Chapter: Jazz Voicings

This is a preview of the educational program A Jazz Improvisation Almanac which is under development for the Outside Shore Music Online School. Feel free to browse this preview and learn what you can from it. For a more completed product, though, check out the original freely browsable jazz textbook, A Jazz Improvisation Primer.

The concept of a voicing usually needs some explaining. When a jazz pianist, guitarist, or arranger sees a chord symbol while providing accompaniment, he rarely plays the chord in its raw form - the form described in the chapter on harmony. That is, he rarely plays a simple stack of thirds.

Instead, a musician tries to choose a combination of notes that conveys the sound of the chord while providing a pleasing distribution of notes within the chord and while maintaining good voice leading between chords. The resultant combination of notes may contain non-chord tones, and it may arrange the notes in ways you would not otherwise have expected.

Some of these voicings are used primarily by pianists and other keyboard instruments; others are more common to guitarists and arrangers. Some of these voicings assume the presence of a bass part to provide the root of the chord; others are intended to provide their own bass. Some of these voicings are meant to be played in the lower range of the instrument while the musicians simultaneously plays a melodic line in the upper range of the instrument; others are meant to use more of the range of the instrument and are more appropriate for use when accompanying a soloist or as punctuation between phrases of one's own solo.

This chapter describes some methods that may be used to construct voicings appropriate for jazz, and it suggests some appropriate uses for these voicings. The program can use your MIDI device to play any of the voicings presented. Each voicing may be displayed or played in any key. Often, any given voicing can be played an octave higher or lower than is shown by this program.

As with the chapter on jazz scales, you should not attempt to master them all at once. The first two sections, on skeleton and 3/7 voicings, should be more than enough to get you started if you are a keyboardist; guitar players may wish to look first at the 3/7 and quartal voicings. After you have become comfortable with these voicings, you should then move on to the unit on Improvisation and on Accompanying, before tackling the other voicings.

Copyright 2000 Outside Shore Music
Authored by Marc Sabatella

Chapter: Jazz Voicings