When people hear me play they always say 'I wish I could play jazz!'  Well, if you follow this guide, you will be able to start reading chords and improvising within minutes!

Jazz (and most popular music) is broken up into three major types of chords: 1) Major chords 2) Minor seventh chords and 3) dominant seventh chords.

A major chord is simply a major triad with the major seventh on top e.g. C maj 7 = CEGB (although you can play these notes in any inversion, e.g. BCEG).

A dominant seventh chord is the same as above but with a flattened seventh e.g. C7 = CEGBb (again, in any inversion).

A minor seventh chord is the same as a dominant sevent chord but with a flattened third e.g. Cm7 = CEbGBb (in any inversion).

The most standard way to group these chords together is in a II-V-I relationship.  Let us take C as the key of a piece.  The scale of C major is CDEFGABC.  Take the second, fifth and first notes of the scale and form a triad from notes within the C major scale and you'll get:

DFAC

GBDF

CEGB

Now if you analyse these groupings of notes compared with the rules for the chords we just outlined above, you will identify these three chords as being Dm7 - G7 - Cmaj7.  This is commonly referred to as a II-V-I in C major.

So to get started on jazz piano, you should try and work out the chords for all twelve keys - try and play a II-V-I into every key e.g. in F, the II would be Gm7, the V would be C7 and the I obviously is Fmaj7.

Once you do this we can work on inversions so that your hands are moving to the nearest notes in the chord (e.g. in C, you can play FAC over the D in the bass to form the Dm7, and then just move one finger in the right hand to play FAB over the G to form the G7...the notes aren't exactly the same as above but what you are doing is removing the fifth degree of the G7 and replacing it with the ninth, the A).  Then once we have looked at inversions we can look at other substitute notes like the beautiful flattened ninth which Charlie Parker introduced!

Enjoy!