How Fats Waller’s Harmonic Architecture Translates to the Fretboard through Chromatic Barre-chord Slides, Pedal Tones, Walking Bass, Altered Dominants, and Economical Voice Leading
Jazz Guitar • Voice Leading • Fats Waller • Harmonic Analysis How Fats Waller’s harmonic architecture translates to the fretboard through chromatic barre-chord slides, pedal tones, walking bass, altered dominants, and economical voice leading. Ain’t Misbehavin’ does not need to be reharmonized to become harmonically fascinating. Much of that sophistication is already embedded in the song. The diminished movement, secondary dominants, relative-minor excursions, and circle-of-fifths turnaround belong to the underlying architecture. What changes on guitar is how that architecture moves . In this arrangement, the original framework is filtered through a distinctly guitaristic vocabulary: full barre shapes slide by half step, bass notes move independently beneath stable upper voices, dominant chords acquire sixths, ninths, and thirteenths, and a tonic pedal can remain fixed while the rest of the chor...