Chords for How The Pros Think About Chord Progressions (and you probably don't)

If you're trying to learn jazz,
and especially the first time you're looking at
how to learn a jazz standard,
then you probably know how it is to look
at a piece of sheet music and then feel
that the chords are flying by in an impossible tempo.
I started thinking about this because a few weeks ago
I was playing a gig with a saxophone player
that I know for a long time.
We were talking about what songs to play.
It [Db] was just [Cm] a gig in a cafe and we were [F] just playing standards
[Abm] and one of the songs he suggested
was Ellington's Sophisticated Lady.
[Eb] Sophisticated Lady is a [Bbm] beautiful song
that I first learned [E] very early on
when I was still living in Copenhagen
and actually I never played [G] it since.
When I was talking to the [Cm] saxophone player,
then we could both remember looking at that song
for the [F] first time and thinking,
what the hell is going on
and why are there so many chords in this?
And that is of course how many jazz standards
[Gb] will come across with a lot of chords
that are hard to remember
and even harder to improvise over.
But there is a way to make that easier,
both to solo over and to remember.
And the way I do this also shows
why I lean so heavily on functional harmony
and just how powerful a concept that is.
But I also want to talk a little bit
about Papatino's [A] and Barry Harris' systems for this,
which can get a bit strange,
but [Am] also are often very practical.
The first time [Eb] I set out
to really start learning a jazz standard,
then I spent two months alone in a house
learning Stella by Starlight and There's No Greater Love.
Just recording a simple chorus of the chords,
practicing the [E] melody and improvising on them every day.
[A] I kept on going until I could get a simple [C] solo
to sort of make sense [D] over them
and I could hear where I was and knew [Gm] the chords by heart.
The problem is that I learned everything one [Ab] chord at a time.
[Eb] I was not thinking in groups of chords
that follow each other or groups [Ab] of chords
that sound similar.
Music is a language.
So I'm gonna use that comparison
to help you see just how [Ab] powerful this is.
But first you need to clean up the chords a bit.
[F] Everything's very dirty.
A problem that I get many questions about
is how to think about extensions
and whether you can use a C713 instead of a C79.
And that's not really how you want to think
about chords if you play jazz.
A chord is a lot of options
and what notes you play or extensions that you add
are more about what you want it to sound like
and what is going on around you [Fm] in the band and in the song.
It's not thinking, now I [G] want to play [C] C713
because that's not really a music thing.
It's a simple that you can maybe turn [Cm] into music
but you need to know [F] how
and often that actually means ignoring the extensions.
In the beginning, you're probably learning songs
from a lead sheet like in a real book
and first you really [Ab] just want to get rid of the [A] extensions
because what's [Eb] important is the type of the chord
and the context it's in.
So just focus on the basic seventh chord
and forget about the nines and elevenths.
You want to understand that
from the [A] other chords around it and the melody,
not a [C] chord symbol.
After all, a piece of music is not a row of letters in Ireal.
If you write out a chord progression,
then really it's just a long row of letters
and it's difficult to memorize
and make sense of long rows of letters.
But if you start grouping the letters into words,
[Ab] then you're attaching meaning to them
and that's a lot easier [F] to remember.
And this of course also works with jazz songs.
So if you can sum up a 32 bar song
as a bunch of smaller progressions,
then you have to remember [A] a lot less
and if you're used to improvising
over those smaller progressions as well,
then soloing over the song
[Abm] is also going to be a lot simpler.
But there are actually [Gb] quite a few more advantages.
For this to work,
then you need to get used [F] to thinking
and recognizing the words or building blocks
in the chord progressions.
Some of the common words or blocks
that you certainly want to start recognizing
are things like, of course, the basic 2-5-1
as you have it here in [B] Perdido and Take the A [Dm] Train.
_ _ [C] _ 1-6-2-5 turnaround, similar to rhythm changes, Blue Moon.
_ _ [Am] _ _
_ [G] _ _ _ _ [Am] The 5-of-5 where you also want [D] to notice
[Em] that very often it's placed in a certain part [G] of the form.
So at the [D] end of the first half as it is here
in [C] There'll Never Be Another You
_ _ _ [F] _ _
[Eb] _ _ _ [Bb] _ _ [A] or at the end of the bridge as [Eb] you see in Sadendal.
The same [D] can be said for the 2-5-4.
It's also very often placed in the bridge
[C] _ _ _ _ _ [F] _ _
[C] or positioned so that the 4 chord
[G] is at the beginning of the second 8 bars of the form
what [Cm] you see in There'll Never Be Another You.
_ _ _ _ [Bbm] _ _ [Eb] _
Another very useful block is 4-4-1 progressions.
Here it is in There'll [Cm] Never Be Another You
and you also have one in [Db] All The Things You Are.
_ _ [Dbm] _ _
[Bb] The next thing will make [F] it even more clear
why you want to learn this from songs
and then we need to get into [G] the Barry Harris
and Pat Martino thing.
A problem when you look at a lead sheet for the first time
or even just the chords in iReal
is that it's hard to have [Eb] any idea
about how those chords sound.
But if you are used [Bbm] to thinking in [F] turnarounds
2-5's [E] and 5-5 and so on
[Bb] then you're actually working towards being able
[Cm] to hear the harmony just from looking at the chart
[C] and that's [Eb] incredibly useful
and makes it a lot easier to play a song for the first [N] time.
It's similar to how you probably find it really easy
to play a song if you're told that it's a blues.
Something that you're already very familiar
with the sound of.
But for that to happen the words or building blocks
should not be only theoretical things.
They need to be something that you really know the sound of
and that's the easiest to achieve by recognizing them
in the songs that you already know well.
At the same time then you can probably also see
how this will help you pick up songs faster by ear
since you can start to rely on hearing groups of chords
and not each chord one chord [Em] at a time.
And there's a good chance that you're probably
[Am] already doing this with things [Dm] like turnarounds.
_ [G] _ A danger with trying to learn building blocks
is that you get [Em] stuck on the details
which is similar to getting stuck with the [Ab] extensions
that I talked about earlier.
With stuff like this it makes the most sense
to focus on how chord [N] progressions are similar
more than how they're different.
So it's a turnaround if it resembles that
and all of these progressions are essentially the same thing
but maybe for this song or this arrangement
one of them fits better than the others
but it's more important to also realize
that it's a turnaround.
If you want to take this into the language analogy
then this would be [Ab] synonyms.
Words with essentially the same meaning
give or take a nuance.
You can expand this [F] to other things as well
like the four four minor one progressions
which are essentially just subdominant
minor subdominant to tonic.
And here a big part of why that's important to know
is that these progressions sound similar
and [Ab] have the same important notes and voice [N] leading
which means that you can approach soloing over them
in very similar ways.
And now we can [Ab] start looking
at the Barry Harris Pat [Ab] Martino methods.
One thing that's often very practical
when looking at chord progressions
that you want to solo over
is to reduce the [Gb] amount of chords [B] in there.
This is where Pat Martino [Ab] and Barry Harris
kind of have opposite approaches.
The reason that you can leave chords out
is that a lot of chords are really just [E] embellishments
and can be ignored without the solo
losing the connection to the [D] song.
And it's easier to play [Ab] strong melodies
if you're not tied down by having to
spell out a lot of changes
and think about a lot of chords.
A very useful example of this
is the A part of rhythm changes
where there are really a lot of chords
but you can reduce it to just one chord per bar.
The reduced version of the chords
will contain the basic movement of the song
and this will work great for [E] solos.
As I mentioned, both Pat Martino and [F] Barry Harris
have systems for this
and they're both very simple rules.
For a [N] 2-5, Pat Martino says that everything is a 2-chord
so a 2-5 just becomes that 2-chord.
Barry Harris goes the other way
and throws away the 2-chord
so he says that a 2-5 is just a 5-chord.
And both of these can be useful.
I think it really depends on the song.
I think the Barry Harris approach
probably gives you a more natural chord progression
when you've thrown away all the 2-chords
where Pat Martino becomes a little bit strange
giving you a [B] blues in F
where you have to think like this.
At the [Bb] same time, for guitar
there's just something natural
and something easier about thinking in minor.
Maybe it's just because we're stuck
with the minor [F] pentatonic box one for eternity.
_ [Bb] _ _ But to be fair, [F] then applying Barry's rule
to a song like I Should Care or Wiz's 4-on-6
also can become a little bit [G] strange.
So maybe you want to be aware of both systems
and flexible enough to use the one
that works the best for you
in whatever song you're playing.
At least that's what I've taken away from [B] that.
In music, context is everything.
[Ab] One thing that this way of thinking really helps [N] with
is when you're making chord melody arrangements
simply because if you can understand the chord progression
and know some of the other similar progressions
that are [F] available
then you can do fantastic things
and make a chord melody arrangement
your personal take on that song.
Also in terms of what chords you use.
And if you want to learn more
about making