Let’s say you’re at a rehearsal, and your band leader starts passing out brand new sheet music—you’re excited, until you start seeing chords you’ve never seen before. Long chord symbols that may as well be a language of its own.
But today, we’ll take you from stressing to impressing with complex chord progressions. But first, if you want to master complex chord progressions, we have the Complex Chords Handbook, which features over a dozen complex chords you’re most likely to encounter in jazz, then lays them out with their parent scale of origin, along with other popular scale choices. All of the material is in all 12 keys, and features recordings to help guide you along. Also make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, “How to Navigate Complex Chord Progressions”.
The bright side of complex chords is that in jazz, we can always trace a chord back to a parent scale. These parent scales are: the major scale, the melodic minor scale, the harmonic minor scale, and the harmonic major scale. We also have cases where we’ll add notes like passing tones to these scales, and that’s where we get things like the bebop scale. Separately, we also have symmetrical scales, like the whole tone scale and diminished scales. These can help generate some extra interest, but ultimately you can still trace the harmony back to one of the parent scales mentioned above.
Let’s walk through our three-step process for tackling complex chord progressions.
We’ll start with the standard, “The Girl from Ipanema.” For a lot of developing jazz musicians, this progression can be a little confusing, as you’ve got dominant seventh chords that are not acting as a V7, and they also have a #11.
Our first step is going to be to clarify where each chord is coming from. The first chord, Fmaj7, is the key we’re in—that’s our tonic, coming from the F major scale. Now the next chord in bar 3 is a G7#11. This tells us to use the G dominant scale with a raised 11, giving us what is called the G Lydian Dominant scale. This is the fourth mode of its parent scale, which is D melodic minor.
The Complex Chords Handbook shows you this, as well as other choices and phrase examples demonstrating these sounds.
Once you’ve gone through the composition and understand what the “right” notes are, then you can move on to the second step—establishing a handful of reliable and good-sounding shapes and sounds that you can confidently improvise over each individual chord.
Let’s take a look at some of Nathan’s favorite for Lydian Dominant in particular.
First, we’ll look at a DmM7 arpeggio.
So why does this work? Well DmM7 is the first diatonic seventh chord of Lydian Dominant’s parent scale, D melodic minor. On the G7#11, these four notes will give you the 5, b7, 9, and #11, a unique set of colorful pitches that will always be good over this chord.
Next we have the F+maj7 arpeggio.
This one works because it’s the third diatonic seventh chord of the parent scale, D melodic minor. It’ll give you the G7#11’s b7, 9, #11, and 13. You’re missing a guide tone in both of these shapes (the third), but it doesn’t really matter. There are other important pitches that these shapes are addressing.
Another cool shape is the F Lydian Augmented shape.
This shape includes both the guide tones and the #11 and 13. The name comes from it having the #11 interval from F to B in this augmented fifth interval (F to C#).
One more reliable option is the A major b6 pentatonic scale, which is just the A major pentatonic scale but with a lowered sixth.
These notes will give you the G7#11’s 9, 3, #11, 13, and b7.
Now obviously there are an infinite amount of shapes and sounds you can use for any chord, but a great starting point is to establish at least three that you feel really comfortable with.
Let’s take a look at a page from the Complex Chords Handbook, which demonstrates how you could tackle the first eight bars of “The Girl from Ipanema.”
The first bar borrows from the melody of the tune, and we’ll build upon it in the next measure by using an Am pentatonic sound in a linear fashion. This B is an implied #11 in this maj7 chord, which can sound nice, if that’s our intention. Now we arrive to our G7#11 chord, and we’re going to use the sound of the G whole tone scale. This scale is going to give you a #5, which is not part of the Lydian Dominant scale, but that’s ok, because it still sounds great, and is a very popular alternate choice of scale to play over this chord in these two measures. We’re really embellishing a G+ triad this whole time, which informs us that a G+ is another great shape to add to your back pocket.
Now we’ll anticipate the chord with an eighth note and descend down the G minor seventh arpeggio and add a 9 in between. When we land on G, we’ll continue to descend, but with a G minor bebop scale until we smoothly voice lead on to the 13th of our Gb7#11 chord. From here, we’ll ascend up another very handy shape for this chord, the maj7b5, from the b7. Technically this is an Fbmaj7b5 shape, but most people don’t like to think of Fb, so we’ll call it an Emaj7b5, starting on its major seventh, D#. Once we reach the top of the shape, we’ll descend down the Gb Lydian Dominant scale, which will smoothly voice lead us into the third of Fmaj7, followed by a three-note diatonic enclosure around the root. Then, we’ll end it with a pickup into the exact same melodic cell, just up a half step to fit this chord.
Slash chords
Alright so that covers the first eight bars of “The Girl from Ipanema.” But what do you do if you see a chord like Dbmaj7b5/C? How do you solo over that?
Just like before, the first step is to identify the chord scale. A slash chord, especially a complicated one like this, can be kind of a puzzle, and usually several options can work over a given slash chord. The Complex Chords Handbook has a thesaurus section that explains what to play over the most typical slash chords you’ll see in jazz.
Looking at Dbmaj7b5/C, we can see that the note after the slash is the root. Now let’s identify the pitches of each note in relationship to that C. Db is the b9, F is the 4, G is the 5, and C is the root. Looking at this, we have a suspended chord with a b9. What would be the other notes? Using what notes we have as clues—a maj7 chord can’t have a b9, like we have here. So that means the seventh of this chord has to be a b7—Bb. So this chord is really just another way to say C7b9sus4, and there are lots of options that can work for this chord.
The most popular option is the C Phrygian scale, the third mode of the parent scale Ab. Another popular option is the C Dorian b2 scale, the second mode of the parent scale, Bb melodic minor. These are all laid out for you in the Complex Chords Handbook in all 12 keys.
Now we’ll use our second step again and establish some reliable and good-sounding shapes for this chord. Some favorites are the Dbmaj7b5 arpeggio and the Gm7b5 arpeggio. If you want more of a Phrygian sound, you could play the F minor pentatonic scale over this chord. Likewise if you want to try a Dorian b2 sound over this chord, a BbmM7 arpeggio sounds great.
So this chord is a good substitute for V7 chords. Here’s an excerpt from the Complex Chords Handbook that demonstrates these chords in action over a VI ii V I.
Here we have something completely diatonic, utilizing a handful of different shapes to generate all these colorful sounds. We start off with the root of D7b9sus4 as an approach note to an inversion of that m7b5 chord we mentioned earlier. That works nicely and is a m7b5 chord from the fifth of this chord. So in this case it’s an Am7b5. This gives you the 5, b7, b9, and 4. Using this shape, we ascend and descend with it, then voice lead into the b7 of the Gm7 chord. From here we play a 1, 2, 3, 5 shape from F and play F again up an octave and descend from C in a 1, 3, 4, 5 shape. We’ll descend this shape again, but this time it’s a Db 1, 3, 4, 5, right after we do it again. But we’ll trade the Db for a Bb this time for some variety.
This Ab in in this chord is a b6, confirming this to be a Phrygian sound. The first chord here didn’t have a 6, so it’s ambiguous as to what mode we’re playing in here. On to the final chord, the Fmaj7—we return to the descending 1, 3, 4, 5 sound and we end off the phrase with a decoration around the fifth.
To finish us out, we’ll speed run this process over one more chord progression—the first four bars of the B section of Dolphin Dance by Herbie Hancock.
First step, clarifying all the “correct” chord scales over each of the chords, G maj7 = G major scale, G7sus = G dominant scale, A/G is ambiguous, so multiple choices could work. As the Complex Chords Handbook will show you, you have a few popular options you can use over this slash chord. For now, we’ll use the G Lydian Augmented scale. And finally, the Ebmaj7#11/G is another ambitious chord where we have a few options. This time, we’ll go with the G Aeolian mode (or natural minor).
On to step two, let’s establish our handful of shapes.
Gmaj7 is pretty easy. You probably have a lot of things in that sound already. But for G7sus, an F major arpeggio sounds pretty great, as does F major pentatonic. You could also treat this as if it was a ii in C major, in which case you could imply that it’s an ordinary Dm7 chord using D Dorian.
For G Lydian Augmented, we’ll us a triad pair of G+ and A major. And finally our G Aeolian shape to use for the Ebmaj7b5 arpeggio.
This gives us less to think about and helps us reduce the progression to something we can understand and work with.
Here’s a line from the Complex Chords Handbook that utilizes these specific sounds over these measures of Dolphin Dance.
That’s all for today, but if you want to learn more, you’ll definitely want to check out the Complex Chords Handbook, as well as our accompanying YouTube video, “How to Navigate Complex Chord Progressions”.
We’ll see you next time!
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