The Easy Jazz Chords Every Beginner Should Start With
When you are just starting to explore Jazz and Jazz chords, it is easy to get lost in complicated chords that are difficult to play and even more difficult to use in a song. That’s not where you want to start. Instead, I’ll show you some very easy chords and five ways you can use them to play music.
The video is also sort of a walk through jazz and jazz guitar history.
The Shell-Voicings
The chords I am talking about are, of course, Shell-voicings, which are so practical on guitar that it is almost hard to believe. Let me explain how they are constructed before we get to the famous jazz guitarists and the different styles!
It’s very simple: There are two versions of every chord. For a Cmaj7 chord,
you have one with the root on the 5th string and the 3rd and 7th on the middle strings.
The other version has the root on the 6th string, but the 3rd and 7th are still on that middle string set.
Having the chord on the middle string set is important because it makes a lot of chord progressions easy to play. Here is one version of a II V I
You can also play that starting with the root on the 6th string like this:
For Shell voicings, you leave out the 5th, and as you will hear in the songs, that is ok; in a song, you won’t miss it. Towards the end, I’ll show you how you might add the 5th back in again or maybe some other more interesting notes like extensions or alterations.
#1 Almost not Jazz
It is almost not Jazz yet. When you start with a song, you want to play the chords to hear how the harmony sounds. Check out how this works on the song Autumn Leaves, and there are two things you want to notice: The chords move very smoothly through the progression, and a little into the song, I start adding a bit of rhythm to give you an idea of how you can use them when you go beyond just hearing the harmony.
I am sure you can hear how easy it is to use these and also how much a little rhythm adds to your comping. The next example is often connected to the swing era of Jazz.
#2 It’s The Wrong Band, Freddie!
Shell voicings are often used in big bands, where the guitar is as much a percussion instrument as a harmony instrument. Here you play the chords in quarter notes with a slight accent on 2 & 4.
The most famous guitarist to play this style was probably Freddie Green, who played with the Count Basie Big Band and was nicknamed Father Time. Here I am playing that type of comping on the song Satin Doll from another famous big band: Duke Ellington.
This way of playing is sometimes looked down on a bit because it is old-fashioned and doesn’t work with more modern-sounding playing, but if you are playing in a big band that plays this style of music, then it is a lot of fun!, and it works in more places than you might think. Let’s open up the rhythm and go from swing to hardbop. I am also adding a bonus variation, which isn’t Jazz, but you will need it, and trust me, you want to learn it.
#3 The Magic Split
If you are interested in Jazz guitar and Jazz chords, then one guitarist you must check out is Joe Pass. One of his opinions on chords always resonated with me, and also immediately fits these chords:
“You must look at chord changes, really, in the simplest form way you can look at them. don’t complicate them”
That is exactly what you are doing going through this material: Simple chords, but just using them differently on songs. Joe Pass was famous for playing solo guitar and being an amazing bebop guitarist, but he was also incredible at accompanying vocalists. His playing on the duo albums with Ella Fitzgerald is simply mindblowing, and those albums are a must if you are interested in Jazz.
I don’t think I have ever heard Joe Pass only play these simple chord voicings. He always does a lot of other brilliant stuff, but this is still a good foundation and connected to how he approaches comping. What I am using here is that we have a natural split in the shell voicings between the root note and the chord,
so you can play all the notes together, but you can also split them up and have a lot more variation:
Check out the C6 chord I am using in this next example and the anticipated chords. Anticipated chords are playing the chord a bit early on the 4&,
which adds energy to the music. I do that on the E7 and on the G7:
Of course, Joe Pass would add a lot more to the chords and not only play 3-note voicings all the time, but even when he does that, you can still see the shell voicings in there. Check this out:
I will help you get started with this in my online course Jazz Chord Craftmanship, which is a step-by-step way to build jazz chord and comping skills.
I’ll link to it in the video description. Check it out and join me in the community with the other students having fun with Jazz harmony!
There is another thing that is often associated with Joe Pass that shell voicings also do very well.
#4 Walking Away
This way of playing is stealing from another instrument, but it is a great way to keep the groove going, especially if you are playing in a duo with a vocalist or a horn player. It was mostly associated with Joe Pass, but he only uses it occasionally and doesn’t play entire songs like this. I am, of course, talking about chords and walking bass.
One of the main reasons this works with shell voicings is that the harmony is split in sets of strings on the guitar, so the lower strings play bass notes, and the middle two are chords. That makes it possible to play chords and walking bass together without breaking your fingers.
You play a quarter-note bassline that moves from one root note to the next and add chords over it when possible. The way the bassline moves towards the next root note drives the whole thing forward. Here’s an example from the song All The Things You Are
Now that you have heard one extreme where the bass is getting all the attention, it makes sense to do the opposite. After that, I want to add a bonus variation, even if it isn’t really Jazz.
#5 Rootless Voicings And Lots Of Color
A minimalist approach that is a great way to expand the chords is to play the shell voicings without the root or bass note, so only 2 notes, which is perfect for us guitarists who don’t like to think too much. You will sometimes hear Jim Hall or John Scofield doing this, and once you leave out the root, you can also start to add other notes quite easily. As you will see, it opens up a world of interesting colors and melodic movement.
The minimalist approach on a blues in C sounds like this; I’ll show you how to add more color afterward.
And using that as a foundation, you have a few fingers free to start adding colors and melodies on top of the chord, and now this is fairly easy to do:
There is another thing where shell voicings sound amazing, and even though it is associated with Jazz, it is another style.
BONUS: Bossanova
This groove also uses that natural split that I already talked about earlier. Of course, I am talking about Bossanova and Samba, something that Jazz has almost claimed ownership of. The beautiful thing about this style of music is that it was invented on guitar, so it is made for the instrument, and it uses the rich jazz harmony.
Bossanova grooves have two layers: a bass part that is on beats 1 and 3 with an alternating bass that moves down to the 5th if that is possible:
But if the root is on the 6th string, then you just repeat that note in the bass:
The high part is this pattern, which is played with the chords, and already like this, it is complete and it sounds great:
And if you put this to use on a song like So Danco Samba, you get this:
How Joe Pass Thinks About Chords
You also want to explore how to add more melody and color to the shell voicings, which is the one thing that you are now missing to really make your comping sound great. Check out this video that covers that. It also has clips from Joe Pass talking about how he thinks about chords and how that makes the process a lot easier for him. It really makes a lot of sense. Check it out!
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