ii V I Creation & Destruction, Comping with Dominant Chords || Jazz Guitar Lessons Daily 9

From our free, Jazz Guitar Lessons Daily Series: Lesson 9
Thursday - How Chords Move
1/21/21
When it comes to jazz guitar comping, I think the jazz guitar education world has a long way to go. Not that there’s any incorrect information out there. It just reminds me a lot of the fitness industry where everyone wants to talk about fancy machines, expensive supplements, exotic superfoods, and 500 pound deadlifts, but nobody wants to just get down to the nitty gritty and admit that if we all just ate a little bit less junk and moved around a little bit more throughout the day, we would look and feel and be significantly healthier. Honestly this is my feeling on the majority of the way jazz education orders our priorities… not JUST when it comes to comping.
But Thursday is our comping lesson day, so let’s get into it.
In our comping course, Chords For Life, I do my best to break down all of comping into the two most important fundamentals. Groove and movement. Of these two, being able to play with a strong groove and an amazing sense of feel is the most important thing. If you don’t believe me, go listen to a James Brown song. The guitar player is probably vamping on a single chord for the majority of the track, but it grooves so hard you just want to get up and move. We should always remember that no matter how hip, modern, or out there jazz gets… it’s growing from a musical tradition that came directly from dance music. Even though we don’t expect audience members to get up and dance when we perform jazz today, it should still reflect that and make people feel almost uncomfortable sitting still and not tapping their toes, nodding their heads, and feeling something inside themselves.
As far as the second element goes, movement, there are all kinds of ways that chords like to move. But the four movement types I present in Chords For Life are dominant, diminished, chromatic, and diatonic. These four, as I learned from studying composition and arranging, are probably the most common and traditional types of movement in the hundreds of years of the western musical tradition… dating as far back as Bach and continuing all the way up through Bird and Rosenwinkel.
Today’s lesson is all about exploring the potential of dominant function. How does it work, and how can we use it to really say something harmonically. Specifically we’re applying it to the humble ii V I and seeing just how many harmonic pathways we can come up with to move through this progression. It’s all about playing with the sensation of home and away, tonic and dominant, resolution and tension. How can we take the harmony (and therefore the listener) somewhere and make it an exciting journey? Once we understand this, we are free from playing the same old real book changes chorus after chorus after chorus. Nobody craves hearing those changes over and over. Not the audience, not the soloist, not the original composers of tunes…
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