Progressions

Progressions to practice

Jazz is a small number of chord movements, played in every key and in every order. These are practice pages rather than articles: a chart, the fingerings that connect it, and a band that loops it wherever you set the key.

• The major ii–V–I, in every key Three chords that lean, pull, and land — voice-led into one four-fret window, with the band walking underneath.
• The jazz blues, in every key The twelve bars everyone knows, and the three bars jazz replaces — both loops side by side, five grips for the whole chorus.
• The minor ii–V–i, in every key The cadence a minor key resolves with, the half-diminished chord that starts it, and the minor blues it usually arrives inside.
• The turnaround, in every key The four bars that hand a tune back to bar one — and the same four played again from the ii, to show they are one loop with two doors.
• Rhythm changes, in every key The form called after the blues and called fast — eight bars at two chords a bar, the eight grips that carry them, and the bridge underneath.
• The Coltrane cycle, in every key Four bars through three keys, comped with six shapes inside one hand position — and the arithmetic that turns twelve keys into four.
• The bird blues, in every key Twenty chords in twelve bars, nine of them ii–Vs — and the chromatic stretch that turns out to be two grips and a slide.

How to use them

Pick a key, start the loop, and comp along with the shapes on the page until you stop reading them. Then change the key and do it again — the chart re-spells, the fingerings move to the nearest window, and the band follows. The playing is the point; the page is only there to be right about what the chords are and where they sit.

If you want the reasoning behind the shapes rather than the drill, the articles cover it: what a drop-2 voicing is, how voice leading chooses between the inversions, and which two notes — the guide tones — do the work in every chord here. For a word rather than an explanation, the glossary defines everything these pages use in a sentence or two.

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