Beyond cowboy chords

I've been playing guitar for years. I've never taken lessons, but used whatever knowledge I had from having studied piano and having taken some music classes in high school to learn to play. There's also been a lot of learning by ear, that is, generally trying to imitate what I heard being played in a song. For the past number of years, however, I've thought of taking jazz guitar lessons. The sounds and rhythms of jazz have interested me for a long time now, thanks to my brother-in-law, who began that education when I was about 14. I'd taken history of jazz courses here and there, but never really studied it to learn to play it - to learn to play all those interesting chords and of course, to unravel some of the mysteries of improvisation. On Wed. of this past week, however, I finally took my first jazz guitar lesson, 20 years after having been introduced to the music.









One of the things the teacher had me do was play various chords on the guitar to see how I played them. There are always different ways to play the same the chords since notes reoccur on the guitar. The chord chosen often relates to the chords which come before and after in order to create a certain pattern of sound or sometimes just to simplify playing the series of chords. When the teacher asked me to play a C7, I played the version in the first image above. He looked at me and said: "I call that a cowboy chord." I laughed. He explained what he meant and showed me that because the root note is repeated, it sounded heavy and thick. He suggested I try the following instead, a C9 (the second image). While not very different, the sound is definitely more interesting in that it adds a 9th giving the chord a lighter yet fuller sound.

And so began my education in jazz guitar.