There is so much nuance in jazz musicians’ approaches to bending notes, dynamically and timbrally shaping melodies, playing swung rhythms, experimenting around with the time feel, revoicing chords, etc., that it is nearly impossible to accurately capture what’s going on in a jazz performance with written music notation alone. Jazz music has thrived on innovation, and theorizing, explaining, and notating the music generally always lags behind actual performance practice. The resulting situation that all jazz musicians are aware of is that even the most detailed written scores, lead, sheets, and transcriptions of jazz music are notoriously imprecise and insufficient to capture what the music is sonically. When Western music notation didn’t have a way to notate something, many jazz musicians either simply didn’t notate it, or they invented their own system for how to notate it, which eventually lead to various schools of thought about notating jazz music and varying degrees of specificity in notated jazz compositions.įurther, the complicated reality of jazz both sonically and historically means that much of jazz theory and jazz’s musical notation have been put together somewhat haphazardly after the fact. Additionally, jazz started out as a primarily aural/oral (an “ear” or “illiterate”) tradition, and when jazz was first written down using music notation, musicians basically adopted the notation traditions associated with European classical music, which proved inadequate to the task in many ways. Part of the underlying set of issues here is that the term jazz embraces a wide variety of musical styles from many different historical periods. I hope that sharing my understanding and interpretation of chord symbols with you is useful and can help dispel some of the confusion surrounding jazz chord symbols. It’s a significant problem in the jazz world, and one that I want to address here.

In my time as a jazz musician, I’ve discovered that there is sometimes confusion regarding how to notate and interpret chord symbols.

Jazz chord chart piano