These confusing chords – some say they are jazz chords – are really simple once you understand what’s going on

Free piano tips at playpiano.com. Good morning. This is Duane and today I’d like to talk about complex chords – jazz chords – that aren’t really once you understand them. Sometimes people try to overanalyze chord structures and it just makes it more confusing, so I’d like to share with you some complex chords that aren’t really complex at all once you understand what’s going on.

That chord that I just played, I was playing the G7 chord but I played this. How would you analyze that? If I was going to analyze it, it would be a G7 with a 6th in it and a flat 9th. To my mind that’s overanalyzing it. You could analyze it that way but that’s kind of complex, especially if you use a blue not of some sort. That’s really hard to analyze. All that’s happening is in the left hand you got a G7 open voicing. In other words, the root and the 7th. In the right hand you supply the 3rd. You definitely have the G7 chord there. Anytime you can leave out the 5th, you got the same chord. The 5th doesn’t add that much to it, so I’m leaving the 5th out.

That chord is what? It’s E major, isn’t it? What’s really happening is that the E major chord is being played over the G7 chord, that’s all. The E7 inverted looks like that. I think I was doing a straddle down or something like that, breaking up the E chord from the top down. Then the final chord was C but instead of playing C I did this. What chord is that? A lot of people will try to analyze that and that’s of course a C chord, that’s a major 7, and wow, that’s a flat 3rd and a flat 5th. That would be difficult to write about the symbol. You could do it but that’s pretty complex. But really it’s simple, isn’t it?

That’s a B major chord over C. That’s all that’s going on – B over C. I just slid from B up to C. Erroll Garner did exactly the same thing in “Misty.” Watch. See if I can play it right. See that chord? That’s B over C, then he just brought it back to C major 7. B, the whole B chord that’s all it is, over C. Then dissolving – yeah, that’s a good word – into the C major 7 chord. Again, and so on.

Another example, if I played “Moon River.” What chord is that? That’s A minor 7, 9th, 11th. You could analyze it that way but another way to analyze it is that’s simply the G chord over A minor 7. Here’s another one. Let’s take it in context. Right there. If you analyze that you’d have to call it an F chord, right? That’s the F chord but it’s really just the G chord over F, isn’t it? The G chord is superimposed over F. There it is. There’s so many examples of this in … That chord, you’d have to analyze it as B flat but that’s the C chord over it – that’s all that’s going on. Like I said, those are complex chords; they seem like complex chords but they really aren’t once you understand what’s going on.

Just a little piano tip that you can look for that sort of thing in music. The more you understand music theory, in other words the guts of music, the more music becomes understandable and reasonable and logical, because music is basically math. I wish I had paid attention in math class in high school but I didn’t so I had to learn it the hard way through the back door of music. In any case, it can help you a lot. That’s my little sermon for today so I’ll get off my stand here and let you go. I hope that you will watch these piano tips often because you can learn a lot, and they’re all free so come on over to playpiano.com and sign up for our free piano tips. You’ll be glad you did. That’s all for today. Bye bye for now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFT4FAwDnOo
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