Genre guide
Jazz chord progressions
Explore jazz chord movement with data from 7,001 genre-tagged songs, a playable ii–V–I, and a generator that starts in jazz mode.
The short answer
What gives jazz harmony its shape?
Jazz harmony makes frequent use of seventh chords and connected dominant motion. A progression can sound rich without moving far on the keyboard because smooth voice leading lets individual notes travel by small steps.
- Genre-tagged songs
- 7,001
- Retained chord moves
- 492,784
- Different move types
- 453
- Moves involving a 7th chord
- 31.6%
01
Start with ii7–V7–Imaj7–VI7
Dm7 prepares G7, G7 resolves to Cmaj7, and A7 turns the ending back toward Dm7. The final A7 is outside the basic C-major chord set, but it creates a clear route back to the beginning.
Dm7 – G7 – Cmaj7 – A7 in C
A practical jazz starting loop. Play the full sequence or press one chord at a time.
Sound loads when you first play.
02
What appears in the chord data
These are adjacent chord moves found in the dataset. They describe pairs of chords, not the frequency of an entire progression.
| Example move | Observed transitions | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Dm7 → G7 | 7,100About 22% of analyzed moves leaving a minor seventh chord | A minor seventh chord moving up a perfect fourth to a dominant seventh. |
| G7 → C | 13,616 | A dominant seventh moving up a perfect fourth to a major triad. |
| G7 → Cmaj7 | 2,298 | A dominant seventh resolving to a major seventh chord. |
Source: the open-source Chordonomicon dataset. Repeated neighboring chords were removed, uncommon moves were filtered out, and extended chord names were grouped into broader qualities. The player voicings are created by Musicpham, not copied from recordings.
03
Three ways to practice it
Use the same few chords, but change one musical decision at a time.
- Listen for the third and seventh of each chord; those notes describe the ii–V–I clearly.
- Play the chord roots first, then add the remaining notes without changing the tempo.
- Use the generator to connect Dm7 and Cmaj7 with two or three steps and compare variants.
04
Build your own jazz route
The full generator starts in Jazz and C. Choose a starting chord, a target chord, and compare several routes learned from adjacent moves in the dataset.
Play Musicpham's keyboard
Play a key
Chord—
Sound loads when you first play.
Chord Progression
Click From, play a chord to set the start — then do the same for To.
Use touch, your mouse, or the computer keys shown. Set From and To chords to hear how real songs travel between them.