The Five Jazz Chord Types lesson. New things for you!
If you have previously purchased the Five Jazz Chord Types video lesson, you will be receiving some new information that goes with it as well as some double-stave piano music which will replace the previous, mostly handwritten music that went out originally with the lesson. I think you will find the new music much easier to read because I used the Sibelius notation software to write it. I’ve also put together a couple of exercises you can read that I hope will help you learn the fundamental, closed-position jazz chords. But of course there is much of that in the video lesson.
If you haven’t previously purchased the Five Jazz Chords Types lesson before and would like to do so, click the Buy Now button below.
Having a solid grasp of the five basic jazz chord types is essential for playing from a fake book.
These fundamental jazz chord types form the basis for our cocktail style playing. Once you understand how the five chord qualities are made in their basic form, you can use them to harmonize melodies in various ways when reading from a song chart.
But it is very important to understand that you don’t use these chords in their basic, root-positions to read from a fakebook. This is a common mistake for beginning chord players. They to try to use these basic chords and play them with their left hand while adding a single-note melody in their right. This creates a blockish, amateurish sound and we don’t want that. Once we understand the chords, we have to learn techniques for making the chords sound pleasing in our playing.
There are two common methods we use to make our chords sound pleasing in our beginning cocktail style playing:
1. Divide the chords into open voicings and add the melody on top.
2. Invert them, matching the inversions to melody.
You can learn how to divide the chords in the Open Voicings Studies that are found on a separate page on the website.
The basic jazz chord types also provide the basis for the more advanced and colorful, rootless jazz chords. But to understand how to make those, it is essential to understand the five jazz chord types first.
Test yourself Free song charts to test your basic chord knowledge
(two are in this newsletter)
For those of you who already have the Five Jazz Chords Types video lesson, you will also be receiving several free jazz chord charts along with the written music I am sending to you. For those of you who don’t have that lesson yet, but are interested to see the charts, there are a couple of samples below.
There are no melodies in the charts, just chords. Students just work through the song charts, not worrying about rhythm, but simply play the chords to test their knowledge. This is just meant to be a root-position, jazz chord exercise. When they can do this, however, they will have already accomplished the very first important step towards playing the tunes in the Open Voicings Studies, These studies can be found on the website: ( https://www.glenrosejazz.com/open-voicings-study.html)
In those lessons, students learn how to open up the basic jazz chords and begin making simple, but pleasing, cocktail arrangements, not only for the charts found on this page but for other tunes as well.
Jazzily yours,
Glen
Here are the common jazz shorthand notations you will need to understand for the chords in these song charts:
∆7 or ∆ = major 7
-7 = minor 7 (sometimes a simple dash mark (-) indicates minor7 as well)
o7 or o = diminished 7
Ø7 = minor7b5
7 = dominant 7
