Exotic Scales

I stumbled across this while playing around with augmented triads on minor chords and thought it was at least a little bit interesting, if only because it led me to a scale I haven't come across in a musical context before.

The Superaugmented Scale is a major scale with every note raised by a semitone except the 1 and 7: 1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 7. It came up a couple of times in the lines in my recent Scriabin-inspired post so I thought it might be worth digging deeper into.

I had more fun than anticipated with the results of raiding Scriabin for vocabulary, so I did it again with another piano piece I'm very fond of: Xenakis's "Mists".

Hit by a bout of insomnia last night I ended up listening to Scriabin's Piano Sonata No 7 and stealing bits from it to turn into jazz lines. Here are the slightly deranged results.

Say you've written (or a bandmate as written) a tune that features a sustained Maj7b5 chord. What do you play over it? Probably you don't have standard vocabulary for this type of chord, and since it's unusual it's not likely you'll find many ideas by transcribing. So how could you quickly build coherent vocabulary?