates:
You’ve spent years trying to internalize Symmetrical Scale Systems but popular theory books in the Jazz idiom don't come close to a true analysis — and you want a comprehensive map of the territory, with every chord, every transposition, and every cycle organized so you can finally see how it all fits together. The Symmetric scales are one comprehensive system, not a set of unrelated auxiliary scales as taught by many.
You compose or improvise with symmetric materials, and you need a navigation tool that shows you in real time how to move between the symmetric world and functional Western tonal harmony — instead of treating them as two languages that don’t speak to each other.
You’ve worked through the standard jazz pedagogy and hit a ceiling. The ii-V-I vocabulary and the modal frameworks have given you what they can. You’re hungry for compositional logic that opens new territory.
You’re a Black musician, composer, or educator who has studied this music inside theoretical frameworks that treat its African roots as background context rather than structural foundation. You want to study this music in a way that doesn’t require leaving your culture at the door.
You’re tired of skimming. The internet is drowning in surface-level theory clips, and you want to go deep into a coherent body of work by someone who has actually built something original — not aggregated other people’s ideas.
You teach this material and you want visual tools that help students see relationships music notation alone cannot communicate.
You want to be connected to a lineage that runs deeper than the recording era — to Sun Ra, Ellington, Monk, Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, and the African intervallic and cosmological traditions they themselves drew from.
If any of that describes your experience, this is built for you.
FAQS
1
Q1 — Who is this for, and what do I need to know already
Designed for musicians who have a working knowledge of jazz harmony — ii-V-I, modes, and basic chord-scale theory — and who can read music. You don't need to be an expert; you do need to be ready to engage seriously. Composers, improvisers, educators, and culturally grounded musicians at the intermediate-to-advanced level will get the most out of it.
2
Q2 — Do I need to play in a big band to use this?
No. The Living Tools, the masterclass, and the 9-Tone Method work for any composer, improviser, or educator — solo, small group, or large ensemble. The four big band compositions serve as deep references that demonstrate the system in action, but you don't need a big band to study them.
3
Q3 — How do the Living Tools work? What do I need to run them?
All tools are browser-based — they run on your computer, tablet, or phone. No downloads, no special software. The Geometry of Symmetry Visualizer offers 2D and 3D views; the Scale Navigation Tool both show correlation between symmetric and functional harmony. Tutorial walkthroughs are included so you can use both from day one to study Symmetrical Scales or find how various parent scales to melodic and chordal structures.
4
Q4 — What does Lifetime Access include?
Access to the two masterclass videos, all four scores and parts ,downloadable PDFs, Interactive audio players for studying with the Living Tools, and the reference catalogs — for as long as AFROGLYPHICS operates the platform. Tool updates and tutorial improvements are included.
5
Q5 — Can I use the scores with my own ensemble?
Yes. The scores and parts are licensed for performance and study. You can rehearse and perform the four compositions with your own group.