Knowing how to ‘color’ your chords when comping behind a vocalist or soloist is an essential skill for any jazz guitarist. In fact, your job in the rhythm section -- when you’re responsible for the harmony -- is coloring the chords to feed the soloist harmonic ideas that they can improvise over.

This Jazz Chord Colors edition of Take 5 from Frank Vignola will focus on the chord extensions that you can use in any jazz setting to spice up your comping and accompaniment skills.

”We’ll start with a chord coloring primer where I’ll pass on a vocabulary of the most useful jazz chord extensions, voicings, and fingerings. I’ll show you several ways to play any Major, Minor or Dominant chord that you might encounter in the jazz songbook. We’ll work with 7ths, 9ths, 6ths, flat 9s, 13ths, flat 13ths, and 6/9s. I’ll show you the exact chords that I use 90% of the time when performing or recording in any setting.”

Frank will then guide you through 5 Jazz Chord Colors performance studies, from basic to more sophisticated and challenging chord coloring and comping approaches. Frank performs each study over a backing track and then breaks it down emphasizing the key concepts in play.

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