I’m going to show you some of the most practical jazz chords, that is you’ll be able to actually use these when you comp (accompany) or more specifically play chord melody arrangements. While many teachers will advise you to learn every chord in every inversion, some of them are very unpractical and even unplayable. But many are difficult to play and will slow down your progress tremendously, so we want to avoid those at first.
There are basically 5 qualities of jazz chords – major 7th, minor 7th, dominant 7th, minor 7 flat 5 and diminished 7 chords. Before we get into alterations I’m going to show you some useful places to play these chords, and ones that I use in a lot of my easy chord melody arrangements. These are mostly root inversions – that is, the root is in the bass in many cases.
I’ve shown them for D chords but you can shift them to any other note my moving the whole thing up or down the fretboard. Video will come soon. Later I’ll show you my chord melody technique using these chords and how you can play chord melody too.
