I've been playing jazz piano for 16 years, I started at age 15 getting paid to play. Here are a set of simple rules you could use to generate harmony that would generally reflect what jazz piano players actually play on gigs.
First of all, one generally should not play the root at the bottom of the chord. This leaves the structure more open to substitions and melodic variation in the bass.
Second, a piano player does not REALLY play Cmaj7, when the changes say that, he plays some coloristic variation on that. The only notes that need to occur to define a progression, are either the 3rd and 7th, or 3rd and 6th. All others are open to variation.
With those in mind, here are some typical chords:
[Cmaj7] E G B E A B E A D E G B D E G A D E F# B
[Cmin7] Eb G Bb Eb Bb D Eb A D Eb F Bb Eb G Bb D Eb G A D Eb F Bb D
[C7] E Bb D E F# Bb Bb E A E G Bb D E F# Bb D E A Bb D F# A Bb D (no 3rd) F A Bb D (a C7sus, which can be substituted often)
[...if the C7 functions as a V7, then it will probably be altered, b13, #9 or b9, as below...] E Bb D# E Bb Db E F# Bb Db E G Bb Db E A Bb Db E A Bb D# E Ab Bb D# E Ab Bb Db F A Bb Db (C7susb9, another substition that will have more tension than ordinary C7)
And that is about it for the normal arsenal of chords, excepting quartal and So What chords, and a few other tricks that are more about superimposing harmony then playing the harmony as given.
This info would give pretty realistic modern voicings, when combined with some idea of voicing - not voice leading per se, but avoiding big jumps between chord voicings. Hope this info is helpful, I don't want to clog up PD list with too much of this kind of thing...
~David
On 8/14/06, Patco megalegoland@yahoo.fr wrote:
Chuckk Hubbard a écrit :
Are you familiar with the "Gestalt" perception laws?
I've checked it, that's interesting, but I wouldn't say that I am familiar with it.
Is the simplest way to describe a harmony with letters the same as the simplest way to hear it?
For playing a standard jazz, we use a book called: The real Book. There are many volumes of 300-400 pages full of most popular jazz standards. Any jazzman would say that learning jazz is actually done through this book.
In each score there are several levels of information:
1 The chords which are wrote with letters like CM7, G7b9b5, FM7#11/G, ect ... 2 The musical score with melody, and nuances ( but nuances usually have to be deduced from the emotion of the players) 3 The structure of the tune, where parts are also called with letters, part A, part B, ... and almost every structures are like that:
A A B A
4 words of the song ...
Voicing is the best way for both following the harmony and giving the soloist and the singer the notes of the melody
Personaly, I don't think at all that full piano scores is for jazzmen, but for classical pianists that are too lazy to learn jazz.
Don't forget that jazz is a music for improvisators.
And of course it depends on voicing, range, and changes.
When I began to practice jazz with my guitar, and learned about voicing, I wanted to make a classification of every sounding voicings of every chords, like Joe Pass did in one of his book, but,
the amount of combinations is very high, just an exemple:
in the major scale we have four types of chords with four sounds using the 7th
M7, 7, m7, and m7b5
so we have 2^4 combinations of four different chords which has 4 different voicings, then we could make at least 16*4*4= 256 different chords,
and five types of chords with five sounds
M79, 79, m79, m7b9, m7b9b5
then 2^5*5*5= 78125 different chords
etc...
Obviously not all the chords are sounding good, mostly the ones where the basses has an interval lower than the fifth (and we uses to remove the fifth because this note is sounding like the fundamental)
and some chords are almost similar with other chords eg: CM7 = C E G B = Em6 = E G B C
I think that it might be possible to make a mathematical formula instead of a database of chords, but I am not good enough with math' to write a formula that would give all sounding chords in an harmonical context.
Patco.
p4.vert.ukl.yahoo.com uncompressed Mon Aug 14 20:27:01 GMT 2006
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