Chord Of The Week 30/1/16 TWINKLEJAZZ3 - Jazz ii7 3rd & 7th chord frags

bigjon · January 2016

TWINKLE JAZZ 3
I'm building a solo jazz chord-melody arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star from the ground up, gradually introducing more complex extensions and substitutions as we go. The key is Cmajor, to keep the theory easy to follow. Video at the bottom of this post. Today we're looking at the third-to-last chord on the word "...wonder...", which is a Dm7, the ii chord, leading in to the G7 V chord on the words "...what you...". The melody note is E xxxx5x and the bass note is a D x5xxxx, in the video I play the chord as a Dm9 x5355x at 0:26. Initially we'll always ignore the bass note and the melody note. If we were playing in a group the bassist and melody instrument would be taking care of those in any case, so our job would just be to define the harmony above the bass note. We'll put them back in later to complete our solo jazz guitar arrangement.

The key to getting a chord to sound jazzy is to ignore the 5th and focus instead on the 3rd and 7th. The 3rd note of the C major scale CDEFGAB (the parent scale) up from D (the root note of the current chord) is note F (4th string 3rd fret) and the 7th note of the C major scale up from a D is note C (3rd string 5th fret). For solo jazz arrangements I recommend mostly putting the 3rd and 7th onto strings 3 & 4, to leave strings 1&2 clear for jazzy extensions and melody notes, and leaving strings 5 & 6 clear for bass notes. So our 3rd & 7th partial chord for ii7 chords is -
ii7 - Dm7(no root): xx35xx or x x 10 10 x x

As with last week's V7 chord xx34xx or x x 9 10 x x I put down 2 versions of the 3rd & 7th on the 3rd & 4th strings: this week the first voicing that I'm using on the video has the 7th on the 3rd string whereas the V7 had the 7th on the 4th string. If your chord progression is moving round the cycle of fifths (and in Jazz this happens a lot!), where the root notes of this chord and the next chord are 5 notes of the scale apart, then by swapping which string out of the 3rd or 4th string takes the third of the chord and which takes the seventh from one chord to the next, you will create voicings that are right next to each other on the fretboard and will flow smoothly, here xx35xx into xx34xx. This is a ii chord followed by a V chord, so forms the backbone of the legendary ii V progression, which at a guess comprises about 70% of any traditional jazz standard.

A word on lower case notation for the ii chord. In Nashville chord notation, a capital letter means that the third of the chord is major (four semitones above the root note), hence V7 and Imaj7 which we have seen in previous weeks, eg C major has a root note C x3xxxx and a major third 4 frets higher E x7xxxx. Lower case means that the third of the chord is minor (only three semitones above the root note) so the ii chord of a harmonised major scale is minor: in this case Dminor has a D root note x5xxxx and the third is F 3 frets higher at x8xxxx.

Going up the harmonised major scale, the I, IV, and V chords have a major third, whereas the ii, iii, vi and vii chords all have a minor third. So the harmonised C major scale I ii iii IV V vi vii I (root and 3rd only) is C Dm Em F G Am Bm C - C x3xx5x, Dm x5xx6x, Em x7xx8x, F xx3xx5, G xx5xx7, Am xx7xx8, Bm x x 9 x x 10, and back to C x x 10 x x 12. It already sounds pretty jazzy if you just play up and down these harmonised-in-thirds (tenths really as I've spaced the notes further apart) chords round the harmonised C major scale.

Now we'll add the bass note D x5xxxx back in, and the melody note E xxxx5x with is the 9th of the Dm chord as E is 9 notes away from a D going up a repeated C major scale. So the full chord with the melody note on top is -
Dm9: x5355x

as at 0:26 in this video of me playing a 30-second arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

If you want to follow the series from the start, the first TWINKLEJAZZ CoTW, on the Cmajor I chord, is at
http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/64757/chord-of-the-week-2-1-16-twinklejazz1-jazz-imaj7-3rd-7th-chord-frags

And the previous CoTW in the series, on the G7 V chord, is at
http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/65355/chord-of-the-week-9-1-16-twinklejazz2-jazz-v7-3rd-7th-chord-frags