From our free, Jazz Guitar Lessons Daily Series: Lesson 54
Thursdays - How Chords Move
3/25/21
In the standard approach to comping and harmonic control, jazz guitarists are often told to focus on two things in their practice time. First, practice drop chord voicings and memorize all of the inversions on all string sets. Second, practice moving chord voicings up and down through diatonic keys to create chord scales.
These two ideas, once practiced, are then meant to translate directly into creative comping ideas by plugging them into jazz standards to create interesting harmonic ideas. We can randomly jump around through inversions of a chord (which is only jumbling up the order of the pitches the ear is hearing, so is only producing the surface level appearance of harmonic movement). Or we can move through a chord scale, carrying the ear through a series of hyper-related, diatonic chords, keeping our ideas firmly within very strict, drab, expected boundaries.
Let’s try something different today. Let’s consider a PURPOSE to inversions beyond jumping around randomly from CMaj7 to CMaj7/E to CMaj7/G to CMaj7/B. Let’s instead think about WHY we might want to use an inversion. Let’s also think about how we can get away from diatonic chord scales and focus instead in insert tension chords that will create a sense of harmonic urge and momentum to through our ideas forward. This will create more of a storytelling effect to the way we use harmony to carry our ideas through a progression and imply a form.
For the sake of keeping things small and manageable today, we’ll focus on a minor ii V i rather than an entire tune. But of course these ideas can be applied to standards and should be once they make sense in this more sterile environment. Let’s focus on a ii V i in D minor. So EØ7 to A7b9 to D-6. But instead of A7b9, we’re going to use the four diminished chords related to A7b9 - Eº7, Gº7, Bbº7, and C#º7. All four of these chords contain the same four pitches and could be said to be inversions of each other. Though for the sake of seeing the potential here, I will name each diminished chord I’m playing based on whichever pitch is in the lowest voice. Just know they’re basically all the same. It’s also worth knowing, if you don’t already, that each of these four chords in an inversion of a rootless A7b9 chord...
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