Beginnings 11

There are twelve major, twelve minor seventh, and twelve dominantchords, each named in reference to some first note and the major scalestarting there.

Chords may be produced in various ways. They may be played indifferent positions on the keyboard (C, E, G, left to right; or E, G, C;or G, C, E, for instance), and, as is common in most modern music,numerous additional tones are added to the basic chord tones to pro-vide a fuller sound. Jazz musicians seldom play chords using the defin-ing notes alone, closely spaced on the piano, but spread chord tonesbetween both hands, or play them all in one hand with various othernotes added to each chord type to enrich its texture. The particularway a chord is executed and colored is referred to as chord voicing.Such considerations neednt be musicologically reviewed here.8

SongsIn most jazz play, the song is used as a basic formatting device. A songis a more or less fixed pattern of chords, with a written melody laid outin a metrical structure, with so many beats, in an evenly articulatedpulse, organized into a set of measures, or barsgroups of accentedpulses: 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3, or far more commonly, 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 34 1 2 3 4, etc. Most popular songs have standard formats, and tuneswith 12, 16, 24, 32, and 36 measures are most common. Heres thefirst half of a typical 32-measure standard:

Tenderly

| E | A7 | Em7 | A 7 || Fm7 | D7 | E | E || Am7 | Fm7 | Am7 | Dm7 G7 || Cm7 | F7 | Fm7 | B 7 |This chord chart, without a notated melody, furnishes a diagram of thestructure of the song Tenderly, in the key of E. (A key essentiallymeans that most melody notes fall on a certain major scale, here E, andthat the songs harmonic movement usually heads to a final rest on anE major chord, the group hum if you will. Any song may be playedin any of the twelve keys.)

Nearly every song has a more or less unique harmony (chordsequence), but progressions from one chord to the next follow nar-rowly defined rules, so that most tunes share many common chord