Chord Of The Week 30/7/16 TWINKLEJAZZ - Jazz VII7 chord frags (NEW SOLO JAZZ ARRANGEMENT of Twinkle)

bigjon

TWINKLE JAZZ 6 - 2nd Arrangement 

I'm building a solo jazz chord-melody arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star from the ground up, gradually introducing more complex extensions and substitutions as we go. The key is Cmajor, to keep the theory easy to follow. Video at the bottom of this post. 
Six months ago I finished looking at the five jazzy chords I used in a solo jazz guitar arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The series began at http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/64757/chord-of-the-week-2-1-16-twinklejazz1-jazz-imaj7-3rd-7th-chord-frags and I've put forward links there to the other Twinklejazz chords if you want to recap and follow the series from the start. Now I've recorded a new version with further jazzy reharmonisations.
For the first five chords in the series I worked backwards round the CYCLE OF FIFTHS (see recap below) starting on the I chord of C, so we had Cmaj7 (the I chord), G7 (the V chord), Dm7 (the ii chord), A7 (the VI chord), and E7 (the III chord). In the first arrangement these chords occur in reverse order for the words "Like a diamond in the sky. Twinkle", except I substituted a D7 for the Dm7. For this 2nd arrangement I've kept the same E7 A7 D7 G7 progression under "Like a diamond in the sky", but gone another step backwards along the cycle of fifths . . .
Today we're looking at the 5th-to-last chord of the bridge just after the word "...high...", which is B7, the VII chord, leading in to the E7 III chord on the word "...Like a...". The melody note is D xxx7xx and the bass note is B 7xxxxx, in the video I play the chord as a

B7#9: 7677xx

at 0:15 (confession - I was lazy and didn't actually play the 5th string, so a actually played a boring old Bm7 7x77xx vii chord but that wouldn't really suit this tutorial and I was definitely implying the missing D# in my head). Initially we'll always ignore the bass note and the melody note. If we were playing in a group the bassist and melody instrument would be taking care of those in any case, so our job would just be to define the harmony above the bass note. We'll put them back in later to complete our solo jazz guitar arrangement.
Recap on NASHVILLE CHORD NOTATION using ROMAN NUMERALS
A word on lower-case notation for the vii chord Bm7 versus upper-case notation for the VII chord B7#9. In Nashville chord notation, a capital letter means that the third of the chord is major (four semitones above the root note), hence V7 and Imaj7 which we have seen in previous weeks, eg C major has a root note C x3xxxx and a major third 4 frets higher E x7xxxx. Lower case means that the third of the chord is minor (only three semitones above the root note) so the ii chord of a harmonised major scale is minor: in this case Bminor has a B root note 7xxxxx and the third is D 3 frets higher at 10 x x x x x.

Recap on RE-HARMONISATION, SECONDARY DOMINANTS & the CYCLE OF FIFTHS
Before we get to the voicing of the chord, a recap on how we arrive at a VII dominant chord in the first place. A conventional nursery-rhyme rendition of the tune would probably have a chord sequence of C F C G (I IV I V) for "Like a diamond in the sky": x32x13 xx3211 x3x010 32x03x. But jazz strongly favours the forward momentum given when the bassline moves up in fourths (= down in fifths, hence the common name CYCLE OF FIFTHS), as happens with the V I progression at the end of the song on the words "what you are." For the line "Like a diamond in the sky, which ends on a V chord G, we'll rigidly move the bassline back in 4ths so "in the" has a bass note of D, "diamond" has a bass note of A, & the chord on "Like a" has a bass note of E. Then just before the line we'll go another step backwards round the cycle of fifths and shoehorn a chord with a B bass note in at the end of the previous line just after the word "...high...". Sticking with the C major scale, that gives us the vii chord Bm, but Bm to an E bass note sounds pretty feeble as a progression within the context of the line in the key of C, so most of the time jazz replaces the vii chord with its dominant equivalent VII chord, here an B7 instead of an Bm7. That has the effect of abandoning C major as the key centre & replacing it with a new key centre of E. This is because a key centre is uniquely defined by a 7th chord, as there is only one 7th chord in the parent scale for each key. Going up the harmonised major scale, the ONLY dominant 7 chord is the V chord, a G7 in our usual key of C. So the harmonised C major scale I ii iii IV V vi vii I (root, 3rd & 7th only) is Cmaj7 Dm7 Em7 Fmaj7 G7 Am7 Bm7 Cmaj7 - Cmaj7 x3x45x, Dm7 x5x56x, Em7 x7x78x, Fmaj7 xx3x55, G7 xx5x67, Am7 xx7x88, Bm7 x x 9 x 10 10, and back to C x x 10 x 12 12. So the fact that our new chord B7 is a 7th chord means it MUST be functioning as the V dominant chord, and so the key has temporarily moved to E. This re-harmonisation move is called a 'Secondary Dominant', where any chord which is not the I chord is approached from a dominant 7th chord built on the root note a 4th backwards from it.
So, now we've decided to play some kind of VII dominant chord, how to arrange it onto the guitar? The key to getting a chord to sound jazzy is to ignore the 5th and focus instead on the 3rd and 7th. The 3rd note of the E major scale E F# G# A B C# D# (the temporary parent scale) up from E (the root note of the current chord) is note D# x6xxxx and the 7th note of the E major scale up from B is note A xx7xxx. For solo jazz arrangements I recommend mostly putting the 3rd and 7th onto strings 3 & 4, to leave strings 1&2 clear for jazzy extensions and melody notes, and leaving strings 5 & 6 clear for bass notes. That would give a 3rd & 7th partial chord for VII7 chords as
VII7 - B7(no root): xx12xx or xx78xx
and a full B7#9 chord of x2123x or 7x78x9
but in this arrangement I broke that rule and remapped the first chord onto strings six to 3 to give 7677xx so as to be located in position at the 7th fret ready for the next E7#9 chord x7678x.
As usual I put down 2 versions of the 3rd & 7th on the 3rd & 4th strings: this week the first voicing, which I'm using on the video (though displaced one string lower!), has the 3rd on the 4th string whereas the second version has the 3rd on the 3rd string. If your chord progression is moving round the cycle of fifths (and in Jazz this happens a lot by design, see the excursus on re-harmonisation above!), where the root notes of this chord and the next chord are 5 notes of the scale apart, then by swapping which string out of the 3rd or 4th string takes the third of the chord, and which takes the seventh, from one chord to the next, you will create voicings that are right next to each other on the fretboard and will flow smoothly, eg xx12xx to xx01xx (although in this instance the voicings x67xxx and xx67xx don't flow smoothly at all ;-) !!) 

Now we'll add the bass note B 7xxxxx back in, and the melody note D xxx7xx with is the #9 of the B7 chord as it is one semitone more than 9 notes away from B going up a cycled E major parent scale. So the full chord with the melody note on top is
E7#9: x7678x
as at 0:15 in this video of me playing a 30-second arrangement of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

bigjon

Chord Of The Week Index updated with 156 discussions at http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/598/chord-of-the-week-index

bigjon

If you want to work through the Twinkle Jazz series from the beginning the first in the series is at http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/64757/chord-of-the-week-2-1-16-twinklejazz1-jazz-imaj7-3rd-7th-chord-frags I'll edit the series with forward links as I go: the next Twinkle Jazz 7 is at [to follow]

viz

Very nice, bj!