A Chord A Day Presents: Blue Monk

Hi!

Well, this isn't a chord post but instead I'm posting a recent video of me playing Blue Monk - a jazz blues composed by Thelonious Monk. For the most part, I only worked out the head (the melody section) and the solo section is a combination of chords, single note lines, double stops and some walking bass lines with chords.

The chords I used in this performance are what I consider to be Joe Pass-inspired chord vocabulary. Joe is a great inspiration to me particularly when I started out learning jazz guitar. My favorite album is the Virtuoso: Live! album and his later CD entitled Songs For Ellen. It is a very sparse album with mostly him playing the melody of the songs and not much soloing (if any) but I really relate to the feel of the album.

Anyway, here's my take on Blue Monk!

Cheers,
Az
PS - I'll be starting to post new chords in this coming week..


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Chord #88 - G7b5(13)

Today's chord is a 6-note dominant voicing. Though more sparsely used in most modern jazz settings (smaller 3 to 4 note voicings are more common), these kind of chords are great to use in ballads and solo settings.

For more examples of these kind of chords, check out recordings by Tal Farlow. For notated examples, check out Steve Rochinski's The Jazz Style of Tal Farlow (Hal Leonard). Steve studied with Tal and his book has a very insightful section on Tal's chordal language.

For my musical example today, I played a Dmin9/G and then today's chord. This could be used in an intro leading to a song that starts on C Major.

Enjoy!

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Chord #87 - Bmin(add9)/F#

Today's chord is a minor voicing. It can be viewed as a close position second inversion minor triad with an added 9th.

In the musical example, I played a series of II-Vs (Bmi7-E7-Amin7-D7-Gmin7-C7) that resolves to an F Major chord.

Enjoy!

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