One Way to Make Blues More Jazzy

The core of this way to make blues more jazzy is to add chords to the familiar I IV V changes, making the result a little more harmonically complex. The chords to add are the II and the VI. I’ll show you a couple of ways to play this and include a video at the bottom (not of me but Matt Schofield, a fine British guitar player), demonstrating how these new chords may fit.

By the numbers

First off I’d like to convince you that making reference to chords by their number in relationship to the key you are playing within is a useful way of calling out chords. This approach has some benefits beyond just having another name for the same shape and position:

• If you know chord relationships it’s a lot easier to transpose (play the same changes in a different key).
• If you learn those chords in a moveable form, you can move a set of changes anywhere on the fingerboard with virtually no new information – not a two-fer, more like a twelve-fer.

Here are those chord relationships for some common keys:

So if we’re playing in A then a "I VI II V" is A F#m Bm E.

For this article I presume you know these chords in 1^st position. You can find stacks of information on these chords (major v minor, extensions…) that I won’t cover – I’m shooting more for quick and handy here.

Play Them Easy

So, play just those 4 chords, A F#m Bm E, over and over – sounds familiar right?  Blue Moon, or the Flintstones theme, they’re the core of ‘rhythm changes’. They show up all the time.

Play Them Hard

• E7#9 and F#7#9 are the same shape 2 frets apart
• The highest 3 notes on A13 and on E7#9 are the same shape
• If you play just those 3 strings/notes, you can play 3 of these 4 chords using only one fingering
• The remaining chord, Bm7 can be played with 2 fingers

If you think of these chords in that way, while they sound more complicated they are not so hard to play, I’d say even easier than the 1^st set that you already knew.

Economy

Chords on 1^st 3 frets (‘cowboy chords’) show distinctly and tell visually what is being played and are easy for others to follow. But watching a more experienced player often doesn’t tell you much, in fact they may seem hardly to move their hand – it’s mysterious how they do what they do. Part of the mystery is this – their brains and their hands have worked through many instances of these kind of mechanics, the result is greater efficiency, bringing bags of benefits – easier to play less exertion smoother transition – all pushing away the physical act of playing the instrument, focusing more on playing music.

Getting from one chord to the next with minimal work

• Move only the fingers that have to move
• Play the part of the chord that is common and just move your hand keeping your fingers in their same relative position
• Move just enough of the fingers to change which notes are played, might not be all of them but enough to suggest the change

Another transition shown in the video uses portions of chords. Here he moves one note, one ‘voice’ to get from one chord to another, like this:

Also shown is how to move the same or very similar shapes through their neighboring frets, making use of the ear's tendency to relate the result by proximity and by tri-tone substitutions (ok now I’m getting in over my head).

This is one way to make a set of blues changes sound more like jazz, or to add some color, and the cost to make it your own is not steep – give it a go, be sophisticated, have fun!

Matt Schofield