Standards, part II

To review, the chords progressions you find in the songs you analyze give you a set of rules with which you can create your own harmonic sequences. In this article, we'll discuss the method you can use to string multiple progressions together into a longer phrase. To begin this, we'll first do away with the idea of an overarching key. Traditionally, passages move from tonic, to sub-dominant, to dominant, and back to tonic; this harmonic method was used up until the end of the nineteenth century and is used in almost all of the standards jazz players play. While it can be used to make an almost endless amount of great music, it requires a decent amount of training to use effectively and originally. Because of that, we'll ignore it for the time being. Instead, we'll consider each chord only in relation to either the chord that precedes it or the chord that follows it – the chord progressions you've written down already do this. What this allows us to do is substitute chords and renumber them with the Roman numeral system. For our purposes, any major chord labeled with an upper-case Roman numeral can be considered a I, or tonic, chord. For example:

The simple progression I → IV can be repeated ad infinitum by renumbering the IV chord as a I. Once the first chord change occurs, you can reuse the progression in respect to the IV chord. It helps to consider named chords here. Cmaj7 → Fmaj7 can be considered a I → progression; if we then consider the Fmaj7 chord to be a I chord, you can repeat the pattern and create a Fmaj7 → Bbmaj7 progression. When linked with the first set, you create a greater passage of Cmaj7 → Fmaj7 → Bbmaj7. The duration of each chord is up to you, but to begin with, it may be easier to consider each chord as one or two measures, with an emphasis on four and eight measure phrases.

This same process can be applied to any other chord quality – of which you'll probably see minor, dominant, and half-diminished most frequently. Be careful of extensions though: generally, you can feel free to alter any generic chord, but taking alterations away from chords changes their meaning and may ultimately result in the breaking of some of the rules you've established. In short, you can substitute a minor 6^th chord for a minor 7^th chord, but you probably shouldn't substitute a minor 7^th chord for a minor 6^th chord.

So let's take a few unusual progressions found in some songs and make something out of them.

We'll start with...

I → i (Green Dolphin Street)

IV → VII7 (All The Things You Are)

i6 → Vmaj7 (All of You)

bv-7b5 → IV7#11 (Footprints)

In addition to this, we'll include the basic ii-V-I cadences in both major and minor as well as the cycle of fifths inside of one key (meaning, the chord qualities of the key departed from in the cycle are maintained). Finally, dominant chords may resolves to their intended root, but can be either major or minor (for those of you that know about tritone substitution, we'll ignore it for the moment).

For fun, we'll start with the relatively unusual key of D Major.

Here's a rather thoughtless example of this process; the chord progressions have been labeled with their respective sources. For ease of reading (as it seems to me) chords have been labeled with respect to D major.

I → bV7 (All The Things You Are) → VII (resolution of dominant) → bvii-7b5 (ii-V beginning) → VI7#11 (Footprints) → II (resolution of dominant)

Substituting in the roots, this gives us

D → Ab7 → Db → C-7b5 → B7#11 → E

Rhythmically, we'll organize these into simple four measure phrases, so

|Dmaj7 | Ab7 | Dbmaj7 | Dbmaj7 | C-7b5 | B7#11| Emaj7 | Emaj7|

Not genius by any means, and it could stand a little more distance between the roots of the chords, but it's a fine start to something. Taking a cue from the AABA pop song form, we'll simply repeat the same eight measures to create a second A. So, the form becomes:

|Dmaj7 | Ab7 | Dbmaj7 | Dbmaj7 | C-7b5 | B7#11| Emaj7 | Emaj7|

|Dmaj7 | Ab7 | Dbmaj7 | Dbmaj7 | C-7b5 | B7#11| Emaj7 | Emaj7|

The next goal is to create a contrasting eight measure phrase to function as the bridge. A few basic guidelines: typically, the bridge of a song is in a different key from the A section, helping to create variety. Since we're not using key structure here, this doesn't help us directly; in a broader sense though, we can take it to mean a contrast in harmonic color. For us, it'd be good to stray away from repeating the same chord qualities in the bridge, even if we can't claim it's technically in a different key. Also, varying the harmonic rhythm – the rate at which the chords change – allows for another way to create contrast between the A and B sections. But first, in order to get to the bridge, we'll put in a traditional ii-V cadence, picking A Major as a target (as luck would have it, A Major is the dominant key of D Major and the sub-dominant of the E Major we left from, so formally, this will work quite well). This edits the second A slightly, resulting in:

|Dmaj7 | Ab7 | Dbmaj7 | Dbmaj7 | C-7b5 | B7#11| Emaj7 | Emaj7|

|Dmaj7 | Ab7 | Dbmaj7 | Dbmaj7 | C-7b5 | B7#11| Emaj7 | B-7 → E7|

So taking a few more of our basic progressions, we'll string together some more chords. This section will combine the major to minor movement in Green Dolphin Street with the minor 6 to major 7 motion found in All of You, resulting in

|Amaj7 | Amaj7 | A-6 | A-6 | Emaj7 | Emaj7 | E-6 | E-6|

Maybe more Major 7 chords than we'd like, so we'll substitute a 6/9 chord in their place. In conjunction with the minor 6^th chords, this provides a nice voicing contrast with the A section, as the two sections become differentiated by style of chord construction (3^rds vs. 4ths). The result is

|A6/9 | 6/9 | A-6 | A-6 | E6/9 | E6/9 | E-6 | E-6|

From here, we just add a third A section and call it done, making the final form:

|Dmaj7 | Ab7 | Dbmaj7 | Dbmaj7 | C-7b5 | B7#11| Emaj7 | Emaj7|

|Dmaj7 | Ab7 | Dbmaj7 | Dbmaj7 | C-7b5 | B7#11| Emaj7 | B-7 → E7|

|A6/9 | 6/9 | A-6 | A-6 | E6/9 | E6/9 | E-6 | E-6|

|Dmaj7 | Ab7 | Dbmaj7 | Dbmaj7 | C-7b5 | B7#11| Emaj7 | Emaj7|

In the end, nothing extraordinary, but it's something to work with. All the remains to be done is the composition of the melody, which, unfortunately, can be decidedly harder to write than the song form. For now, just experiment with as many chord progressions as you can find and when you've finished a few song forms on them, try soloing on the ones you like.