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.