Pentatonic Chord Voicings
In this lesson I’m going to introduce you to the concept of pentatonic harmony. This lesson is closely related to the ‘Pentatonic Improvisation’ lesson so if you haven’t watched that tutorial I’d recommend you check that out first.
As with all lessons I’ll demonstrate how you could apply the theory concept to a jazz standard. The application of pentatonic harmony is so vast so this is literally the tip of the iceberg but we will be adding this theory into future jazz standard lessons and also looking at utilising these sounds for fills, introductions and endings.
The jazz standard I have chosen to demonstrate pentatonic harmony in action is ‘What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life’ which is one of my all time favourites. I’ve chosen this tune because it has particularly rich harmony.
We’re are going to start off with a simple example and then move onto something more challenging.
Lesson Downloads
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Major Pentatonic Scales In 12 Keys File Type: pdf -
Pentatonic Scale Choices Cheat Sheet File Type: pdf
Related Lessons
We will explore the pentatonic scale from a jazz improvisation standpoint applying the scale to different chord types and common progressions.
Michel Legrand’s ‘What are you doing the rest of your life’ is a challenging tune to learn and contains some difficult-to-navigate chord changes.
Introduced by the pianist Bill Evans, the ‘So What’ chord is a minor 11th voicing that sounds great over minor chords with the 5th in the melody.
Practice Tips
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Watch the pentatonic scales lesson which is the foundation of the theory for pentatonic voicings.
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Learn the voicings in C Major and apply these to a tune that you are working on.
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Learning these voicings in all 12 keys is a lot of 'heavy lifting' so be realistic about how long this will take.
- The most important thing is the understand that 1 set of voicings can be used over many different chord types. This is demonstrated at ~7:30s in the tutorial.
Fascinating stuff – I’m going to have to watch the Michel Legrand tutorial to get up to speed on this but couldn’t resist pressing on to see the examples of pentatonic harmony in action… I’ve begun working on the C pentatonic sequence and see why it’s going to take some time! I was wondering if these harmonies are related to the so-called “miracle voicings” that some jazz books use, and that also use a lot of quartal intervals. I remember having just as much trouble memorizing those in ii-V-Is and just decided to stick with rootless voicings at some point. The end of the tutorial does a really good job of explaining how to use pentatonics to expand your harmonic pallete so now that I know what the destination can be I’m prepared to persevere more than with miracle voicings.
Thanks Martin!
Good day Hayden
I just signed up yesterday with the Pro membership and I immediately learned something new. I mostly play Bebop, but I want to get more ideas with my improvisation and the way you construct the lessons are more in a modern style which I like so I thought why not mix Modal theory with Bebop.
My question is what lessons in your library can I check out to further my ideas of how to improvise and get more ideas in the bridge of a song? I only play Bebop in the bridge of all my songs, but it would be nice to lengthen the improv section by applying new ideas like Modal and pentatonic ideas.
Best, Stephan
Hey Stephan,
Here is a more detailed breakdown of each video and what improv concepts are covered. These lessons address general improvisation concepts that you can apply to any jazz standard:
Great lesson. Thanks.
Now I know where this comes from.