Lord Larehip

I’ve touched on jazz charts before but I haven’t gone into them to any depth because the topic was jazz music in general and getting too deeply into reading charts would have bogged the whole thing down. Charts, however, are an integral part of jazz and any discussion of this music without a discussion of charts is incomplete. So I should explain jazz charts in some depth with a thread of its own. I am not going to get too complicated, this is intended more for the casual reader. After all, the experienced jazz musician doesn’t need to read a thread about charts. However, if you have any “weighty” questions, feel free to post them and I’ll get you answers.

First, what do we mean by “chart”?

Is it some big placard tacked up on the wall? No. It is the same size as a piece of sheet music but it is not precisely sheet music even though it almost always has written music on it. Rather, a chart is something like a diagram of the music and its movement—a flowchart, basically. It essentially tells the musician to “start here by playing this and then move here and play this, repeat this twice and then go here and play this and then move onto this part and play this and then everybody take a solo and then go back and repeat the last two parts and then jump to this ending by playing this.” This chart is very often referred to as a lead sheet. Doesn’t ordinary sheet music do the same? To an extent, yes. But charts are, by their nature, rather loose. Rarely does one encounter a jazz piece, especially a standard, that is rigidly dictated on paper the way classical music is. The chart leaves a lot of open space for improvisation and personal interpretation. Even many highly organized jazz compositions are written to leave a lot of room open because, frankly, that’s what makes a jazz piece jazz. A piece as Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” may sound like jazz but any jazz or classical musician will tell that it is a classical piece because it is written and performed as a standard classical composition is. Some jazz orchestras have done jazz arrangements of “Rhapsody” using charts and the difference is immediately apparent.

The chart differs from a score (written music of a piece containing every note) in three primary ways:

· Length – A chart is usually no more than a page or two. A score is virtually always a great many pages in length. By the time one assembles a symphonic score with all the music for each and every instrument, it could be a couple of hundred pages in length (I have a complete score of Beethoven’s 9th that runs 190 pages). A chart that long is unheard of and unnecessary.

· Notation – A great deal of the chart space will contain little to no written music but abbreviated instructions. A bass walk, for example, is rarely ever written out and will be shown as four diagonal slash marks per bar (or measure) with a chord designation written over each bar. This tells the bass player to improvise a walk constructed from those chords. The four slashes simply show that the bass is to be playing in 4/4 time indicating a walk. Solos are not written out but the basic melody will be and solos will be based on that (called “paraphrasing” although the musician may ignore that and improvise something else entirely). If the piece has an introduction or a coda, they will be written out and these are the only parts that may be played close to as written. Also the rules of designating flats and sharps will often be dispensed with. In many cases, flats and sharps are intermixed and follow the understanding that ascending musical phrases will use sharps (e.g. F-sharp on the way up) and descending will use flats (e.g. G-flat on the way down).

· Layout – A chart will be divided roughly as: Intro, A, B, A, B, Coda or Ending. The A and B sections are what carries the basic melody. There could be a C functioning as a bridge and so on. There are no set rules on exactly how many times these sections may be repeated since this is where solos will be inserted. Sometimes each instrument in the combo might take a solo but, in larger orchestras, the lead tenor sax, for example, might play the entire solo. Or maybe the alto sax will solo and then the trumpet or perhaps trombone and clarinet may trades riffs back and forth or maybe piano, bass or drums will carry the whole thing—whatever the arranger wants.

To read a chart requires one be well acquainted with music theory. Primarily, one must know the scales, chords and notation. Now I speak from the viewpoint of a bassist and while my experiences should be similar to any other musician in the band, there are bound to be differences as well so my knowledge here is general and may not apply to other instruments than bass. Knowing the scales requires more than knowing the notes but, even more importantly, the note positions. For example, take the C major scale. Its notes and their positions run thus:

1. C
2. D
3. E
4. F
5. G
6. A
7. B
8. C’

Now each note position has a name:

1. Tonic
2. Super tonic
3. Mediant
4. Subdominant
5. Dominant
6. Submediant
7. Subtonic / Leading tone

These are known as scale degrees. These are important because one further thing a chart does is establish key centers between the bars. In jazz, improvisation is essential so a jazz musician must know how to read chord progressions and the way to do this is through establishing key centers. So let’s look at how chords are stacked up in a scale:


Figure 1.

First we write out the notes in the scale as shown in the bottom half of Figure 1 which shows the C major scale. This establishes the roots (the lowest notes) of each chord. Then we start stacking notes on top of those—the second tier of notes is the thirds and the third tier is the fifths. What do we mean by this? Well, look at position I which is C. The lowest note in that triad is C. Now, if C is I, then what is iii? It’s E. So the third position of the scale becomes the third of the C major chord. What is the fifth (V) position of the C scale? It’s G. So the fifth of the C major chord is G. So the C major triad is CEG. Now look at position ii. That’s D in the C major scale. If D is the root of the chord, what is the third? D=1, E=2, F=3, so the third of the D chord in the C major scale is F. The fifth position, then, would be A. So the triad is DFA. But this is not the D major triad. Why? Because a D major chord has a major third or F-sharp (F#). This one has a minor third of F because, as we can see, F# does not naturally occur in this scale. When a triad has a minor third, then it is a minor chord. So, looking at Figure 1, we see those positions with upper case Roman numerals are major chords and those with lower case are minors. In other words, I, IV and V are major while ii, iii, vi and vii are minor. It will always work out this way no matter what major scale you plot out the chords for.

But there are two special cases here. To understand them (and they are indeed important), we must expand our triads into seventh chords by adding a fourth tier as follows:



Figure 2.

Now notice in the last two figures that position vii has a circle in Figure 1 and a circle with a slash through it in Figure 2. What does that mean? A circle means a chord is whole diminished and a circle with a slash means it is half-diminished. A whole diminished chord means from root to 3rd is a minor third interval, from third to fifth is a minor third interval and from fifth to seventh is a minor third interval. In Figure 1, the circle is used because there is a balance of minor thirds in the triad from bottom to top: root to third (B-D) is a minor 3rd interval and third to fifth (D-F) is also a minor 3rd interval. But when we add sevenths as in Figure 2, the scheme changes at position vii to minor 3rd (B-D), minor 3rd (D-F), major 3rd (F-A). This imbalance between the fifth and seventh results in a half-diminished chord which is represented by the circle with a slash. But vii is still considered a minor chord. If the fifth to the seventh was also a minor 3rd then the chord would be considered whole diminished.

The other special case is essential to our understanding of music and occurs at position V or the dominant. In Figure 2, it occurs at G in the C major scale. The triad portion of the chord is a major—GBD—but if we compare it to the other majors in the scale such as I or IV, we will see that the 7th on top of the triad is not a major 7th. In both I and IV, the 7ths are major. This dominant chord, as a result, is sometimes called a major-minor chord although it is better known as the dominant 7th. This is an exceptionally important chord because without it, songs cannot change key and most songs resolve using the V7 chord.

Now we need to discuss chord progressions. Jazz is not very comprehensible from a musician’s standpoint without knowing chord progression. So when I used the term “resolve” what did I mean? A song might start off at position I, pass through vi, pass through ii and then onto V and from V it must return or resolve back to I again. We use the term “resolve” because the chord progression sounds completed or resolved when it returns to the starting point. The progression I just ran through—I-vi-ii-V(7)—is a standard progression and often called the doo-wop progression because a lot of doo-wop songs used it. Although if played straight up this chord progression naturally sounds like doo-wop, jazz uses it in an almost infinite variety where it sounds nothing like doo-wop. An alternate way to play this is I-vi-IV-V(7).


GENE VINCENT In My Dreams - YouTube
A Gene Vincent song from 1957 using the I-vi-ii-V(7) chord progression. If you play the progression barebones, it will always sound this way.


Eddie Cochran - Lovin' Time (VintageMusic.es) - YouTube
Eddie Cochran from 1957 using the I-vi-ii-V(7) progression.


Erroll Garner plays Misty - YouTube
The magnificent Errol Garner playing his self-penned signature song, “Misty,” perhaps the finest jazz ballad ever written, which is also a I-vi-ii-V(7). Notice how different it is from the 50s pop songs that use the same progression. There will never be another like him.


Mr. Sandman - The Chordettes - YouTube
An unusual I-vi-ii-V(7) song is “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes from 1954. The “bum-bum-bum” part is actually I-vi-ii-V(7). But that doesn’t sound like the doo-wop stuff? That’s because they are doing something that jazz musicians often do: Arpeggiating each chord in the progression as individual notes. For example, if you have a guitar or piano handy, play C major 7, A minor 7, D minor 7 and G7 in that order as open chords and notice that it is very 50s sounding. But now instead of strumming the chord or playing all the notes at once, do this instead: Play the notes C, E, G, B ascending in the first measure then descend A, G, E, C in the second measure, then ascend D, F, A, C in the third bar then descend B, G, F, D in the fourth bar. Hey, it’s “Mr. Sandman”!!! But notice how the I-vi-ii-V(7) is hidden: The first measure is an arpeggiated C major 7, the second is A-7, third is D-7 and the fourth is G7 but the descending bars tend to obscure the progression. The ascending bars arpeggiate the standard chords as 1, 3, 5, 7 but the second bar descends as 8, 7, 5, 3 and the fourth descends as 3, 1, 7, 5. Nevertheless, the chord progression is still I-vi-ii-V(7). This demonstrates the nearly infinite variety one can get from a simple progression.

Lord Larehip

The main part of the I-vi-ii-V(7) progression is ii, V and I. There are an enormous number of songs written as ii-V and ii-V-I. Even blues which is I-IV-V is really a variation of ii-V-I. Notice that in both cases, the V resolves into I. One reason that rock and roll sounded somewhat different from blues even though it was clearly derived from it was that the I-IV-V of hard blues was sublimated into ii-V-I. Nearly every pop song in existence is ii-V or ii-V-I. But so are a great many jazz tunes and even classical pieces.

So before we go any further, let us review the circle of fifths:



Figure 3.

Figure 3 is my favorite circle theme to be found online because it shows the chord progression in Roman numerals. The indicator window is centered on C as I. When C is I then F is IV and G is V. No matter where you slide this indicator window, the relationship will be the same. Slide it over to D making it I, then IV is G and V is A and so on. The key signatures are shown both in sharps and flats and the relative minor scale of each major is shown in blue. Again, the major chords are in upper case Roman and minor are in lower case.

For more info about the circle of fifths, read my thread here:

http://www.musicbanter.com/general-m...le-fifths.html

Okay, so now we have looked at chord progressions and we can apply them to a jazz chart. Let’s start with a simple standard—“Satin Doll”:


Figure 4.

The bassist is mainly interested in the chord designations over each bar (or measure). So would the pianist and guitarist. Unless one of them is the lead instrument in which case they would be more interested in the notes on the staff which is the basic melody. The guitarist or pianist would play those chords as background accompaniment to the lead instrument.

We’re not too concerned with the key at this time (it’s C) because we are using the chord progression to establish key centers. The first two bars are occupied by a D minor 7th (D-7) and a G7. This is ii-V. C is I so D is ii and G is V so the key center for the first two measures is C. But the next two measures are E-7 and A7. What is the key center for these two measures? Since the chord progression is still ii-V then D is I, E is ii and A is V. So the key center is now D. You can consult Figure 3 to verify this. Using key centers eliminates the need to know the key while playing and to establish a chord progression instead which is far more useful.

As a bassist, I would play though it once as a “two-feel” before breaking into the walk. Two-feel is short for “two-beat feeling.” I would play two half-notes per measure based on a root-fifth thing. So, I’d play a D for two beats then a G for two beats in the first two measures then E and A for the next two and so on. This may sound easy but “two-feel” requires a creative mindset or it becomes very monotonous very quickly. There are secrets to varying it up and a good bassist relies on them. I find two-feel playing harder than walking.

Okay, so the two-feel portion is done and I start to walk it. How do I do that? When you listen to a jazz tune and the bassist is walking, you can tell he’s improvising. You know this wasn’t planned out ahead of time. Part of the reason you know this is because he never seems to play the repeated sections quite the same way. Yet, he’s never out of tune and seems to know what note he’s going to play before he plays it. So how does he do it?

All he’s really doing is expanding on the two-feel idea to make it four beats per measure. So in the first measure, the bassist would play a D-7 arpeggio. An arpeggio is simply playing the notes of a chord in succession rather than simultaneously. So once the walk begins, we will play one arpeggiated chord per bar rather than two chords per bar, e.g. a D-7 chord in the first bar (DFAD) then a G7 chord in the next bar (GEDG) then an E-7 in the next (EGBE) then an A7 in the next bar (AC#EA) and so on. This would be a simplistic walk but it would work. And that is really the secret of walking—arpeggiating the proper chord. Of course, it takes practice and a lot of it to do it creatively so it doesn’t sound the same on every number but this is it in a nutshell.

In fact, here is a bass chart for the walk portion of “Satin Doll” (notice the bass clef):


Figure 5.

Figure 4 was a very abbreviated chart for the piano or guitar in a small combo. It uses a treble clef and does not contain any indicators for the bass to walk. The reason is that seasoned professionals don’t need all that. They would rather keep the chart minimal and short. They know what they have to do. But a larger jazz orchestra might have charts for each instrument and so the bass would get its own chart. Notice it is divided into A and B sections which is quite helpful. When the bandleader is telling the orchestra how to play the piece, he can tell the band to play A then go onto B then repeat A again then jump to C before moving onto the coda. Such instructions are useless for the earlier chart because it is too stripped down although the band members can mark it up with pencils as they see fit. Charts were made for marking up (note the pencil marks in Figure 5 which are mine).

Notice that in Figure 5 certain parts there are two chords per bar. During a walk, this is usually seen at the points known as the “turnaround.” The turnaround occurs at the end of a section where the musician either goes back and repeats the section or she moves onto another section either because the chart itself instructs her where to go or because the arranger has decided it (and the musician will generally pencil that change in). So how is the turnaround played? Notice in the A section of Figure 5 that there is a two-bar turnaround labeled “1” that consists of C major 7 and B7 in the first bar while the second bar consists of Bb7 and A7. The pianist would just play those chords but the bassist would have to pick two notes from C major 7 and two from B7. C and B would two of the notes obviously. So maybe he picks C and the fifth of C major which is G. Then he plays B and maybe plays the major 3rd of B7 which is D#. Then in the next bar, he plays Bb and perhaps the minor 7th of that chord which is Ab. Then he plays A and maybe the major 3rd of A7 which would be C#. So that’s what he’ll play at that first turnaround—C, G, B, D#, Bb, Ab, A, C#—in straight 4/4 time and then go back and repeat that A section again as per the instructions. Or he could simply play the root of each chord and the fifth of each. Or perhaps he’d prefer to play the root and the thirds. Or he could mix them up—anything he wants. That is how a jazz bassist walks on the fly never playing the same thing twice and yet never playing out of tune or fumbling for notes. He doesn’t have to know precisely what notes he is going to play next but he knows what notes are available to him and where they are on the fingerboard. Practice is still necessary because some note combinations don’t sound that good together and the musician wants to know what to avoid.

Why does each bar have four little slashes in them? Because the notes to be played will be improvised. The slashes let the musician know to improvise notes—four to a bar. The bars could simply be left blank, I suppose, but this is the standard way of signifying improvisation on a chart. One may write down a walk if one chooses. For example, here is my chart of “Satin Doll” with two sets of walks:


Figure 6.


Joe Pass - Satin Doll - YouTube
“Satin Doll” by Joe Pass. Here, the bassist does all kinds of stuff during his walk. He is still arpeggiating chords but is doing it in very innovative ways. This is how each bassist develops his own style. Ron Carter, Scott LaFaro, Milt Hinton, Paul Chambers, Gary Peacock, etc. would have each done it differently.

By the way, plucking two D-7s quarter-notes and two G7s quarter-notes in the first bar and so on is NOT two-feel! That is still considered walking. Anytime you are playing four quarter-notes to a bar in 4/4 time, you are walking. Two-feel is always two half-notes per bar of 4/4. Now there are little tricks you are taught as a jazz musician to inject some variation into a two-feel so that it doesn’t sound boring such as preceding each half-note with a little short grace note sort of like “b-bum b-bum” but this not walking.

One last thing about walking: accent the 2 and 4 beats. Giving all four beats the same emphasis doesn’t cut it. The walk has to swing—that is its raison d’etre. To make it swing, we accent 2 and 4. Try it, you’ll what a difference it makes.

Lord Larehip

Can we make a chart of any piece of music? Sure, pretty much. What about a classical piece? Absolutely. Here’s a bass exercise from one of my old lesson books, Wilhelm Sturm’s “110 Studies Opus 20, Volume 1”:


Figure 7.

Why would it be important to make a lead sheet of a classical piece? For performance purposes, there really isn’t (not by my admittedly limited experience anyway). But for practice, it helps to learn certain pieces. At points, the piece changes from F major to D minor and by condensing the notes into chords, one can see where the changes from major to minor take place. Other notation that may look confusing occurs, for example, in the last bar of the third line where one sees where I have marked it “Bb/D”. What that means is that the notes in that measure are actually an arpeggiated Bb major triad—Bb, D, G (remember the B is flatted from the key signature so no flat sign within the bar is necessary but the B is to be played as flatted). But notice the Bb is not the lowest note here but D is. So we notate that as “Bb/D” or “a B-flat major chord with a D in the root.” One will see this type of notation a great deal when reading charts.

Another reason the chord progression is important is for what are called head arrangements. Head arrangements are done without charts but are simply in one’s head. Many of the old jazz bands specialized in head arrangements or knew the charts so well they never bothered to look at them anymore. But doing a head arrangement on the fly is much easier if one knows the chord progression. Then it basically dictates itself.

In jazz bands, the custom is to assemble a book of arrangements in the form of charts and, in rare cases, the full sheet music. Many of these arrangements have been purchased and used over and over again by various bands, e.g. when Benny Goodman first started out with his own ensemble, he was using the arrangements of Fletcher Henderson. These are known as fake books—partly because they aren’t real books (I have a bass chart book that actually uses false titles for the songs to avoid copyright issues) and partly because a chart doesn’t depict a full score but just a skeleton and each musician will fake the rest. In the days when jazz was society’s music of choice, every band jealously guarded its fakebook so other bands couldn’t steal their arrangements.

Today, there is a very popular book of arrangements called “The Real Book,” the title being intentionally ironic, i.e. it’s a real fakebook. Every student of jazz has a copy. It has literally of hundreds of charts of every conceivable jazz standard. In fact, the “Satin Doll” chart in Figure 4 is from an edition of “The Real Book.”


Figure 8.

If one goes on websites dedicated to jazz, especially those geared specifically to musicians, one will encounter numerous threads dedicated to discussing the Real Book, many of them critical of it. Lots of musicians don’t like it because it’s too general and stripped down for their use. I sympathize, but, in many cases, there are few other references to look at and the charts in the Real Book, chintzy as they often are, at least offer a starting point. For example, the Figure 5 bass chart for “Satin Doll” offers no melodic line whereas the Real Book chart from Figure 4 does and this is what the musician would use to build a solo around. Now, I am simplifying here because “Satin Doll” is a pretty simple tune and the solo I play when I perform this piece is my own. I have never consulted anyone’s chart or recording for a solo. But more complex jazz pieces would require a melodic line written down as reference. The musician isn’t going to play it as written because it’s rather minimal but rather he is going to build off it and embellish it. I have also found the Real Book chord changes to be accurate and useful. If the chart is too simple then grab some manuscript paper and use that chart to build a more complex one. I have frequently made my own bass charts out of Real Book charts.

The jazz bassist needs to use the Real Book (and all the ones I know do) because it is always written in treble clef rather than bass clef and a good bassist must learn to read both. If you are a bassist and someone calls you up to perform in a paying gig, when you show, they are almost certainly not going to hand you a bass chart but rather a Real Book page or a copy of the pianist’s/guitarist’s chart or something like that. You should know how to convert treble clef into bass clef on the fly. That’s what my instructor did and he made me learn how to do it and it has proven itself time and again to be an invaluable tool.

If you are a bass guitarist, you can apply all these rules and pointers to your instrument. The only thing you can’t do is bow on your axe but jazz bass playing only uses the bow sparingly. In fact, I teach myself to play on the bass guitar everything I learn on double bass including classical pieces which I play pizzicato in lieu of the bow. If you are a bass guitarist, learn to play classical and jazz on your axe. Trust me, you’ll learn a lot about your instrument and yourself from doing it.

Lord Larehip

I have a bass chart for "So What" that someone wrote down for me and most of it consists of nothing more than "D-7" and underneath it is "16" bracketed between two lines. Then next to it says "Eb-7" with an "8" underneath it bracketed between two lines. It just means to walk a D-7 (really a Dorian D) for 16 bars and then an Eb-7 for 8 bars. No staff lines, no slash marks, no nothing. It's up to the player to chose what walk to do and to count it off correctly. Stripped down anymore than that is pretty much a head arrangement.