Jazz Chord Basics

to all musicians in progress

I thought I'd dedicate my first steemit post to my favourite source of creativity, relaxation, fun and inspiration: playing music. Like a lot of other musicians on this planet (professionals, amateurs, hobbyists) I constantly see myself confronted with the necessity of actually understanding the harmonics and the theory they are based on. Of course, one can always go on improvising or soloing by following the ear and pick the tones accordingly (maybe that can be a sustainable way to keep the learning curve steep enough... I would love to read your comments on this) but I figured out that this does not work for me in the long run. I tend to run out of ideas quite quickly feeling very limited in my possibilities. I found for myself two solutions to overcome this:

Explore more approaches how to improvise over chord progressions such as understanding what tone material can be used (considering the single tones of a chord ("chordal approach") or of the scale that chord is part of ("scale approach"))
Build up "vocabulary" by practicing your favourites musicians' solos or grooves (or parts of it) and try to understand how they are related to the chord progression. They might come in handy also in other keys.
Either way a deeper look in the theory yields a better overview.

Chords of one scale... in general

First of all, I'm no professional musician nor a music teacher so all I'm writing about is the result of my own experience. Plus I'm a bass player so probably guitar and bass players can find this particularly useful.
What helped me a lot was to be clear on the chords that can be put together from the material of a single scale. I like Jazz so I refer to tetrads (4-tone-chords): the prime , the third, the fifth and the seventh; a minor chord has a minor third, a major chord has a major third. For example now, the tone material of C makes the following chords possible (I'm adding the mode names). this is the chordal approach

I	II	III	IV	V	VI	VII
Ionian	Dorian	Phrygian	Lydian	Mixolydian	Aeolian	Locrian
major, maj7	minor, min7	minor, min7	major, maj7	major, min7 (dominant)	minor, min7	minor, min7
Cmaj7	Dm7	Em7	Fmaj7	G7	Am7	Bm7

And now? That's a lot of random info, right?... not quite: let'sbreak it down to an essential observation. You see, we have three major chords (I, IV, V) and four minor chords (II, III, VI, VII). All of them have the minor 7th a part from I and IV. There is no such thing as a minor chord with a major 7th here!For guitar and bass players that means they only need to remember 3 different patterns for the tetrads: minor chord with minor 7th, major chord with minor seventh (the dominant) and major chord with major seventh.

Now you just need to know what key the piece (or the part of the piece) is written in (it gets more complicated when there are changes in keys; might be best then to first analyse what the "I" is) and you can start improvising securely with four tones per chord. Isn't that great?? Well I was amazed when I realised how cool the improvisation sounded all of a sudden!

If you like pop songs then you most likely get songs written in either Aeolian (VI, minor) or Ionian (I, major). To find pop songs written in Dorian or Phrygian is somewhat unlikely so whenever you see a song ending in E or C#min you might want to check out the scale of E (four '#'): E, F#, G#, A, B, C#, D#.

E	F#	G#	A	B	C#	D#

So all chords are:

Emaj7	F#min7	G#min7	Amaj7	B7	C#min7	D#min7

A useful tool is the circle of fifth when facing "odd" keys like Db or Ebmin.. who can remember all keys and relative keys without a mnemonic trick (I'd share mine but it's in German).

Ok, that was the harder way. Things get easier when you use the 'scale approach'. That is, taking the tone material of E for example, remember the pattern on the fretboard for Ionian (I personally find Dorian to be a cool pattern so I'd use F# Dorian instead) and play only the scale notes. All chords in the key of E use only these 8 notes (or more if you play higher / lower octaves). Unlike the chordal approach with this technique I mostly follow my ear since there are notes that won't go with every chord.. so my "acoustic imagination" tells me what to avoid. I think that's a good way to get started with soloing and improvisation. Always remember, the tones don't always have to be part of the scale, you can create tension with odd ones that are followed by scale tones, check out your favourite musicians soli, you'll see they seem to be doing what they want from time to time..

I found this discovery very helpful and I hope so did you. Leave comments on how you tackle improvisation and how you practice soloing, I'm very curious about that.

cheerio