Miami News-Digest

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...

Guitar Theory • Jazz Standards • Harmonic Analysis All or Nothing at All Chromatic Voice Leading, Relative Keys, and the Guitar Logic Hidden Inside a Jazz Standard A guitarist's harmonic study All or Nothing at All becomes much easier to understand when we stop treating its chord symbols as a long series of unrelated grips. On guitar, the arrangement reveals something much more elegant: voices move by half steps, chord tones remain in place, relative major and minor keys trade places, and altered dominants redirect the ear at precisely the right moment. The version examined here begins in E minor and follows the way I actually play the tune: A Section Em → Em(maj7) → Em7 → Em6 F6 → Dm6 → Dm7 → G6 → Cmaj7 → B7♯9 Chorus / B Section E♭ → E♭6 → Fm6 → Fm → B♭ Fm → F7 →...