Over many years of playing jazz and other contemporary styles, I’ve noticed there is no universal agreement among arrangers, copyists, and songwriters about chord symbols. In teaching students to read chord charts, I’ve also noticed how the theoretical basis for many commonly-used symbols, abbreviations, and terms, while well-known among musicians, have not been addressed very thoroughly in books and publications available to piano students. There are many more materials available now than when I was learning 20 years ago, and two books I use and recommend are:
- The Jazz Piano Book – by Mark Levine
- The Pop Piano Book – by Mark Harrison
Over the next few months, I will be submitting documents here on my blog and on jaypfeifer.com with the purpose of building on these and other great books in the field of contemporary music theory. These documents are intended to be the beginning, not the end, of a discussion about standardizing chord symbols, terms, names and descriptions of styles and techniques, and other aspects of contemporary music with a solid theoretical foundation. To this end, I welcome comments, both positive and negative, from arrangers, copyists, songwriters, and other musicians. I have developed and posted “Chord Standards” at http://jaypfeifer.com/chordstandards/ under a Creative Commons license that allows users to access, copy, and re-distribute the document subject to certain limitations. It is my intent that this url will contain the latest version of the document.
