In this case, the melody uses notes from the minor scale as the chord changes happen. Sometimes, we can find songs that have melodies that don’t display the minor or major quality of the key that clearly, and that can be quite the opportunity to play with both chord sets and change things underneath.
If you pay attention at the end of a jazz song, many times you’ll hear the pianist play a set of improvised additional chords underneath a long sustained final note of the singer to add a little extra embellishment and drama before the song ends. That takes quite a bit of practice to do smoothly, but basically, what’s happening is that the pianist is listening to the held note and adding chords that might not be from the home key but that still work together with the melody and that way they can create a mini harmonic journey for that final statement.
3. Getting “chromatic”
The idea of chromaticism has to do with the changes in color that we get from moving on half steps; since unavoidable, if we move in contiguous half steps, we’ll be going in and out of our main scale and touching upon all the options in between. If we do that, then we are finding what we call the “chromatic scale.”
Here is an example from my own songwriting to exemplify chromaticism. I was playing with 7th chords. A 7th chord is a triad with one more third stacked on top.
If we take our C major triad, in order for it to become a “C major7,” we add the note B, which is a major third above the fifth, and the chord will be spelled C-E-G-B.
I was not in the key of C at that time. I wasn’t really thinking of any key in particular. I was just moving 7th chords up and down the fret and reacting to how they felt next to each other. I was alternating major 7th chords with minor 7th chords. I remember starting on a Gb Maj7 and then going down a half step to F minor7.
Then I took that and made it into a sequence, going up a whole step and repeating the motion starting from Abmaj7 down to Gm7. Finally, since that was feeling good, and we love balance and things that are full circle, I went back to the beginning and played the Gb Maj7 to Fm7 again. At that point, the final landing Eb chord was an absolute necessity.
In this case, the song is clearly in Eb Major. The only chord that doesn’t belong to the Eb major scale is the Gbmaj7, which is borrowed from the Eb minor scale.
Chromaticism isn’t quite happening in this situation since there is a whole step between F and Eb, which takes us back to Eb major, but it’s pretty close! And the fact that the progression departs from a Gb to F in a chromatic step makes the whole progression feel a little more colorful than it actually is.
Here are the chords of the intro and verse, which follow the same structure: