As many of you readers begin to dig deeper into learning jazz guitar harmony and voicings, you'll undoubtedly come across various ninth chords—Maj9, m9, 9, etc.—in your jazz-guitar...
As many of you readers begin to dig deeper into learning jazz guitar harmony and voicings, you'll undoubtedly come across various ninth chords—Maj9, m9, 9, etc.—in your jazz-guitar explorations.
Since these chords pop up time and again, it is important to have a variety of ninth chords under your fingers so that you can bring them into your comping, chord melody and chord soloing ideas when needed. But this doesn’t mean you have to learn a bunch of new chords. You can use previous knowledge to build great-sounding and authentic jazzy ninth chords.
In this lesson, we’ll be looking at how you can use “rootless” ninth chords to expand your jazz-guitar chord vocabulary without having to learn any new shapes, simply adapting four-note chords you already have under your fingers to a new musical situation.
Building Ninth Chords with Common Voicings
To begin, let’s take a look at four common jazz chords with their 1357 and rootless 9th-chord voicings. Notice that each chord pair shares three notes in common: the 3-5-7 of each chord, but that in the second voicing the ninth has replaced the root, which is why we call them “rootless” ninth chords, as they contain no root in the voicing. To get you started, here's a quick reference for the four chords used below.
• Maj7 - m7 from the 3rd
• 7 - m7b5 from the 3rd
• m7 - Maj7 from the 3rd
• mMaj7 - Maj7#5 from the 3rd.
This means that if you see a Dm7 and you want to make it Dm9, you simply play Fmaj7, a Maj7 chord starting on the 3rd of Dm7. Try this out with each of the following chords, Maj7-7-m7-mMaj7, using the quick guide above as a reference, through all 12 keys and with as many voicings