How Joe Pass Makes Jazz Chords Simple & Easy
Do you feel overwhelmed when you look at the sheet music of a jazz song with lots of difficult chords?
I used to feel completely lost until I found Joe Pass’ method for simplifying chords, which makes it 10x easier to solo over songs. It’s worked, not only for me but also 100s of my students, helping them easily play jazz solos over jazz standards.
So in this video, I’ll break down this method and show you how to easily expand your repertoire and have fun soloing while you do it.
Check this out! You might also recognize the approach from someone else:
“first of all I’ll tell you if I have a 2 5 forget the two and you don’t need it”
So this isn’t exactly how I think chord progressions but I sort of agree with him. As you’ll see, the way Joe breaks down a jazz standard is incredibly practical—and it makes learning a song so much easier.
I’m sure you know that feeling: staring at a chart, feeling lost in a forest of chords, with crazy extensions and alterations everywhere.
But the thing is: that’s not how you have to think about it. Let me show you!
But first: as you probably already know, Joe Pass is one of my favorite jazz guitarists. He was a walking library of jazz standards. I’ve heard that in the famous virtuoso sessions, the producer, Norman Granz, would just ask Joe to play a song, and they’d record it—no rehearsal!
That’s pretty mind-blowing!
So when I found this video of him explaining how he thinks about chord progressions, I was very interested in what he had to say.
II V is just V
Let’s dig into this idea: in jazz, a II V progression is often just… a V chord in disguise!
Joe Pass explains it like this:
“Why are you playing the II?
What is it? Like…
If you play the V that got the II. Here’s the scale for the V. It’s a G7
Here’s the scale for the II It’s the same scale!”
Instead of thinking about two separate chords, you can just focus on the V chord. And Joe’s not the only one who does this—Barry Harris teaches it, and you’ll find it all over Bebop. In fact, you can even spot it in Charlie Parker’s solos like this one.
Check out this phrase from “Blues For Alice.”
On the bar labeled Em7 to A7, Parker hits a C# right on the first beat and continues with an A7 arpeggio.
That’s a A7, not Em7—he’s thinking about the V chord, not the II.
So, next time you see a II V progression, try simplifying it in your mind: it’s really just a V chord. This makes improvising on songs a lot less intimidating. But you want to make sure that you reduce chords the right way, otherwise it works against you. Let me explain…
Pros and Cons of Reducing Chord Progressions
Having fewer chords is great, but you have to go about it the right way. Let’s start with what works: If you look at the chords for Charlie Parker’s Confirmation, a Bebop classic:
The obvious advantage is that there are fewer chords to remember. If you take out the II chords a LOT easier:
Because you go from this,
to this:
Another advantage of reducing II V’s is that the strongest movement in a II V I is the resolution from V to I, and that is still there, so you keep the essence of what is going on, which means that the reduced progression will often still make sense as a chord progression.
Joe Pass puts it simply: the notes in the II and V scales are basically the same.Another way to see it—something a teacher once told me—is that the II chord is really just a fancy suspension of the V chord. For example, Dm7 is like a G7sus4 that got out of hand and became its own chord.
The Exception
But here’s where I don’t always agree with Joe Pass. Sometimes, it actually makes more sense to keep the II chord and toss out the V chord instead.
Let’s look at what happens:
In the last section, we reduced the chords in “Confirmation” and ended up with A7 moving to G7, and then G7 moving to F7.
But here’s the problem—when you string those together, you lose that strong V-I resolution that makes the lines flow and drives the solo forward.
Instead, it gets a bit weak with A7 resolving to G7 and G7 resolving to F7.
So, for the bar with Dm7 and G7, it can be better to just turn that into a Dm7 chord. Now, A7 resolves straight to Dm7. And if you check, you’ll see that this actually matches what Charlie Parker plays in his solos as well.
Here’s the twist: while Bebop players sometimes ignored chords, they also loved adding extra ones. So, simplifying isn’t the only trick in the book. Let’s look at how they added more chords next.
Bebop: More Chords! (but also less chords)
Ironically, Bebop is probably the period in Jazz where it became normal to turn V chords and (a lot of other chords) into II V progressions when harmonizing standards. Why, did they do that? This has to do with how Bebop is very much about moving harmony, and if you have a II V I then there is more movement than just the V I.
But keep in mind that they thought about a lot of those “extra chords” as embellishments and extra sounds and not than really a description of the actual harmony of the song. A good example of this could be the first two bars of “Have You Met Miss Jones”:
The first version has a ton of motion and sounds exciting. This second version is what’s actually happening in the song.
Here you might often solo on the 2nd progression while the comping plays the first.
And the best part is that you are free to do whatever you want. Sometimes it is nice to just nail all those changes, even if the comping just plays the basic changes:
Joe Pass went even further than the II V, he reduced everything to 3 chord types, and that practical approach can also be very useful. Let’s check it out!
Joe Pass: Just 3 Chords!
What if you only needed 3 types of chords to play any Jazz standard? That is how Joe Pass thinks about songs:
“I mean major, ,minor and dominant. You must look at chord changes really in the simplest form way you can look at them”.
As you will see, it’s a great shortcut for reducing the amount of chords in a progression . It also helps you understand how the harmony flows, but not always, and maybe tying your understanding to specific chords is not explaining how to improvise or even comp over the song.
“Stella By Starlight” is a good example here, and Joe Pass reduces that song in the video. Here, the way he interprets the way back to Bb really resonated with me:
“You know, like if I play Stella By Starlight in the key of Bb. The first chord is A7, 2nd chord is F7, 3rd chord is B7, next chord is Eb, next chord is Ebm. Bb”
Stella By Starlight:
I’ll get to how Ab7 is really just Ebm in a bit, but let’s first look at the different dominants he is talking about.
F7 is clearly the dominant in the key, which is Bb major, and you just hear that sound with a 9th and 13th in the song, even if the original arrangement has a b13, if I remember correctly.
This makes a ton of sense, and reducing Cm7 F7 to F7 also works really well, but if you look at the A7 at the beginning of the song, then that is not A7 as you would find it in D major.
There are a few things that give that away: The II chord is an Eø, and there is a Bb in the melody over the A7. So that chord is more like an A7 in Dm with a b9 and a b13. If you treat F7 and A7 the same, one of them is going to sound off.
In general, you will quickly come across a few different types of dominant chords that you want to be able to handle; these two are the most important ones.
In fact, it wasn’t really an A7 or Eø A7 is a reharmonization. The chord is originally a diminished chord, what I usually describe as a #IV diminished,
But as you may or may not know, I tend to reduce chord progressions to functions rather than chords because that also tells me how I have to play the chords or solo over the progression, the one thing that is clearly not included when you just throw away the II chord.
Barry Harris has another way of explaining this type of dominant sound where he tells you to play down the “C7 scale to the 3rd of A”
Essentially that scale is D harmonic minor which is the scale that gives you an A7 with a b9 and a b13.
It is a very neat way to introduce the sound of the progression and also get the right extensions in there without having to start talking about harmonic minor and making things complicated.
As I mentioned, I tend to think in functions when I’m looking at a chord progression. The downside is that you might need to learn some extra names or concepts, which can be more work than just simplifying everything.
But Joe Pass clearly learned in a very practical way—by playing a ton of songs—while I also learned a lot from theory lessons when I was studying. Let’s talk about functions and why the Ab7 is really Ebm in Stella.
IVm and Backdoor Dominants
The other thing that really resonated with me, and actually is the reason I decided to make this video, is how Joe Pass described this section:
So he clearly hears the Ab7 as a minor subdominant since that dominant is then turned into a IV minor chord
Instead of keeping it as a dominant, which to me suggests that his ears think in functions as well.
A lot of the most beautiful harmony in Jazz standards is about minor subdominant chords in major.
Let’s look at what chords make up this small group. They can do magical things, and it is very useful to realize that they belong together, and that you can often change one out for the other.
In this case, the song is in Bb major, so the IV chord is Eb and the IVm chord will be Ebm, as Joe plays in the video.
The different chords you then have available as common minor subdominant options would be:
The important notes for the sound are probably that the chord contains the Gb, which is the minor 3rd of Ebm, and that it does not contain an A, because that would make it a dominant chord, some sort of F7 sound.
If you want to get comfortable with these sounds, check out some Cole Porter songs—he uses these chords to create beautiful progressions.
Getting Rid of Filler Chords
As I mentioned, my way of thinking about progressions is not only about throwing away some of the chords. Instead, it is about understanding how the harmony moves, which makes it easier to solo over the song. If you want to see just how powerful an approach that is, then check out this video, which will give you a good start when it comes to not only analyzing but also hearing the chord progressions.
How The Pros Think About Chord Progressions (and you probably don’t)
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