One of my favourite chord progressions to play is a jazz blues. In the example chord study below I’ve illustrated some of my favourite chord forms for playing a jazz blues in Bb.

The chords are designed primarily for accompaniment in this particular study, but you could certainly utilise some of them in an improvised solo. Wes Montgomery often did this in his solos where he would play some choruses just using chords rather than the more common single-line approach. 

I’ve notated the chords in the first chorus so that you can see how I’ve expanded the harmony in places to create more movement and variety between the chords.

I have left a quarter note metronome ‘click’ on the audio recording below, but I’d highly recommend practicing this study with a click sounding on beats 2 and 4. This gives more of a jazz swing feel to your practice and sounds less rigid rhythmically. I hope you enjoy this chord study!

If you’d like study more jazz orientated material like this, but in far greater detail and depth, you might also like to consider my online jazz guitar lessons. 

Here is the PDF file of the above chord study: Bb Jazz Blues Chord Study 

Here is an audio file using MIDI of the complete chord study: