the christmas song jazz chord chart piano

and this is very important information to speed up the process of memorisation when learning jazz standards. You will see that the chapters are “1st A Section”, “The B Section” etc…. I have created the chapter markings around the form of the tune. I had forgotten to add the lesson chapters to the lesson, but you will now see the chapter markings. We can further reduce our reliance on lead sheets by memorising the form and chord changes of the song. Your “Method B” is the better approach and I certainly advise using lead sheets until we have memorised the tune.

I have never used transcriptions in my jazz education and it is best to reduce and remove our reliance on reading full notation when playing jazz piano. I would advise against the using the transcription. Have fun with this stuff and let me know if you have any further questions. Instead of resolving into the 1 chord, play the major 7th chord a half step up and add the #11 colour. By including these notes in the arpeggios running up the keyboard, it creates a mysterious quality to end the tune.Īs an exercise, try applying this to another tune that you are working on, perhaps a tune that is not in C Major, so that the chords are different. In both chords I outline the #11 in my arpeggios.įor Dbmaj7, the #11 is the note ‘G’ and for Cmaj7, the #11 is the note ‘F#’. Whenever we play a major chord, we can add the #11 which creates a ‘floating quality’. The final part of your question is the #11 colour that we apply to both chords. Notice that the final melody note is a ‘C’ over a C Major chord.īy instead playing a Dbmaj7, that ‘C’ in the melody becomes the major 7th of Db, and then we can then resolve into any note or extension of C Major, I like to run up the keyboard with Db Major 7 Arpeggio, and then resolve into C Major using a ‘D’ which is the 9th. This also works well when the final chord finishes with the root in the melody, as it does in this tune.

In this example, we finish with a C Major chord, and so I play a major chord a half step higher which is Db Major 7. It’s a nice trick that we can apply to any jazz standard. This delays the sense of resolution into the final chord, and surprises the listener. When ending a tune, we can finish with a major chord a half step higher, run that chord up the piano, and then resolve into the I Chord.

The christmas song jazz chord chart piano