Knowra Jazz harmony Jazz harmony Jazz harmony is a musical language built from extended chords, chromatic movement, and flexible tonal progressions. It supports improvisation while allowing tonal centers to shift or remain ambiguous.
Seventh chord : A chord formed from a root, a third, a fifth, and a seventh. Seventh chords provide the basic harmonic color that jazz extends and alters.
ii–V–I : A progression from the supertonic chord through the dominant to the tonic. This compact cadence is a central template for jazz tonal motion.
Jazz standard : A widely performed jazz composition that serves as shared repertoire for musicians. Standards give players recurring progressions on which to improvise and vary harmony.
Common-practice tonality : The tonal system that governed much European art music from roughly 1600 to 1900. Jazz draws on tonal function but often loosens its pacing and expectations.
Blues : A musical tradition rooted in African American communities, characterized by expressive pitch, recurring forms, and distinctive repertories. Blues harmony contributed blue notes and recurring progressions to jazz.
Chord extension : A chord tone beyond the seventh, commonly the ninth, eleventh, or thirteenth. Extensions add the characteristic upper-note colors of jazz chords.
Dominant seventh chord : A major triad with a minor seventh above its root, often resolving to a chord a fourth higher. Its tritone supplies the strongest conventional pull toward a tonic chord.
Rhythm changes : A common jazz form and progression derived from George Gershwin’s song “I Got Rhythm.” Its fast-moving changes test how fluently a player navigates tonal harmony.
Pop chord progression : A recurring sequence of chords used to organize a popular song’s harmony. Comparing pop progressions highlights jazz’s denser substitutions and extensions.
Ragtime : A syncopated American piano music popular around the turn of the twentieth century. Ragtime’s composed forms and chromatic piano vocabulary helped shape early jazz practice.
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