Last year I challenged myself to get rid of all of the concepts in my playing that I didn’t really care for but had been playing out of habit. This became a much larger task than I had anticipated. One of the first things to go was a handful of crappy voicings that I always seemed to default to for no good reason. This left a bit of a whole in my voicing arsenal. I started to scramble for voicing ideas that might seem useful.
I’ve always admired compers that didn’t seem like they were just plopping down chords but really comped melodically. Block chords can certainly give you that – players like Hank Jones, Red Garland, and George Shearing certainly mastered artfully crafting melodies with their comping. I decided to attempt a custom system of 5-note voicings that included every note of the scale at the top, without repeating the inner voicings as much as possible.
This has opened up a whole new vocabulary to my comping that was missing before, giving me tons of freedom to move around in a logical way with good voice leading – not just moving shapes around diatonically.
