The term jazz
chord conjures up confusion and
mystery for many guitarists. The fingerings are unfamiliar, and
technical terms such as major seven, seven flat nine,
dominant seven suspended with a sharp 11, and diminished
(I’ve heard this referred to as "demented") are
enough to scare anyone off for years. Add to that the perceived
difficulty of playing these chords all over the neck and you’ve got a
strong enough excuse to avoid them for the rest of your life.
On the other
hand, jazz chords offer the guitarist a vastly expanded palette of
tonal colors and entry into an unlimited universe of modern music,
including pop, rock, and classical. And if you want to play swing or
jazz, they’re essential.
The good news is
that once you get into these types of chords, you’ll find a system that
is logical, regular, and easy to use. The trick is to discover a bridge
from what you know to what you don’t know. In this lesson, we’ll make
that bridge out of the blues by looking at the chords to a simple blues
riff, the kind that players as diverse as Louis Armstrong, Benny
Goodman, Bob Wills, Django Reinhardt, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane,
Charlie Christian, Joe Pass, Wynton Marsalis, and George Benson have
all composed, played, and recorded. We’ll learn some basic
closed-position chords and discuss how to move them around. In the
process, we’ll transpose our blues riff from the key of G to the key of
Bb.
Musically
speaking, there is no such thing as a "jazz chord," any more than there
are special cubist colors for painters or designated mystery words for
writers. A chord is a chord, and jazz chords are often just basic
chords played in unfamiliar forms and positions on the fretboard, or
extended or altered versions of these same basic chords. The former can
include chords played up the neck in closed positions, which are
sometimes called barre chords. These chords don’t utilize open strings;
each note is fretted. Extended chords have notes--the nines, 11s, 13s,
etc.--added to basic triads (chords with three notes). Altered chords
have one or more notes changed, as in flatted fives or sharp nines.
The main
emphasis here is on closed-position and barre chords. If you’ve tried
them on an acoustic guitar, especially one with high action, you know
how difficult they can be to play correctly without buzzes or
unintentionally muted notes.
One of the
reasons we use closed-position chords is that they can be moved up and
down the neck. Knowing this, you can learn chords by form and move
these forms anywhere. A chord then becomes, for example, a dominant
seven form rather than, say, merely a G7 chord. Most chord
forms can be played in at least 12 different places on the fretboard.
Here’s an
example: The chord on the left below is the familiar form of the G7
chord that uses open strings. The 0’s above the grid denote strings
played open. The chord on the right is a closed-position dominant seven
form played at the third fret. It’s also a G7. With this form, the
first and fifth strings are muted; the X’s above the grid show which
strings do not sound.
Introduction