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Chord Of The Week 13/2/16 TWINKLEJAZZ5 - Jazz III7 3rd & 7th chord frags

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bigjonbigjon Frets: 680
edited July 2016 in Technique
TWINKLE JAZZ 5 
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 4th-to-last chord of the bridge on the words "...Like a...", which is E7, the III chord, leading in to the A7 VI chord on the word "...diamond...". The melody note is G xxxx8x and the bass note is E x7xxxx, in the video I play the chord as a E7#9 x7678x at 0:15. 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.
 
Recap on RE-HARMONISATION and SECONDARY DOMINANTS
But before we get to the voicing of the chord, a recap of last week's excursus on how we arrived at a III dominant chord in the first place. A conventional nursery-rhyme rendition of the tune would probably have a chord sequence of C F C G (I IV I V) for "Like a diamond in the sky": x32x13 xx3211 x3x010 32x03x. But jazz strongly favours the forward momentum given when the bassline moves up in fourths (= down in fifths), as happens with the V I progression at the end of the song on the words "what you are." For the line "Like a diamond in the sky, which ends on a V chord G, we'll rigidly move the bassline back in 4ths so "in the" has a bass note of D, "diamond" has a bass note of A, and this week's chord on "Like a" has a bass note of E. Sticking with the C major scale, that gives us the iii chord Em, but Em to an A bass note sounds pretty feeble as a progression within the context of the line in the key of C, so most of the time jazz replaces the iii chord with its dominant equivalent III chord, here an E7 instead of an Em7. That has the effect of abandoning C major as the key centre and replacing it with a new key centre of A. This is because a key centre is uniquely defined by a 7th chord, as there is only one 7th chord in the parent scale for each key. Going up the harmonised major scale, the ONLY dominant 7 chord is the V chord, a G7 in our usual key of C. So the harmonised C major scale I ii iii IV V vi vii I (root, 3rd & 7th only) is Cmaj7 Dm7 Em7 Fmaj7 G7 Am7 Bm7 Cmaj7 - Cmaj7 x3x45x, Dm7 x5x56x, Em7 x7x78x, Fmaj7 xx3x55, G7 xx5x67, Am7 xx7x88, Bm7 x x 9 x 10 10, and back to C x x 10 x 12 12. So the fact that our new chord E7 is a 7th chord means it MUST be functioning as the V dominant chord, and so the key has temporarily moved to A. This re-harmonisation move is called a 'Secondary Dominant', where any chord which is not the I chord is approached from a dominant 7th chord built on the root note a 4th backwards from it. 

So, now we've decided to play some kind of III dominant chord, how to arrange it onto the guitar? 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 A major scale A B C# D E F# G# (the temporary parent scale) up from E (the root note of the current chord) is note G# xx6xxx and the 7th note of the A major scale up from E is note D xxx7xx. 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 III7 chords is - 
III7 - E7(no root): xx67xx or x x 12 13 x x 
 
As usual I put down 2 versions of the 3rd & 7th on the 3rd & 4th strings: this week the first voicing, which I'm using on the video, has the 7th on the 4th string whereas the second version has the 7th on the 3rd string. If your chord progression is moving round the cycle of fifths (and in Jazz this happens a lot by design, see the excursus on re-harmonisation above!), 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 xx67xx into xx56xx. 


Now we'll add the bass note E x7xxxx back in, and the melody note G xxxx8x with is the #9 of the E7 chord as it is one semitone more than 9 notes away from E going up a cycled A major parent scale. So the full chord with the melody note on top is - 
E7#9: x7678x
as at 0:15 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 I'll also keep a running index to the whole series on that page.
And the previous CoTW in the series, on the A7 VI chord, is at
http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/67731/chord-of-the-week-6-2-16-twinklejazz4-jazz-vi7-3rd-7th-chord-frags
Current favourite chord - Gm9add13 x[5]5360, see http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/56152/chord-of-the-week-21-11-15-a-gmadd9add13-based-on-dido-s-white-flag
My facebook music site is "Jon Kingsman Music" at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jon-Kingsman-Music/231035300359856
0reaction image LOL 0reaction image Wow! 2reaction image Wisdom

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