Upper Structure Triads For Jazz Piano

What Are Upper Structure Triads? Welcome to this tutorial on upper structure triads. Upper structure triads are complex altered dominant chord voicings that are widely used in solo jazz piano performance. Why "Upper Structure" Triad You may be wondering why is this type of voicing is called an upper structure triad? Well that’s because there are 2 parts to the chord, the upper structure and the lower structure. The Lower Structure The lower structure is the vanilla dominant chord voicing, so for C7, we could play root, 3rd and b7, and if you have a wide stretch we can play those notes like this, we could play just the root and b7, we could play just the 3rd and 7th, and we can also invert that 3rd and 7th. Each of these creates a different LH texture. The Upper Structure So what about the upper structure? Well the upper structure is played in our right hand, and the cool thing about these voicings is that we only need to use major triads to construct the 4 most useful and versatile upper structure triads. We must be comfortable with the major triads in all 12 keys & also the inversions. Why Split The Chord Into 2 Parts? That’s a very good question! The answer is that it gives us simple formulas to memorise complex altered dominant chord voicings. For example if we want to play a C13chord, we just think D major triad over C7 and with practice that process becomes very quick to visualise until it is an almost subconscious process. The other key benefit is that by...