rootless voicing
A rootless voicing is a way of playing a chord, typically with four notes in the middle of the keyboard, that omits the root. Since the bass player is already sounding the root, the pianist uses the space for the third, the seventh and extensions such as the ninth or thirteenth. For C minor 9, […]
rubato
Rubato, from the Italian rubare, “to rob”, describes expressive freedom of tempo: a performer lingers on some notes or phrases and hurries others, “stealing” time and giving it back. It is rarely written in the score and is left to the player’s judgement. In some styles only the melody moves freely while the accompaniment keeps […]
seventh chord
A seventh chord takes an ordinary three-note triad (root, third and fifth) and stacks one more note on top, the seventh above the root. Changing the size of the third, fifth and seventh produces different colours. Spelled from C, the main types are the major seventh (C–E–G–B), the dominant seventh (C–E–G–B♭), the minor seventh (C–E♭–G–B♭), […]
swing feel
Swing feel is the way jazz musicians play a pair of eighth notes: not evenly, but with the first longer than the second, giving a lilting “long-short, long-short” motion. The music is usually written in straight eighths and players know to swing them. Teachers often explain it as a triplet with the first two notes […]
syncopation
Syncopation shifts the accents of a rhythm away from where the listener expects them. In a bar of 4/4 counted “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”, the strong points are the numbers, especially 1 and 3. A syncopated rhythm stresses an “and”, leaves a rest where a strong beat should be, or holds […]
tempo
Tempo is the speed at which a piece of music moves. Today it is usually measured in beats per minute, or BPM: at 60 BPM each beat lasts exactly one second, at 120 BPM half a second. Classical scores also use Italian words such as adagio (slow) or allegro (fast), while drum machines, music software […]
time signature
A time signature indicates the metre of a piece: how beats are grouped into bars. It is written as two stacked numbers. The upper number gives the number of beats in each bar, the lower number the note value that counts as one beat, so 4/4 means four quarter-note beats per bar and 3/4, the […]
tritone substitution
A tritone substitution swaps a dominant seventh chord for another dominant seventh whose root lies a tritone (six semitones) away. In C major the V chord G7 (G–B–D–F) can be replaced by D♭7 (D♭–F–A♭–C♭). The trick works because the two chords share the same unstable tritone: G7 contains B and F, and D♭7 contains F […]
ii–V–I
The ii–V–I (“two–five–one”) is a three-chord progression named with Roman numerals for the scale degrees its chords are built on; lower case marks a minor chord. In C major it is Dm7–G7–Cmaj7. Each root falls by a fifth (D to G to C), and the third and seventh of each chord move by a single […]
improvisation
Improvisation is music invented in the moment of performance rather than read from a score or played from memory. In jazz it usually happens inside a framework: soloists create new melodies over the chord progression and form of a tune, drawing on scales, rhythms and phrases they have absorbed, while the rhythm section improvises its […]