Just learning the chords is not enough to really play something that sounds like real Jazz Comping, and you need to develop more than just finding some chord voicings.
In this video, I am going to take an easy Jazz Standard, and then show you how you can start with basic chords and step by step develop your comping, improvise with the chords, and lay down the harmony so that it sounds beautiful and interesting.
Level 1 – Basic Chords
Perdido is a great and very easy Jazz Standard to work on if you are new to playing Jazz, and as you will see, it is a good chord progression to develop some very solid comping skills.
If you play through an A part with a basic set of chords then you only need these basic chord voicings
And making this a little more interesting is pretty simple.
Splitting The Voicings In Two
What I am doing here is just adding some rhythms and splitting up the chord voicings in a bass part and a chord part.
Thinking of the chords as two layers like this is actually a really essential way of thinking of grooves, even if it is not that clear in Jazz.
This is of course also what happens with a walking bass and chords where there are clearly two active layers
Let’s have a look at what you can do the chord voicings to start comping with them
Level 2 – Rootless chords and melodies
The first thing to do is to take the basic voicings from example 1 and then turn them into rootless voicings by leaving out the bass note, like this:
And you can take the 3-note voicings in example 4 and try some different melody notes here as well:
You can also start adding melody notes on the top string:
In this way, you also have some small melodic exercises for the chords and that is going to be really useful for the next section when this has to be turned into comping.
Level 3 – Comping
With this material, you can now start to make short melodies and riffs and comp through an A-part. First I’ll show you how that sounds and then talk about how you practice playing like this
As you can see these are small melodies with a few notes on each chord, so you want to keep it really simple so it doesn’t get in the way.
Notice how I am not writing any extensions here because we are improvising with the chords and they are changing all the time, so it is better to just write the basic chord.
Develop Your Comping Rhythms
If you want to develop your own vocabulary then you could start with a single chord and just play simple two note melodies.
You can then take this to the song and start developing your comping.
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