Bigfoot By Charlie Parker - Guitar Chord Melody Arrangement Lesson

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Chord-melody is among the most important techniques one can learn as a jazz guitarist. It is an extensive topic to dig into, as there are so many ways it can be done, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll simply define chord-melody as playing a melody harmonized with chords.

This technique is one way to utilize the polyphonic capabilities of the guitar to give us a broader palate of textures to draw from.

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In many ways, pianists paved the way for the role the guitar ultimately came to play in jazz music, so much of my influence in this realm comes from the great pianists. Listening to Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Red Garland, Erroll Garner, Wynton Kelly, and many others, particularly in a trio setting, has been especially enlightening.

With limited instrumentation, these pianists manage to make the band sound like an entire orchestra! Climactic moments swell with intensity; these are contrasted by soft, simmering passages that keep the listener on the edge of their seat. Much of this can be attributed to the group’s dynamic control, but there is another important element at play here.

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I mentioned textures at the beginning of this article and wanted to provide a cursory definition of what that means for our purposes. Texture effectively means how many voices are at play. In a big-picture way, a band could play with different textures by simply having different instruments play at different times.

But if we zoom in on just the piano or guitar, we can employ a variety of textures by playing a different number of notes in a passage. For instance, when we play single-note lines, we’re playing in a one-voice texture. When we play block chords, we’re typically playing in a four-voice texture.

Each number of voices we can play in has its own unique quality, and in order to express ourselves as fully as possible, we want to be able to use any of the textures that are available to us.

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Think of a Wes Montgomery solo. I’m thinking of “No Blues” off Smokin’ at the Half Note. Wes plays single note lines, he plays octaves, he plays block chords. That’s our one-voice, two-voice, and four-voice textures.

Listening to this solo, his use of different textures helps to shape his solo, giving it an exciting arc that keeps our attention all the way throughout. It builds in intensity not because he starts playing faster or louder, or because he starts playing more intricate lines or “out” substitutions, but because he uses more and more of the guitar as he goes. Playing in more dense textures is a way to naturally push a solo to a higher intensity level.

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This example is my arrangement of a Charlie Parker blues head that I learned as “Bigfoot”, though I’ve since seen that he recorded it under the title “Driftin’ on a Reed” as well. The vast majority of this arrangement uses a way of playing chord-melody that I call “punctuating”.

Rather than harmonizing every note of the melody with a chord, I often play some single note lines, punctuated with chords where it seems called for, and where it is feasible. I tend to do this on a lot of bebop heads, as they get pretty note-y.

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In the course of this arrangement, I play in the one-voice texture, the two-voice texture, and the four-voice texture. The four-voice texture is mostly used in playing block chords. I use the two-voice texture in playing some thirds in the intro.

The one-voice texture is, of course, the single note lines throughout. Having multiple textures to draw from is so important in our chord-melody playing, as we need a lot of solutions to the problems that arise when we’re trying to harmonize a melody.

This knowledge also gives us more options in our solo playing and comping.

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My hope is that you can listen to this arrangement, read through it, and glean some new insight into how the chord-melody technique can be used to expand the expressive capabilities of the guitar.

We often get caught up in our single note playing, trying to catch the changes, or play something hipper than the last thing we played, while ignoring the whole orchestra of an instrument we’re holding.

Playing great lines is as important as anything else in this music, but don’t miss the forest for the trees.

Happy practicing!

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