Jack Pezanelli’s Triads Over Bass Notes Non-Functional Reharmonization

Jack Pezanelli was a professor at the famed Berklee College of Music. There was a time when Jack’s office and the office of Mick Goodrick were next to each other. Between classes, when time allowed, you could hear the two jamming with each other through the walls of their respective offices!

Jack was said to be the Bill Evans of guitar and stunned many listeners with his mastery of chord solos and reharmonizations. He had an interesting way of using triads over bass notes as non-functional reharmonization and that is what we talked about last night at the Modern Guitar Harmony monthly Zoom meeting (subscribe for free to the MGH newsletter to be kept up to date with the next meetings).

Here is a brief overview of Jack’s non-functional reharmonization concept using triads over bass notes.

Jack Pezanelli’s Acoustic Weight Chart

Jack had a chart which put all 12 major triads against a static bass note. These major triads over bass notes were then ranked from the most consonant to the most dissonant.

Here is the list.

1. C/C
2. F/C
3. Ab/C
4. G/C
5. Eb/C
6. Bb/C
7. A/C
8. D/C
9. E/C
10. Db/C
11. B/C
12. F#/C

The first three triads over bass notes are very consonant while the last 4 get very dissonant.

The sweet spot therefore are the triads over bass notes numbers 4 – 8.

Experiment with these first.

How To Use Triads Over Bass Notes as Non-Functional Harmony

For the best result, at least until you can play these structures without thinking, it’s best if you stick to one constant structure.

So instead of jumping from structure 5 to 7, back to 3 and up to 8 your playing initially will sound better if you stay with one structure. Structure 5 for example.

Graduating your hybrid structures can also work well. This means that you play the structures in order so for example, an ascending graduation would be playing structures 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 etc in order.

A descending example would be playing the structures in order descending such as 8, 7, 6, 5, 4 etc.

Harmonizing A Melody With Triads Over Bass Notes

Let’s say that we have a very simple melody that we want to harmonize using this concept.

What you do is take the first melody note, let’s say it’s an E note, and build three triads on the melody note.

Our three triads would be;

E major as the E note is the root note of the chord.

C major as the E note is the 3rd of the chord.

A major as the E note is the 5th of the chord.

You then select one of the triads and you place a bass note above it.

Make sure that you play them to hear which sound it is that you like best.

So now you might have chosen the A note and have selected a bass note from the sweet spot in the acoustic weight chart.

You might like a bit of tension and dissonance in your chords and harmonic progressions so you could pick structure 8 which on the chart is structure D/C.

Since you have an A major triad you have to put a G note in the bass to get structure 8.

You then go to the next melody note and repeat the process.

Let’s say that the melody note is F# to get the following triads.

F# Major

D Major

B Major

Then add the appropriate bass note to each to keep to structure 8.

F#/E

D/C

B/A

Now play your first structure A/G then play F#/E.

Play A/G again followed by D/C.

Finally play A/G followed by B/A.

Which of those sounds do you like best?

Repeat this process until your melody has been harmonized.

You will notice that there is far less push and pull in this progression then there is in a standard diatonic harmonic progression. Beautiful!!

This tension obviously works very well in turnarounds of jazz standards.

The Coda

The above process is a lot of fun to work with but as always it takes a lot of work to truly ingrain this into your playing.

If you are hungry for more information on this topic why not buy Jack Pezanelli’s reharmonization course (it’s a 2 part series) on Mike’s Masterclass.

Here is a summary of the course.

Now go forth,

Explore,

And let us know what you come up with!