Red Garland Voicings Tutorial
In this lesson we are going to create a useful 2 handed voicing, widely known as the Red Garland Voicing.
Red Garland is perhaps most famous for his unique block chord style. He performed and recorded extensively throughout his career, with many of the jazz greats including Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and, Coleman Hawkins.
The Red Garland voicing has a very distinctive ‘block chord’ sound, but compared to previous styles of block chords, it has a much brighter quality and is slightly more dissonant in places.
The voicing also creates more fullness in the upper register which allows you to produce a very rich and full sound out of his piano. Similar to earlier block chord styles, the Red Garland voicing is often used to harmonise each note of a stepwise melody line.
This is a very nice voicing to comp with and is quite easy to learn because you are just playing a left hand voicing, and then doubling the melody with your right hand with a fifth interval in between.
Sometimes the 5th interval in the middle of you right hand will ‘clash’ with the underlying harmony and this creates some interesting colour and tension.
In this lesson, we will use the tune ‘There Will Never Be Another You’ to apply the red garland voicing. If you haven’t watched that jazz standard tutorial already, I would recommend watching that lesson first to familiarise yourself with the chords and changes.
Related Lessons
We explore how you can use So What voicings not only for minor chords, but also major chords by creating a quartal maj13 voicing.
The Kenny Barron voicing is an minor 11th chord voicing built from 5th intervals. The voicing is names after acclaimed jazz pianist Kenny Barron.
The Herbie Hancock voicing is a rich-sounding, two-handed minor 11th chord. A perfect choice when the 9th is in the melody over minor chords.
Practice Tips
Check out the 3 recordings of Red Garland below. He uses the block chord style in all 3 so definitely check out those recordings. Also remember to use the iRealPro app to get the backing track for this tune and set the drum beat on 2+4 which helps when working on swing rhythm.
We will applying these voicings to new jazz standards that we will be working on so spend some time to familiarize your self with this style of playing.
I love the sound of the Red Garland block chords. So happy you produced this lesson.
I’m also working on your 12 bar blues course which is great.
So I just tried playing Red Garland block chords over the F blues and it sounded nice, it will be nice to play the 12 bars a few times with single note improvisation and then once through entirely in Red Garland style and then maybe another time with single note improv. Just one more thing to make it sound more interesting.
Are there any other ways to combine 12 bar blues and Red Garland style? And do you know of any instances of Red playng 12 bar blues?
I wonder why there have been no comments on this lesson which I found so useful…
Many thanks.
Brad