Simple Exercise for Incredible Reharms (feat. Luther S. Allison)

Oftentimes, people will learn harmonic concepts but will not understand how and when to use them in the context of playing a standard or playing with other musicians. 

Everything we're about to talk about today, you can find in our new resource 30 Day Jazz Harmony Chops, which will provide you with a simple day-by-day plan where every session focuses on three things: a technical warm-up, a harmonic concept, and direct application to a tune. Everything that we cover is accompanied by sheet music, along with overhead video. By the end of the 30 days, you're going to have access to many different tunes and harmonic concepts, and you'll have tools to develop your soloing and comping as a jazz pianist.

And if you want to see how Luther plays through anything we talk about today, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video Simple Exercise for Incredible Reharms (feat. Luther S. Allison).

Now let’s get playing!

Reharmonization is a very, very important topic as a jazz musician. And so a few other ideas for how to open up your mind harmonically, we’re going to be taking one note at a time. If we just take G, we pick any bass note, and then figure out all of the chords that we can play within this top note and this bottom note.

We can play Ebmaj7, Ebmaj7#5, Eb6, Eb(b9), Eb(b9b13).

If we were to move that bass up to E, we could do a C/E, an A/E, an Em7b5, Eb/E, which is really crunchy.

Let’s move the bass note to F. 

Another good thing is to do this in time, which forces you to have to come up with something fairly quickly. 

Going up. Not a lot of options here.

Susb9 on our Gb, we could have Gsus, Gm. This is when we could play anything—G and G are your outside notes. 

Up to Ab.

And as you do this, mess around with different notes on the top as well. So maybe you can say, “I'll do one note, one time through, where I keep the top note the same and change all the chords within, while I move the bottom note up chromatically.”

Or you can say, “I'm going to move the top note up chromatically for each chord.”

Well that’s all we have for today, but if you’re interested in learning more on this topic, make sure to check out our resource 30 Day Jazz Harmony Chops. And if you want to hear how Luther played through anything we talked about today, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video Simple Exercise for Incredible Reharms (feat. Luther S. Allison).

We’ll see you next time!