Sophisticated Lady Tutorial
Sophisticated Lady is one of the most famous jazz standards written by the great Duke Ellington, who was one of the most famous jazz composers and band leaders from the 20^th^ century. Written in the key of Ab Major, it follows a standard 32 bar A-A-B-A form.
The tune is quite challenging to play in places and contains a lot of chromatic movement with dominant chords. This makes it a nice tune to study altered harmony and upper structures.
In the first section of the video we will explore the A section of the tune. Remember the A section repeats 3 times so we will be looking at different ways you can voice the chords to add variety to the performance. The descending sets of dominant chords in the A section are quite tricky to navigate at first but using parallel voicings makes the task is much easier.
Moving into the second half of this tutorial we adopt a basic stride style by playing the roots way down in the lower registers and then moving up with out left hand to play left hand voicings. The bridge of Sophisticated Lady has a completely different feel to the A section but sounds great with a stride piano style left hand.
This is one of Duke Ellington’s greatest ballads – enjoy!
Related Lessons
Diminished 7th chords are not as common as major, minor and dominant chords and so you don’t see them as often in jazz standards.
We start the lesson by recapping the basic theory behind sus chords and then explore them in context of major and minor 251s
Tritone Substitution is a useful reharmonisation technique that can be used to add harmonic interest and variety to a chord progression.
Practice Tips
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Sophisticated Lady is a wonderful tune to explore upper structure triads.
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Remember to print off the Upper Structure Triad Cheat Sheet which will help you find these voicings quickly and easily.
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Try to memorise the chord tones contained in each upper structure triad. This will help you make more informed decisions when adding altered harmony to your arrangements.
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As an example, when the root is in the melody over a dominant chord, the #5#9 upper structure should come to mind which creates the #5, Root & #9. It's then down to you to find the most suitable inversion.
Great lesson. For subsequent listeners: it looks like there is a typo at 22:25 where the lead sheet says Abm7b5 but you play Am7b5 (which I think is correct).
Hi Matt, thanks for spotting this – that’s correct. I also say ‘Abm7b5’ when in fact it is an Am7b5. This creates a 251 into the bridge (Am7b5 – D7b9 – Gmaj7) . All the best, Hayden
Can you put in the leadsheet for this song…
Hi Jose, yes sure thing, here it is: http://www.pianogroove.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Sophisticated-Lady.pdf
Fantastic tutorial and awesome song selection!
Thanks Adam!