LJS 96: Important Jazz Chord Substitutions You Need to Know

Welcome to episode 96 of the LJS Podcast where today we are talking about important jazz chord substitutions you should know about. Jazz musicians love to add and substitute chords and progressions within jazz harmony, and these are some common ones that you should explore. Listen in!
Listen to episode 96







One thing I love about jazz music is all of the harmonic possibilities. Jazz standards are already extraordinary vehicles for harmonic exploration, but the very nature of this music allows us to expand upon all of this.
When approaching jazz standards and common chord progressions we can consider substituting chords and chord progressions for each other. Regardless, of whether you are a comping instrument or not, you can use substitutions to add more color and movement to your jazz improvisation.
In today's episode I talk about 5 chord substitutions that you may hear other jazz musicians use and that you should explore for yourself.
I will have basic examples in the show notes today, but if you want to get a lot more detail on these, check out this blog post that today's episode is based off of.
Here are the substitutions I talk about:
1. iii Replaces the I
 

2. #i Diminished Replaces the VI

Note: a dominant 7 can be altered (b9,#9, b13, #11). If we were to make the VI chord into a dominant7(b9) chord it would share all of the important notes except the bass note of the chord, with the C#dim7.

3. Tritone Substitution

4. I-IV-iii-VI Turnaround to a ii-V-I

5. Chromatic ii-V's







Important Links
Zero to Improv eBook
5 Jazz Chord Substitutions You Need to Know
LJS 92: How to Use Tritone Substitution In Your Jazz Improv







Read the Transcript
All right, what's up everybody? My name is Brent. I am the jazz musician behind the website, learnjazzstandards.com which is a blog and a podcast all geared towards helping you become a better jazz musician. Welcome back if you are a regular listener and if you are listening for the very first time, I'm really excited to have you here, checking this out, hanging out with me. And I know you're going to get a lot of value out of today's episode, and today's episode is actually a little bit of a theory lesson, a jazz theory lesson.
Now this lesson comes straight out of our e-book which, by the way, I looked up at the numbers the other day and over 1,000 people have downloaded and are using this book to help their jazz playing. It is Zero To Improv. You can't find that at zerotoimprov.com, and this lesson comes straight out of that and today's episode 96 is all about important chord substitutions that you need to know in jazz.
Now jazz musicians, they are always messing around with chord progressions, right? If it wasn't hard enough, jazz harmony tends to be a little bit more complex than say, pop or rock harmony and folk music and things like this.
There's a lot of crazy, cool diatonic things, very colorful things happening in jazz harmony, but oftentimes jazz musicians like to go even further than that and add other substitutions to those chord progressions to add even more harmonic movement or just simply swap one chord out for the other to try to get a different color, a different sound in there.