The first is the idea that tango is a uniquely Argentine folk music — a self-contained ethnic tradition without antecedents or external influences.

This is straightforwardly false, in the sense that tango as an identifiable musical genre emerged around 1890 out of the collision of several existing genres: the Cuban habanera, European dance forms imported by waves of immigration (esp. Mazurka), and the Afro-Argentine candombe and milonga of the Río de la Plata.

The earliest tangos were called música criolla — Creole music — precisely because the form was understood by its own first audiences as a fusion rather than as something endemic and untouched.

The second misunderstanding is the idea that ‘traditional’ tango is dance music, played by large orchestras in the 1930s and 1940s, with a heavy rhythmic emphasis and a defined social function on the dance floor.

However, when you look at major compositions of the 1920s and 1930s — Juan Carlos Cobián’s Nostalgias, Los Mareados and Flores Negras, the work of Enrique Delfino, the De Caro school more broadly — what you find is not European salon music with a Latin rhythm pasted on top.

You find harmonic writing that uses extended chords, secondary dominants, chromatic voice leading and pre-dominant chains in ways that are unmistakably drawn from the jazz harmonic vocabulary.

The natural question is how that harmonic vocabulary reached Buenos Aires so early in the genre’s development.

The explanation is that the Argentine composers who built this side of the tradition — Cobián above all, but also figures like De Caro, Delfino, and Osvaldo Fresedo — were classically trained musicians who travelled to the United States, particularly to New York, and absorbed jazz harmony directly from the source.

They returned to Buenos Aires with a dual fluency in classical and jazz harmonic practice, and they applied that fluency to the tango compositions that became the foundation of what is now called tango romanza.

In the 1930s a reaction set in against this concert-oriented strain of tango, led by figures like Juan D’Arienzo, who pushed the form back toward its function as dance music with a heavily rhythmic, staccato style — with his pianist Rodolfo Biagi’s orchestra pushing the staccato percussive style of playing to the extreme (and D’Arienzo himself following in suit).

This was the orillero line: rhythm-first, dance-floor-oriented, comparatively spare in harmony.

But the romance tradition did not disappear in the 1940s; it continued underneath the dance-orchestra surface in the work of Aníbal Troilo, Ángel D’Agostino, and Osvaldo Pugliese who retained the harmonic sophistication of the 1920s while working within the larger ensemble formats of the 1940s.

Troilo’s line continued forward into Astor Piazzolla, who studied with Troilo, absorbed his harmonic approach, and pushed it further by adding explicit jazz and classical-music elements to produce nuevo tango.

The continuous thread runs from the tango romanza of the 1920s, through Troilo’s harmonic refinement of the 1940s, into Piazzolla’s full fusion in the 1950s and beyond — and the entire arc could reasonably be called tango jazz, because the harmonic vocabulary at every stage is recognisably the jazz harmonic toolkit applied to tango forms.

What follows is the biographical detail behind that arc — the specific Argentine musicians who lived and worked in New York during the 1920s and 1930s, the connections between them, and the institutional channels through which jazz harmony reached tango.

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The tangueros in New York

Juan Carlos Cobián (1896–1953)

Juan Carlos Cobián was an Argentine pianist and composer, and one of the central figures of the guardia nueva — the “new guard” generation of tango musicians that emerged in the early 1920s.

Within that generation, Cobián led what was called the evolucionista tendency, pushing tango away from its dance-music origins and toward concert music.

After establishing himself in Buenos Aires, Cobián travelled to New York in the late 1920s and lived there for several years, working professionally in both tango and jazz.

He returned to Buenos Aires in 1928, then went back to the United States around 1937 and remained there for another five years before returning home in 1943.

The total time he spent in the US was therefore close to a decade, all of it spent moving between the two genres on a working basis.

Cobián’s most famous compositions — Nostalgias, Los Mareados, Nunca Tuvo Novio, La Casita de Mis Viejos, Flores Negras — are exactly the harmonically rich, romantic tangos that defined tango romanza and that benefit most from analysis using jazz-harmonic concepts.

Carlos Gardel (c. 1890–1935)

Carlos Gardel was the defining tango singer of his era, and from late 1933 until his death in mid-1935 he lived in New York, recording his last twenty-two titles there and starring in four films for Paramount Pictures shot at the Astoria Studios in Queens.

The films — Cuesta abajo, El tango en Broadway, El día que me quieras, and Tango Bar — were aimed at the Latin American market but were produced inside the American film industry, with American studio resources and an Argentine creative team based in New York.

Among the songs Gardel recorded for these films was Rubias de New York, a foxtrot rather than a tango, written by Gardel himself with lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera.

Terig Tucci (1897–1973)

Terig Tucci is less well known than Cobián or Gardel, but he was probably the most important figure for the actual mechanics of cross-pollination between tango and the American music industry.

Tucci was an Argentine composer, orchestrator, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist who left Buenos Aires for New York in 1923 and remained there for the rest of his career.

From 1930 to 1941 he played in the NBC Orchestra, and in 1932 RCA Victor appointed him executive producer of its Latin American music unit — a position he held until his retirement in 1964.

In 1934 he became orchestrator and musical director for Carlos Gardel’s Paramount Pictures films, transcribing Gardel’s compositions into staff notation and writing the orchestral arrangements that accompanied him on screen.

Tucci therefore sat at the precise point where Argentine tango compositions were being rendered into orchestral scores using American big-band orchestrational resources, which made him one of the first people to physically combine the two vocabularies on a working scoring desk.

He published a memoir of his work with Gardel, Gardel en Nueva York, in 1969.

Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992)

Astor Piazzolla lived in New York from 1925 to 1936, between the ages of four and fifteen, and the New York he grew up in was the same New York that Cobián, Gardel, and Tucci were working in.

He acquired his first bandoneon there, took bandoneon lessons from Terig Tucci himself, and as a fourteen-year-old played a small role as a newspaper vendor in Gardel’s El día que me quieras in 1935.

The harmonic and orchestral world that Piazzolla absorbed before the age of fifteen was therefore the world that Tucci had built around Gardel’s recordings and that Cobián had been operating in during his own New York residencies.

When Piazzolla later studied with Aníbal Troilo and then with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, he was building on a foundation that already included direct exposure to the jazz-tango exchange of 1930s New York.

The two-way exchange in Buenos Aires

The traffic was not only one-directional.

By the 1920s, Buenos Aires had its own jazz scene, and tango orchestras competed directly with jazz bands for the dance-floor audience.

Many of the leading tango orchestras of the period — including those of Francisco Canaro, Juan de Dios Filiberto, Francisco Lomuto, Osvaldo Fresedo, Juan Carlos Cobián, Julio De Caro, Edgardo Donato, and the Victor Typical Orchestra — incorporated tango-foxtrot and jazz sets into their working repertoire.

So the same musicians who were writing harmonically ambitious tangos were also playing jazz on a regular basis, often within the same evening’s performance, which meant that the harmonic vocabulary was alive in their hands as practical working material rather than as something absorbed at a distance from records.

The lineage

The line that runs from this early period through to the present is reasonably clean.

Cobián and his contemporaries write the foundational tango romanza repertoire of the 1920s and 1930s, drawing directly on the jazz harmonic vocabulary they absorbed in New York.

Aníbal Troilo carries that harmonic sophistication forward through the Golden Age dance-orchestra era, retaining the chord vocabulary while accommodating the larger ensemble formats of the 1940s.

Astor Piazzolla, who studied with Troilo and grew up in the New York environment that Tucci helped build, takes the synthesis further into explicit fusion in the 1950s and beyond.

The arrangements I’ve published in Romantic Tango Guitar Volume 1, based on the work of Aníbal Arias, sit squarely within this lineage.

Arias was working with the same harmonic vocabulary, applied to solo guitar, and his arrangements of Cobián’s Nostalgias and Los Mareados — and of De Caro’s Flores Negras — are direct descendants of the line that started with the Argentine musicians who travelled to New York a century ago.

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I’ve just published a new study pack: a solo guitar arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango, with full harmonic analysis and study notes.

Astor Piazzolla was born in 1921 in Mar del Plata, Argentina, and grew up in New York before returning to Buenos Aires as a young man.

He trained classically with Alberto Ginastera in Argentina and later with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

Boulanger famously told him to stop hiding his tango background and write the music he actually heard — advice that set the course for the rest of his career.

Buy here it: Libertango (Piazzolla) — guitar arrangement and study pack

The result was nuevo tango, a style that fused the harmonic and contrapuntal vocabulary of jazz and classical music with the rhythmic and emotional intensity of Argentine tango.

It was a controversial style in Argentina at the time, dismissed by traditionalists as not really tango at all, but it eventually became one of the most influential bodies of work in twentieth-century music.

Libertango was composed in 1974, during Piazzolla’s years living in Italy.

It was first recorded that same year on the album of the same name, with Piazzolla on bandoneon leading a small ensemble.

The piece quickly became one of his most-performed compositions and has since been recorded hundreds of times, by tango ensembles, jazz groups, classical performers, and pop artists alike.

It remains the piece most listeners associate with Piazzolla and with modern tango more broadly.

What’s in the bundle:

• Performance score with standard notation and TAB

• Study score with chord symbols and Roman numeral analysis

• Study notes discussing the harmony

Grab it here: Tango Guitar: Libertango — Arrangement, Harmonic Analysis and Study Notes

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We understand Western music (music which uses the diatonic scale) in terms of movement away from and back towards a tonal centre at any point in a piece of music.

If we play the C note together with the G note, the ear hears C as home. The G feels unresolved — it wants to move to the C.

Try it on the guitar: play the two notes together, then play just the C. You’ll hear the C as the settled, resting note.

This pull from G to C is the V–I relationship, and it’s the strongest sense of movement in Western music. The G is the V of C, and when it moves to C, we hear the music arrive.

• This V-I relationship is the strongest cadence, tendency or movement in Western music

• We can view a chord progression as movement away from the tonic ‘home’ and then return back to it

• This tension and resolution gives Western music a sense of direction and forward movement

V7-I Cadence

As we saw in lesson #2, the V chord in a major key is a dominant V7 chord, which is the G7 in the C major scale:

You will find that when you get to the G7, it will sound more natural or musical to return to C immediately after the G7:

• In some genres like tango or bossa nova, the V7-I cadence will be very common in the course of a tune

• it will also be found at the final bars of a section as well as the end of the whole tune; this is called a ‘turnaround’

• it’s also common to outline the V7 chord in the intro, leading into the I chord at the start of the tune

Example: Black Orpheus

In the bossa nova standard Black Orpheus, the key is A minor, but we can see the G7-C cadence in bars 6-7 and 10-11.

• This tells us that the tonic temporarily changes from A minor to C major, so that the tonic centre in this section changes: A minor, C major (bars 5-12), A minor.

• D-7 is the ii chord of C, and the A- is the vi chord of C; then, bars 5-7 are analysed as a vi-ii-V7-I, which is one of the most common patterns in modern jazz-based music

• Bars 8-11 are analysed as VI7-ii-V7-I, where the A minor is changed to A dominant; it’s very common practice in jazz-based music to substitute a minor or major chord for a dominant chord to give the tune additional movement or energy.

Minor Keys

When you look at the chord chart, the tonal centre in bars 1-4 and 13-16 is the key of A minor.

The A minor scale is as follows:

• Minor scales are thought of as ‘relative’ scales to major scales starting on the 6th degree of the major scale

• The 6th degree of the C major scale is A minor, so the A minor scale is the ‘relative minor’ of the C major scale, it’s essentially the C major scale starting on the 6th degree

• Then the chords of the A minor scale will be the same, but we assign different Roman numerals with A-7 being the i chord.

V7-i Cadence in Minor Keys

If you look at the harmonised A minor scale, the v chord is E-7.

However, in the chord chart for Black Orpheus, you will notice that instead of E minor there’s an E7 chord: Bø7 – E7♭9 – A-.

This is because in jazz the V chord resolving to the minor tonic is usually played as a dominant:

• On charts you will often see this written as E7alt (”altered”); in practice, in minor key cadences, this means either ♭9 or ♭13.

• Which one you play depends on position and voice leading (more on this in the next lesson).

• So when you see E7♭9, E7♭13, or E7alt on a chart, you can choose whichever voicing works in a given position and leads well into the next chord.

Final Notes

The V–I cadence functions to create movement and establish temporary tonality in the tune, so expect to be spending much of your time looking for this pattern and learning the various ways it can be voiced.

Related keys

It’s also very common for a tune to switch between related major and minor keys as in Black Orpheus

A change in tonality (tonal centre) will be marked by the V–I pattern; so in Black Orpheus tonality changes from A minor to C major when you see the D-7 – G7 – C△7.

Substitutions

In jazz, the other chords in the scale, both minor and major, are commonly substituted for the dominant to establish a momentary V7–I cadence, because the dominant is very effective at creating energy and movement.

So if the progression is D-7 – G7 – C△7, it’s common to play the D minor as a D dominant: D7 – G7 – C△7; or if the chord chart specifies a D minor, jazz musicians might play D-7 – D7 – G7 – C△7, switching to D dominant before moving to G7.

Much of jazz study is concerned with exploring options for adding dominant chords even when they’re not given in the original score.

Please leave questions and comments below!

I publish solo guitar arrangements and studies with full harmonic analysis — standard notation, TAB, chord symbols, and Roman numeral analysis. Browse the catalogue on Payhip. If you’d like to support the work, you can become a paid subscriber or buy me a coffee.

I’ve just published Brazilian Guitar: Baden Powell — a collection of 21 edited transcriptions from the solo guitar recordings of Baden Powell, re-engraved from scratch for readability and formatted for iPad or print performance.

This has been the most challenging editorial project I’ve taken on, and it’s worth explaining why.

Baden Powell

Baden Powell de Aquino was born in 1937 in Varre-Sai, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, the eldest child of a shoemaker who was also a violinist and a devoted admirer of the founder of the Boy Scouts — hence the name.

The family moved to the Rio suburb of São Cristóvão when Baden was still an infant, and the house became a regular gathering point for musicians, including Pixinguinha and Donga, two foundational figures of Brazilian popular music.

At eight years old, Baden began guitar lessons with Jayme Florence, known as Meira, one of the leading choro guitarists of the 1940s and a member of Benedito Lacerda’s regional ensemble.

Meira gave him two things that would define the rest of his career: fluency in the Brazilian popular guitar tradition — choro, samba, the whole rhythmic and melodic vocabulary — and a grounding in the classical Spanish guitar repertoire, specifically the music and technique of Francisco Tárrega and Andrés Segovia.

By thirteen he was playing professionally, and by fifteen he was earning a living accompanying singers and bands across multiple styles.

In the mid-1950s he joined pianist Ed Lincoln’s trio at the Bar Plaza in Copacabana, where his playing caught the attention of Antônio Carlos Jobim.

He studied advanced harmony with Moacir Santos, one of the most sophisticated harmonic thinkers in Brazilian music — a composer and arranger who brought together jazz, European modernism, and Afro-Brazilian traditions into a deeply original harmonic language.

Santos is an under-appreciated figure in the story of Brazilian music, and his influence on Baden Powell’s harmonic vocabulary is audible throughout these recordings: the extended voicings, the chromatic movement, the way dissonance is used for colour rather than tension.

Baden Powell cited Garoto — Aníbal Augusto Sardinha — as a key influence, alongside Dilermando Reis and Django Reinhardt.

The Garoto connection matters: Garoto was arguably the first Brazilian guitarist to bring jazz harmony into the solo guitar tradition, and his innovations in chord voicing and voice leading created the harmonic foundation on which bossa nova was built.

In 1962, Baden Powell met the poet and diplomat Vinícius de Moraes, beginning a partnership that would produce some of the defining music of the decade.

While bossa nova was the prevailing sound, Baden and Vinícius were reaching further — combining samba with Afro-Brazilian ritual music from the candomblé and capoeira traditions, resulting in the landmark 1966 album Os Afro-Sambas de Baden e Vinícius.

At nineteen, he made the decision to stop playing electric guitar entirely, concentrating on classical nylon-string guitar for the rest of his career.

He recorded prolifically — for Elenco and Forma in Brazil, Barclay in France, MPS/Saba in Germany — and toured Europe extensively through the 1960s before relocating permanently to France in 1968.

The European period

The move to Europe is significant for understanding the material in this book.

Living in France, touring German concert halls, recording for the MPS label with producer Joachim Berendt, Baden Powell was operating in a very different environment from the Rio club scene where he’d made his name.

European audiences knew him as a classical guitar virtuoso, and the concert hall context drew out a different side of his playing.

Through the early 1970s — the period from which most of the recordings in this collection are drawn — his solo work became increasingly introspective, moving away from the rhythmic drive of his combo recordings toward something more contemplative and sustained.

The album Solitude on Guitar, recorded in Frankfurt in 1971, opens with a reading of a Vinícius de Moraes poem-setting that reviewers described as distinctly more classical than anything he had previously recorded — clean, precise, unhurried.

Apaixonado, recorded in Rio in 1973 for the German MPS label, contains both Alcântara and Estórias de Alcântara, pieces that sound more Spanish than Brazilian — the Tárrega and Segovia influence laid bare, with jazz harmony thinning out and the European Romantic guitar tradition coming to the foreground.

Solitário was composed during the lonely hours before a recording session in Germany, while Baden Powell was separated from his wife Márcia — the emotional circumstances reflected directly in the music’s sustained, introspective character.

This is the period where his solo guitar voice is most fully itself, and it’s the period this book primarily documents.

The impressionistic style

The word I keep coming back to for Baden Powell’s solo guitar approach is impressionistic.

In his combo recordings — the bossa nova and samba material with bass and drums — he is a rhythmic engine, the right hand driving patterns in the 2/4 samba metre, the bass locked into a groove, the whole thing propelled forward by the ensemble.

In the solo recordings, all of that rhythmic scaffolding drops away.

What remains is sustained bass notes ringing under arpeggiated melody, rubato phrasing where the barline is a suggestion rather than a boundary, and a harmonic palette that prioritises colour over function.

He plays with a heavy right-hand attack positioned close to the bridge, which produces a bright, overtone-rich bass — the fundamental rings clearly, but so does the harmonic series above it, giving the low notes a resonance and complexity that you don’t get from the warmer, rounder tone of playing over the soundhole.

This is a deliberate sonic choice, not an accident of mic placement, and it connects back to his study with Moacir Santos: the overtone spectrum becomes part of the composition, not just a byproduct of the instrument.

He separates bass and melody notes rhythmically — the bass lands slightly ahead of the treble on each beat, giving every phrase a breathing, arpeggiated quality rather than the simultaneous block-chord attack that characterises conventional classical guitar performance.

The left hand contributes constant ornamentation: hammer-ons, pull-offs (ascending and descending slurs, in classical terminology), slides, and chromatic passing tones woven into the melodic line so pervasively that they become part of the texture rather than occasional decorations.

On repeated passages he will embellish differently each time — these ornaments are improvisational in character, part of his expression rather than part of the composition itself.

The closest analogy I can think of outside the Brazilian tradition is the sustained, breathing approach of jazz guitarists like John Stowell — let the notes ring, let the chord speak, prioritise harmonic colour over rhythmic momentum.

Stowell arrives at that aesthetic from jazz abstraction; Baden Powell arrives at it from classical guitar technique meeting jazz harmony somewhere in the middle.

Different roads, same destination: make fewer notes mean more by letting them resonate.

The Spanish-sounding pieces

One of the most striking things about working through this material was discovering that several of Baden Powell’s compositions don’t sound Brazilian at all.

Alcântara and Violão could easily pass for 19th-century Spanish guitar music — arpeggiated, lyrical, Romantic in temperament, built on triads and simple chord progressions rather than the extended jazz harmony that characterises his bossa nova work.

Solitário, composed in Germany during the Solitude on Guitar sessions, occupies similar territory.

This isn’t an anomaly — it’s a window into the layers of his musicianship.

The classical Spanish guitar tradition was foundational to his technique and musical imagination, absorbed from his very first lessons with Meira in the 1940s.

In most of his repertoire, that European classical foundation is fused with Brazilian rhythm and jazz harmony in a way that sounds unmistakably Brazilian.

But in these pieces, the Brazilian rhythmic layer drops away and the Spanish classical root is exposed — what you hear is essentially the voice of his teachers, filtered through his own sensibility and touched with just enough jazz-influenced harmony to distinguish it from pure Tárrega.

The name Alcântara itself carries this layered history: it refers to a colonial Portuguese town in the northern Brazilian state of Maranhão, but the word comes from the Arabic al-qantara — “the bridge” — a place name that originated in Extremadura, Spain, referring to a Roman bridge that the Moors named when they occupied the Iberian Peninsula.

Portuguese colonists carried the name to Brazil.

So the name is literally Iberian — Moorish Arabic filtered through Spanish and Portuguese colonialism — and the music sounds exactly like that etymology implies.

The repertoire

The 21 pieces in this collection span a wider range than you might expect from a single guitarist’s catalogue.

The foundation is a set of traditional Brazilian compositions from the early generation of solo guitarists: Abismo de Rosas by Canhoto, the foundational valsa-choro of the Brazilian guitar repertoire, and Gente Humilde and Jorge do Fusa by Garoto, the proto-bossa nova innovator whose harmonic language Baden Powell absorbed and extended.

Several pieces are Baden Powell’s own instrumental compositions — Brasiliana, Retrato Brasileiro, Sentimentos, Tema Triste — works that sit in the space between choro and bossa nova without belonging exclusively to either tradition.

Apelo and So Por Amor come from his collaborations with Vinícius de Moraes.

Viagem, by João de Aquino (Baden Powell’s cousin) with lyrics by Paulo César Pinheiro, was first recorded by Baden Powell in 1969 in a solo instrumental version — the earliest recording of what would become a Brazilian popular standard.

Three well-known Jobim compositions — Por Causa de Você, O Que Tinha de Ser, and Se Todos Fossem Iguais a Você — receive Baden Powell’s characteristic solo guitar treatment, which transforms them from vocal bossa nova into something closer to through-composed instrumental pieces.

Alcântara, Violão, and Solitário are the Spanish-sounding compositions discussed above.

Ária Para Se Morrer De Amor is an unusual piece that functions almost as atmospheric drone music — it doesn’t follow standard harmonic progressions and produces some striking, challenging chord voicings that sit outside any easy genre classification.

Round About Midnight by Thelonious Monk and Manhã de Carnaval by Luiz Bonfá — the latter having become a jazz standard in its own right — offer a window into the space where jazz meets Brazilian nylon-string guitar, and are worth exploring for jazz players looking to bring repertoire onto the classical instrument.

El Dia Que Me Quieras by Carlos Gardel brings a tango into the collection, a reminder that Baden Powell’s musical curiosity extended well beyond Brazilian borders.

And Valsa Sem Nome — Baden Powell’s own Brazilian waltz — is transcribed here in his more extended performance version, with a developed introduction and more legato, impressionistic phrasing than the simpler arrangement commonly found elsewhere, showing how his performances evolved toward greater harmonic colour and expressive freedom.

About these editions

If you’ve ever tried to read an existing transcription of Baden Powell’s solo guitar recordings, you’ll understand why this project took as long as it did.

His playing is so heavily ornamented — constant slurs, slides, chromatic passing tones, arpeggiated attacks — that a literal transcription of everything audible on the recording produces a score that is visually overwhelming and practically unreadable.

The transcriptions that circulate online tend to be sourced from a small number of websites, possibly generated with the assistance of automated transcription software, and they reproduce this density faithfully without any editorial intervention to make the result playable from the page.

These editions have been re-engraved from scratch with readability as the priority.

My editorial contribution has been to clean up rhythm, phrasing, and bar structure; organise each piece into clearly signposted sections with symmetrical four-bar-per-line layouts; and format everything for continuous reading on iPad or in print, with no repeat signs.

Baden Powell’s harmonic language and voice leading have been preserved with minimal modification — what has been simplified is the ornamentation.

Because the slurs and slides are improvisational rather than structurally fixed — he embellishes differently on every pass through a repeated section — notating all of them would misrepresent them as composed elements and clutter the score unnecessarily.

I have included the slurs that define the melodic line, and I encourage players to listen to the recordings and add their own embellishments in the same spirit.

These are not academic study scores — they are performance editions designed to be slapped onto an iPad and played.

I publish separate study scores with full chord symbols and Roman numeral harmonic analysis for individual pieces, and I’ll be writing more about Baden Powell’s harmonic language and playing approach in upcoming articles.

Subscribe here for updates on new lessons, study scores, and articles.

Contents

Abismo de Rosas (Canhoto) · Alcantara · Apelo · Ária Para Se Morrer De Amor · Brasiliana · El Dia Que Me Quieras (Gardel) · Gente Humilde (Garoto) · Jorge Do Fusa (Garoto) · Manhã de Carnaval (Bonfá) · O Que Tinha De Ser (Jobim) · Por Causa De Você (Jobim) · Retrato Brasileiro · Round About Midnight (Monk) · Se Todos Fossem Iguais A Você (Jobim) · Sentimentos · So Por Amor · Solitario · Tema Triste · Valsa Sem Nome · Viagem (João de Aquino) · Violão

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The most basic way to represent a song is a leadsheet which shows the given melody and the chords above the staff, usually one or two chords per bar of music.

You find these lead sheets in jazz real books or fake books, or on websites like Musescore.

This is the barebones structure of the tune from which to develop some sort of an interpretation or arrangement.

A leadsheet is not what you perform or a transcription of a performance, but an architectural representation of the composition.

This is important: if you play the basic chords as given, that won’t be wrong, but it’s unlikely to result in an effective performance because of the need for ‘voice leading’.

We'll look at voice leading later on — for now, the point is that a lead sheet gives you the structure, not the finished performance.

A fully developed arrangement or transcription of a performance is an interpretation of this basic structure in a given key for a given instrument or ensemble type.

Chord charts

Another common basic representation of a tune is the chord chart.

You can find these on the iRealPro app.

This is what jazz musicians are often looking at on their iPads if they’re not familiar with the tune.

In order to learn how to interpret a chord chart to create an arrangement or a performance we need to understand how musicians understand the chord chart.

Musicians look at the chords in terms of their function or position in the scale.

To understand this we first need to look at the harmonised scale.

Harmonised C Major Scale

The harmonised scale is the chords that are built by stacking only the scale notes a third apart.

The C major scale:

2. Harmonised C major scale (R-3-5-7)

The harmonised C major scale is the chords built by starting with the root note (R) on each scale degree, and then stacking notes a third apart (R - 3 - 5 - 7) as follows:

We only use notes that are inside of the scale, and the technical expression often used by jazz musicians is to say that these notes are ‘diatonic’ to the scale.

Each chord built in this way is assigned a Roman numeral which indicates the function of the chord in the scale.

So when jazz musicians look at a chord chart like the one above, they look at the chords in terms of these numerals.

You will notice that major chords—which includes major and dominant chords—are given a capitalized numeral, whereas minor chords are given a small numeral.

Dominant chords are indicated with a 7.

Also, half diminished—minor 7 flat 5 (-7b5)—chords are often indicated with the ø symbol.

3. Drop two voicings (R-5-7-3)

As you might have noticed, the chord fingerings for chords created by simply stacking thirds are often impractical on the guitar, and also don’t necessarily sound the best.

So this scale is normally practiced using ‘drop two’ voicings, with the 3rd moved to the top of the chord, as follows:

4. Shell voicings (R-3-7)

The voicings above are the most common fingerings of the basic 7th chords on the guitar.

However, playing the chords in this way, gripping all four tones, does not leave much room for extended ‘colour’ notes.

The essential tones are the root, the 3rd and the 7th, as these give you the chord and the chord quality (major, minor, dominant).

These give us ‘shell’ chords using just the essential tones:

5. 5th in the bass (5-R-3-7)

Omitting the 5th entirely, or playing it in the bass (often instead of the root tone), is very common in jazz and bossa nova:

Final notes

The point here is not to ‘practice scales’ so much as to understand how chords are constructed and what functional harmony is.

Practicing the harmonised scale as given above, up and down the neck, will not sound particularly musical.

We need to devise special exercises to make it sound musical, which will be the subject of the next lesson.

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I could see the chord grips on the page. I could even name some of them. But I didn’t know what they were doing — I didn’t know which chord was functioning as the dominant, where the cadences were, why one passage sounded rich and colourful while the next passage sounded flat and ordinary. I was playing the notes without understanding the architecture of the piece.

And because of that, I was stuck. I couldn’t fix the parts that didn’t work. I couldn’t fill the gaps where the melody jumped awkwardly. I couldn’t make informed choices about voicings or embellishments. I was entirely dependent on whoever had written the arrangement, and I had no way to evaluate whether their choices were good ones.

When I eventually started studying jazz harmony — not as an academic exercise, but as a way to understand what was actually happening in the music I was playing — everything changed. Pieces I thought I knew revealed harmonic structures I had been playing without hearing. Inconsistencies I had accepted as normal turned out to be problems I could solve. And arrangements that had felt like fixed texts became starting points for my own interpretation.

This is the difference that harmonic understanding makes, and it affects everything from the consistency of your sound to your ability to adapt, embellish, and eventually create your own arrangements.

The first thing you notice when you start analysing arrangements harmonically is inconsistency. Commonly you will find passages with a rich and extended harmony — sophisticated voicings, colourful tensions, interesting voice leading — followed immediately by passages that sound fairly bland and generic. Basic triads or simple seventh chords sitting next to major 6/9 or dominant #11, with no apparent awareness that the contrast creates an imbalance.

A classical guitarist arranging a Piazzolla piece will handle the jazz chords given in the lead sheet faithfully, but default to conventional classical voicings wherever the harmony is left to interpretation. If you don’t understand the harmonic structure, you have no way to recognise the imbalance. You might like it or not. But if you don’t, you’re basically stuck with what’s on the page.

Another common problem is technical. Arrangements that combine chords with melody — whether in a classical texture or a chord-melody approach — often create situations where the chord voicing and the melody note are physically distant on the fretboard. The bass note of the chord is down in first position while the melody note is up at the seventh fret on the first string, and your hand simply cannot bridge the gap.

If all you know is the tab, your only option is to make the stretch or accept the gap. But if you know what chord you’re playing, you have options. You can arpeggiate the chord and run a connecting line up to the melody note. You can use a different voicing of the same chord that sits closer to the melody. You can insert a brief single-note fill that outlines the harmony and arrives at the melody note through voice leading rather than a leap.

All of these solutions require one thing: knowing what the chord actually is, and understanding its function in the progression. Without that, you’re stuck with whatever the arranger gave you, whether it works for your hand or not.

Understanding the harmony of a piece begins with identifying the key and recognising the standard patterns within it. It’s good if you can find a lead sheet or an iRealPro Chord chart. But even if you find the chord progression, often you need to infer what’s going in the arrangement from the notes on the staff.

If a piece or section of music is in A minor, you are expecting to encounter certain chords: A minor as the tonic, B half-diminished as the ii chord, E dominant — usually E7♭9 or E7♭13 — as the V chord. You are looking for the ii–V–i cadence, because that is the engine that drives harmonic movement in most tonal music, and it will appear repeatedly throughout the piece.

If the piece is in C major, the same notes produce different functions. Now D minor is the ii chord, G dominant is the V chord, and C major is the I chord. The ability to recognise which key you are in at any given moment — and keys often shift within a piece — tells you immediately what role each chord is playing.

This is not abstract theory. It is practical information that changes how you hear and play the music.

When you look at a bar of notation and see a collection of notes that could be several different chords, the harmonic context suggests and interpretation. It might look like an A minor chord from the grip alone, but if it sits between a D minor and an E7♭9, it is probably functioning as the tonic in a iv–V–i cadence in A minor. Conversely, if the same notes appear between F major and G7, you are probably looking at a vi chord in C major.

The grip is the same. The function is completely different. And the function determines what you can do with it — what extensions are available, what substitutions work, what voice leading makes sense.

Once you can see the harmonic architecture of a piece, you stop being a passive reader and become an active interpreter. You can compare two different arrangements of the same tune and understand what each arranger was going for — a traditional sound or a modern one, a conservative approach or an extended one. You can identify the places where the harmony thins out and decide whether to enrich it. You can spot passages where the arranger defaulted to simple voicings and consider whether an extension or substitution would improve the line.

You can also adapt arrangements to your own technique. If the original relies on wide stretches that don’t suit your hand, but you know the chord and its function, you can find a different voicing that achieves the same harmonic result in a more comfortable position. If you are good at fast single-note runs but the arrangement is written in block chords, you can outline the same harmony melodically. The arrangement becomes a starting point rather than a fixed text.

Every genre has its own harmonic vernacular — its characteristic voicings, common progressions, and idiomatic grips in particular keys. As you study more pieces in a genre, you begin to internalise these patterns, and new pieces in the same idiom become easier to learn, memorise, and adapt.

The arrangements you play become conversations rather than recitations. You understand what the arranger intended. You can agree with their choices or improve on them. And this leads to something that most guitarists postpone far too long: writing your own arrangements.

The conventional assumption is that arranging is an advanced skill — something you work toward after years of studying other people’s work. I think this has it backwards. You should start creating your own arrangements as early as possible, because arranging is one of the most effective ways to learn harmony in the first place.

When you take a lead sheet and try to build a guitar arrangement from it, you are forced to make the decisions that were previously made for you. Which voicing of this chord? Which inversion puts the melody on top? Where does the bass note go? What connects this chord to the next one? These are not theoretical questions — they are practical problems that you solve with your hands on the fretboard, and each one deepens your understanding of how harmony works on the instrument.

Intros are an excellent way to get started. Take the last few bars of a piece and adapt them into an introduction — this is a standard technique in tango and bossa nova arranging, and it gives you a contained problem to solve: just four or eight bars of music where you need to establish the key, set the harmonic mood, and arrive at the beginning of the tune. Listen to recordings and notice how performers handle their intros — sometimes it is a simple melodic line over the dominant chord, sometimes it is a more elaborate harmonic setup. Then try writing your own. A few bars of arranging teaches you more about a piece than another ten repetitions of someone else’s version.

Another useful exercise is to take an arrangement you already know in one key and rearrange it in a different key. The same harmonic structure produces different voicing options, different open-string possibilities, different physical challenges. You quickly discover that an arrangement is not a fixed object but a set of harmonic choices, and that the same progression can be realised in many different ways depending on the key and the voicings you select. Comparing your version with the original — or with someone else’s arrangement of the same tune — is where real learning happens. You see what they chose, what you chose, and you start to understand why.

A deeper point here is that improvisation is essentially just arranging on the spot. When a musician improvises over a chord progression, they are making the same decisions an arranger makes: which notes to play over this chord, how to voice-lead into the next one, where to place the tensions, how to connect the melody to the harmony. The difference is speed. An arranger works these things out at a desk; an improviser does it during the performance. But the underlying skill is the same — a fluent understanding of the harmonic options available at any given point in a tune.

So the more arrangements you write, the more fluent you become with the harmonic vocabulary of the music you play. And as that fluency develops, the gap between working something out on paper and generating it spontaneously on the instrument begins to close.

That is what studying harmony gives you. Not just theoretical knowledge, but practical freedom on the instrument.

I publish solo guitar arrangements and studies with full harmonic analysis — standard notation, TAB, chord symbols, and Roman numeral analysis. Browse the catalogue on Payhip, or subscribe here on Substack for more on tango and bossa nova harmony.

I said Brazilian guitar — bossa nova, that kind of thing.

He immediately name dropped Yamandu Costa.

If you don’t know Yamandu, he’s a Brazilian guitarist with extraordinary technique. Blazing single-note runs, incredible speed, total command of the instrument.

I said yeah, he’s impressive — but I didn’t sound enthusiastic.

And this confused the guy. Why wouldn’t I be excited about someone who can play that well?

I responded that Yamandu plays a lot of fast notes, but his playing is very inside.

“Inside” is a jazz term.

It means you’re playing the notes that belong to the chord — the root, the third, the fifth, the seventh.

The notes that outline the harmony.

There’s nothing wrong with those notes. You need them. They’re the foundation.

But if that’s all you’re playing, you’re narrating the chord progression back to the listener.

And after a while, that sounds like elevator music.

It sounds vanilla.

It sounds safe.

Speed doesn’t fix this.

You can play inside notes at 200 beats per minute and it can still sound predictable.

The listener’s ear isn’t impressed by how many notes you fit into a bar.

It’s that sort of traditional palette that sounds rather generic to a sophisticated jazz listener.

I’ve had this conversation more than once, by the way.

There’s a common thread among traditional folk and classical guitarists — choro players, tango players, the whole Latin tradition — and it goes like this.

You mention jazz harmony and they say something like: “Music is not mathematics.”

I’ve heard it enough times to recognise it as a (somewhat defensive) philosophical position, not just a throwaway comment.

For these players, music is about the song. The melody. The vocal quality of the line. The virtuosity of the performance.

The underlying chords are there to support the melody, and that’s where the thinking stops.

Anything beyond the basic seventh chord — the extensions, the alterations, the voice leading choices — that’s “mathematics.” And mathematics isn’t music.

I thought about this for a while, and I realised my attitude is exactly the opposite.

If you want a modern jazz sound you have to become comfortable with the idea that music is mathematics.

Not in the sense that it’s cold or mechanical.

In the sense that the interesting stuff happens when you count past seven.

The seventh chord gives you the foundation. But the 9th, the 11th, the 13th, the ♭9, the ♭13 — those are where the colour lives.

And yes, you have to count to get there. You have to know which degree of the scale you’re on, what’s diatonic and what’s altered, where the tensions sit relative to the chord tones.

That’s mathematics. And that’s where the money is.

So there’s this cultural gulf.

On one side: Yamandu Costa, the choro tradition, the classical guitarists. Music is the song, the melody, the virtuosity. Don’t overthink it.

On the other side: Baden Powell, Jobim, Piazzolla, Ted Greene, John Stowell. Music is interpretation. It’s impressionistic. It’s abstract. And the abstraction comes from extended harmony — from the notes beyond the seventh.

Both sides are making real music. But they sound completely different.

And the difference comes down to a handful of notes.

The altered tones. The tensions.

These are the money notes.

In the vocal world, a “money note” is the big high note the audience is waiting for — Whitney Houston belting the key change, that kind of thing.

For a guitarist, the money notes are something different.

They’re the colour tones — the extended and altered notes that create tension and resolution within the harmony.

They’re the notes that make a chord sound like something, rather than just sounding correct.

Ted Greene — one of the most respected harmonic thinkers in the history of the guitar — put it bluntly: if you’re just playing chord tones, you’re not playing jazz.

He didn’t mean ignore the chord tones.

He meant the chord tones are the scaffolding.

The jazz lives in what you put on top of that.

Here’s an example.

Take a standard ii–V–i in A minor.

The textbook version gives you Bø7 – E7 – Am.

Those are inside chords. Perfectly correct, perfectly functional.

If you voice them with their basic chord tones — roots, thirds, fifths, sevenths — you’ll get something that sounds fine.

A theory teacher would give you full marks.

A listener will have forgotten it before the next bar.

Now extend them.

The Bø7 — add the 11th (E). That’s a strong colour note that changes the character of the chord immediately. It’s no longer just a pre-dominant placeholder. It has its own voice.

The E7 — play it with a ♭9 (F) and a ♭13 (C). Now the dominant chord has weight, darkness, urgency. Put that ♭9 in the bass — E7♭9/F — and you’ve got a voicing that shows up all through tango and bossa nova arranging.

The Am at the resolution — voice it as Am6, or Am9, or Am(♭6) if you want that Piazzolla colour.

Each chord now has something to say.

That’s the difference between outlining the harmony and embellishing it.

This is why players like Ted Greene, John Stowell, and Baden Powell can play at a completely relaxed tempo and nobody notices — or cares — that they’re not playing fast.

Every note is doing something.

There are no filler notes.

There is no padding.

Consider the opening of Jobim’s How Insensitive.

The tune begins on a minor seventh chord, and the melody immediately moves between the 5th and the ♭6th.

That ♭6th — the same note as a ♯5 — is a money note.

It’s not a chord tone.

It’s a tension note, sitting a half-step above the 5th.

And it creates an ache that defines the entire character of the piece.

From the very first bar, you know this isn’t going to sound generic.

That one note does more work than an entire scale run.

Now here’s the part that’s counterintuitive, and it’s where most guitarists get stuck.

Understanding harmony means you need to play fewer notes, not more.

This goes against everything the guitar internet tells you.

Speed exercises. Scale patterns. Picking drills.

The implicit promise is always: if you can play faster, you’ll sound better.

And there’s a whole industry built around that anxiety.

You watch someone shred on Instagram and you think: I need to be able to do that, or I’m not good enough.

So you practice scales. You build speed. You learn patterns.

And then you play over a tune and it sounds... fine.

Competent. Fast, even.

But not particularly interesting.

Not the way Baden Powell sounds interesting.

Not the way a Piazzolla arrangement grabs you by the throat with three notes.

The problem isn’t your technique.

The problem is you’re playing all the notes equally, without knowing which ones are the ones that matter.

If you know where the money notes are, you don’t need to fill every beat.

You can play a simple voicing with one well-chosen tension and it will be more interesting than a fast run built from chord tones.

The listener doesn’t process speed.

The listener processes colour.

A ♭9 in the bass of a dominant chord. A major 7th against a minor triad. A ♯11 on a major chord.

These are the sounds that create the emotional response.

And they require zero virtuosity to execute.

They require knowledge.

This is why Bill Evans at the piano, or John Stowell on guitar, or Baden Powell playing a slow bossa nova, sound endlessly interesting at tempos that any intermediate player could technically handle.

The complexity is in the note choices, not the note count.

So what does this mean for studying harmony?

Most jazz theory resources focus on teaching you the chord tones and the common progressions.

That’s necessary. It’s the alphabet.

But the alphabet isn’t the poem.

The reason to study harmony for the modern guitarist isn’t to know what the inside notes are.

It’s to know what the outside notes are.

So that when you play, you know exactly which note is the one that matters.

Without the harmonic understanding, you’re just gripping shapes and hoping they sound interesting.

The same principle applies whether you’re playing chord melody, comping, or improvising single-note lines.

In a line, the money notes are the ones you want to foreground.

The chord tones provide the voice leading that connects notes that do the expressive work (earn you the money).

This is a complete inversion of what Youtube jazz guitar tutorials teach, where the chord tones are the ‘targets’.

For a modern jazz sound, it’s the other way around.

None of this requires you to play faster.

In fact, it argues for playing slower — or at least, for not worrying about speed.

The focus shifts from physical execution to harmonic awareness.

Knowing which note creates the colour or the tension.

And that’s why I build harmonic analysis into every arrangement I publish.

The Roman numerals and chord symbols aren’t academic decoration.

They’re a map that shows you where the money notes are.

When you see a II7 chord in a tango, or an E7sus resolving to E7♭9 in a bossa nova, you’re seeing the moments where the arranger chose tension over safety.

Those are the moments that make the piece interesting.

And they’re the moments that will make your playing worth hearing — at any tempo.

I publish solo guitar arrangements of Argentine tango, Brazilian guitar and modern jazz music with full harmonic analysis — standard notation, TAB, chord symbols, and Roman numeral analysis. Browse the catalogue on Payhip, or subscribe here on Substack for more on tango and bossa nova harmony.

Canhoto and the birth of Brazilian guitar

Abismo de Rosas — Abyss of Roses — is one of the most enduring pieces in the Brazilian guitar repertoire. It was written around 1916, and it’s still being played, recorded, and arranged over a century later. To understand why, you need to know something about the man who wrote it and the tradition he helped create.

Américo Jacomino, known as Canhoto — “left-handed” — because he played the guitar in inverted position without reversing the strings, was a pioneering guitarist and composer working in São Paulo in the early twentieth century. He was one of the first Brazilian musicians to establish the solo guitar as a serious concert instrument rather than just an accompaniment for singers. At a time when the guitar was still looked down on by the classical establishment in Brazil, Canhoto was filling theatres.

His compositions are rooted in the choro tradition — the sophisticated instrumental music that had been developing in Rio de Janeiro since the late 1800s. Abismo de Rosas is a valsa-choro — a Brazilian waltz — and it has everything that made Canhoto’s music last: a lyrical, romantic melody, a clear formal structure, and an elegance that rewards both the listener and the performer. The harmony is traditional by modern standards — functional cadences, standard tonalities, no chromaticism to speak of — but the beauty of the piece is in the melodic writing. It didn’t need harmonic complexity to become a classic.

Baden Powell

Half a century after Canhoto wrote Abismo de Rosas, Baden Powell recorded his own arrangement of it in 1980 — demonstrating the development of Brazilian guitar over those fifty years.

Baden Powell de Aquino was born in 1937 in Varre-Sai, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. His father named him after the founder of the Boy Scouts, and the family home in the Rio suburb of São Cristóvão was a regular gathering place for musicians, including Pixinguinha and Donga, two giants of early Brazilian popular music. He began guitar lessons in the 1940s with Jayme Florence, known as Meira, one of the leading choro guitarists of the era. By the time he was a teenager he was winning talent competitions, and at fifteen he was playing professionally.

In the mid-1950s he joined pianist Ed Lincoln’s trio at the Bar Plaza in Copacabana, where his playing caught the attention of Antônio Carlos Jobim. He studied advanced harmony with Moacir Santos, and later cited Garoto — Aníbal Augusto Sardinha — as a key influence, alongside Dilermando Reis and Django Reinhardt. In 1962, he met the poet and diplomat Vinícius de Moraes, beginning a partnership that produced some of the defining music of the decade, including the landmark 1966 album Os Afro-Sambas. While bossa nova was the prevailing sound, Baden Powell and Vinícius were reaching further — combining samba with Afro-Brazilian ritual music from the candomblé and capoeira traditions. He was the house guitarist for Elenco Records and appeared regularly on Elis Regina’s television show O Fino da Bossa.

At nineteen, he made the decision to stop playing electric guitar entirely, concentrating on classical guitar for the rest of his career. He recorded prolifically — for Elenco and Forma in Brazil, Barclay in France, MPS/Saba in Germany — and toured Europe extensively through the 1960s before relocating permanently to France in 1968. His later recordings, made after returning to Brazil in the 1990s, are intimate solo guitar and voice performances.

Listen to Baden Powell’s 1980 recording of Abismo de Rosas:

The score

Baden Powell’s arrangement of Abismo de Rosas reimagines the harmonic foundation of the composition. The result sounds deceptively simple and warm — a listener hears a beautiful waltz — but the underlying craft is rich jazz harmony.

I’ve just published an edited transcription of this arrangement with full harmonic analysis throughout — chord symbols above the staff labelled by function, Roman numeral analysis below, and a set of Brazilian Harmony Study Notes explaining the key patterns.

Despite the sophistication of the harmony, this arrangement is technically accessible. The positions are comfortable, it doesn’t demand virtuosity, and a relaxed performance works beautifully. The main challenge is sustaining focus through a longer piece — it has three full sections plus a reprise. The score includes standard notation and TAB, and a study guide outlining Baden Powell’s harmonic approach.

Pick it up here: Abismo de Rosas — Solo Guitar Study Score

If you’ve been working through my tango scores, this is a natural next step. The harmonic language of Argentine tango and Brazilian bossa nova overlaps more than most people realise — both traditions drew heavily on jazz harmony, just applied to different musical frameworks. Studying both side by side is one of the fastest ways to internalise extended harmony on the guitar.

I’ve just published Tango Guitar: Anibal Arias — a collection of 20 solo guitar arrangements of classic Argentine tangos, based on the work of the legendary tango guitarist Aníbal Arias.

If you know Arias’s playing, you know why this matters. He was one of the great interpreters of the tango repertoire for solo guitar, and his arrangements of pieces like Sur, Nostalgias, and Volver are benchmarks of the style. But good editions of his work have always been hard to find, and the transcriptions that do exist tend to be bare-bones.

These aren’t straight transcriptions. I’ve re-engraved every piece from scratch and enhanced the harmony throughout — revoicing basic dominant 7ths as 7♭9 with the flat 9 in the bass, voicing minor chords as minor 6, filling out thin textures with inner voices, and replacing strummed chords with fingered block chords where it improves the melodic flow. The harmonic language draws on jazz and Brazilian guitar traditions while staying true to the lyrical character of Arias’s style.

Most of the pieces follow Arias's arrangements closely, with enhanced voicings and reworked harmony. Two pieces go further — Flores Negras is a more significant reinterpretation of Arias's arrangement that keeps much of his style, and Loca Bohemia is my original arrangement written in the style of Arias.

Every arrangement includes standard notation and TAB, and the layouts are designed for continuous reading with no repeat signs — ideal if you use an iPad with Piascore or a similar scrolling app.

The full track listing:

A Homero (Troilo) · A Media Luz (Donato) · Amurado (Maffia & Laurenz) · Barrio de Tango (Troilo) · Cafetín de Buenos Aires (Mores) · Caminito (Filiberto) · Don Juan (Ponzio) · Flores Negras (de Caro) · Loca Bohemia (de Caro) · Los Mareados (Cobián) · Malena (Demare) · María (Troilo) · Mariposita (Aieta) · Mi Noche Triste (Castriota) · Nostalgias (Cobián) · Nunca Tuvo Novia (Bardi) · Romance de Barrio (Troilo) · Sur (Troilo) · Tabaco (Pontier) · Volver (Gardel)

If you’ve been looking for performance-ready tango guitar editions that go beyond what’s currently available, this is it.

Grab it here: Romantic Tango Guitar Volume 1

Tom

There are seven notes in a scale. In the C major scale the notes are:

C D E F G A B

Each note is a ‘degree’ in the scale:

1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th.

A chord is created by adding (‘stacking’) every other note in the scale.

A basic chord is called a ‘triad’ which is made up of the three basic tones: 1st 3rd and 5th.

So the C triad is made up of C - E - G.

There are two basic kinds of triads used by guitarists who are starting out: major and minor.

A minor chord is created by flattening the 3rd.

So a C minor is: C Eb G.

Another common chord type is the 7th chord, also called ‘dominant’, which is created by adding a flat 7th.

So a C7 chord is: C E G Bb.

Jazz Level 1: Basic Jazz Chords

Guitarists start out by learning the grips for triads and 7th chords using cowboy or open chords, and then also barre chords.

This allows them to play most pop and rock tunes.

To move on to genres like Rnb, jazz standards, or bossa nova, guitarists have to move on to so-called ‘jazz chords’, which are major 7th, minor 7th and dominant 7th.

These chords add the 7th note in the scale as follows:

• major 7th: 1 3 (5) 7

• minor 7th: 1 b3 (5) b7

• dominant 7th: 1 3 (5) b7

C major 7th (CM7 or C△7):

C minor 7th (Cm7 or C-7):

Explanation:

• major, minor and dominant are chord qualities

• the 1st tone is called the ‘root’

• the 3rd and the 7th determine the chord quality; this is what people mean when they refer to ‘chord tones’ because they’re in a sense essential

• the 5th tone is optional and often omitted on guitar to allow for extended notes; this is explained further in the next lesson

• the flat 7th is actually called ‘the 7th’, whereas the 7th is actually referred to as ‘the major 7th’; this is just the convention

Jazz Level 2: Extended Jazz Chords

While an RnB tune will probably mostly comprise of basic 7th chords, most chords on a jazz or bossa chord chart will be extended in some way.

Examples:

• Major: CM9 = 1 3 7 9

• Dominant: C9 = 1 3 b7 9

• Minor: Cm9 = 1 b3 b7 9

C major 9 (CM9 or C△9):

C9:

C minor 9 (Cm9 or C-9):

Jazz Level 3: Colour Chords

A more modern or complex sound will utilise more extended ‘colour’ chords with additional notes from the scale, often omitting some of the chord tones:

Examples:

• Major: C69 = 1 3 6 9

• Dominant: C11 = 1 3 b7 9 11

• Minor: Cm6/9 = 1 b3 6 9

C69:

C11:

Cm69 or C-69:

Jazz Level 4: Non-Diatonic ‘Outside’ Notes

All the chords above are ‘diatonic’, which means that they use only notes that are in the scale of the chord.

So a C△7 chord will only use notes that are in the C major scale.

A further step toward a modern jazz sound is to use notes that are ‘non-diatonic’ by adding the other notes: b9, #9, b5/#11, #5/b6/b13.

Examples:

• Major: C△7#11 = 1 3 7 #11

• Dominant: C7b13 = 1 3 b7 b13

• Minor: C-7b13 = 1 b3 7 b13

C△7#11

C7b13

C-7b13

Why learn jazz chords?

It’s not necessary to learn jazz theory if you intend to play pop songs, singer song writer material, or rock music.

Rnb tunes (eg., Jamiroquai) will require level 1 basic jazz chords.

Jazz standards and bossa nova will require at least level 2 extended chords for basic comping (accompaniment).

Modern jazz and jazz improvisation will require more in-depth study of extended harmony at level 3 and non-diatonic ‘reharmonisation’ at level 4. This is what I teach on this substack, stay tuned!

Goals and getting started

The language of jazz theory is initially pretty confusing because there are different ways of notating chords, and there are various archaic conventions that don’t initially make sense.

I’ve found that a great way to get this to stick in your head is to use an online chord analysis tool like oolimo.com to analyse chords in tunes.

I’ve also found that bossa nova tunes, esp. those composed by Antonio Carlos ‘Tom’ Jobim, are an easy and fun way to acquire a solid vocabulary of basic jazz chords.

You kill several birds with that stone, because you learn a lot of great jazz chords, practice lead sheets and chord charts, get jazz chord shapes under your fingers, while building your repertoire.

I will publish Jobim study lead sheets in upcoming posts, so stay tuned!

Leave a comment or questions below!

👉 Download the PDF score here

I’m sharing these charts to give guitarists access to beautiful Argentine and Brazilian repertoire outside the usual jazz standards. If you’d like more arrangements, practice notes, and performance tips, stay subscribed here at Art Jazz Guitar.

Normally the real book will give you the basic chords underneath the given melody, which works for comping in a jazz combo context.

However, the guitarist is limited by this approach to either block chord comping, or single note soloing against a backing.

The standard approach for adapting this to solo guitar is the so-called ‘chord-melody’ which combines block chords with the melody on top.

Playing shell chords under the given melody can sound ‘inside’, and often sounds sound choppy when alternating between chords and single note lines.

Hazeltine’s enhanced chord arrangements provide extended jazz chords as well as slash chord triads.

These chords provide fuller and richer textures that sound more satisfying, ie., more ‘outside’ and modern, in a solo guitar context.

I developed a basic understanding of extended harmony studying materials for solo jazz guitar by Ted Greene and John Stowell.

Greene taught bigger 5 note chords as well as more open voicings that utilise stretches, open strings, and close intervals.

Most materials for jazz guitar focus on basic 4 note block chord voicings that are suitable to comping but tend to sound to small, chunky and ‘inside’ for a solo performance.

They are ‘pretty’ rather than ‘meaningful’.

Part of the reason is for this focus might be the prevalence of playing with the pick.

The pick has certain limitations in terms of how you can voice and sound the chord.

It does not facilitate the playing of wider ‘broken’ chords and arpeggiating larger chords which can only be done with classical technique in the right hand.

(I don’t use the term ‘finger-style guitar’ which connotes a style of playing on the steel string acoustic and is not normally associated with the classical guitar.)

While the guitar pick provides for a clean jazz tone and fast single note runs, it limits the player to strumming chords as a block.

The classical right hand technique is closer to the jazz piano.

It’s versatile enough to allow the player to spread out the chords and arpeggiate them in various ways.

Apart from mastering the classical right-hand technique, another roadblock to this for jazz players can be the tightness of the strings on a standard jazz guitar.

Wes Montgomery could use the weight of his thumb to move the heavy strings on his archtop guitar, but it’s less easy to get a full jazz tone with the other fingers.

Greene and Stowell deal with this problem by down-tuning.

Greene used a Telecaster fitted with jazz strings, which he tuned a half or a whole step down.

Stowell suggests going even further by tuning three whole steps down.

That’s a bit extreme, although it provides for some very interesting timbres.

I find that tuning down a whole step is optimal for jazz and bossa standards, and also suits my low male vocal.

It gives the electric more of the feel of a classical nylon string.

So utilising a classical right hand technique and down-tuning makes these extended pianistic chords more accessible.

Though intended for all instruments, Hazeltine’s arrangements are most immediately for the piano, and the chords as given don’t always naturally translate to the guitar.

It serves more as a basis for ideas for how a piece can be reharmonised.

While some of the chord progressions can be transferred mostly as given, in other cases I find that a key change provides for a better sound.

One valuable lesson I’ve learned working through these arrangements is the use of the 11th #11th sound in major, dominant and dominant chords.

It takes a while getting used to it, and figuring out where these chords can be plugged in, but it certainly pays off, giving you a more open and modern jazz sound.

It’s certainly an interesting approach for those looking to develop their chordal improv skills.

It might also provide a basis for a modern single line soloing approach, as arpeggiating over these chords will access extended ‘outside’ notes.