What is smooth jazz?

Before embarking on the adventure that is soon to be my project, I first need to examine what smooth jazz actually is.

Smooth jazz is an offset of jazz fusion.  It is a style that is influenced by jazz, r&b, funk, rock and pop musical styles.  The most often played smooth jazz pieces (most played meaning played on radio or downloaded/bought) are often slower than their similarly styled counterparts.

All music.com says of Smooth jazz:

Smooth Jazz is an outgrowth of fusion, one that emphasizes its polished side. Generally, smooth jazz relies on rhythms and grooves instead of improvisation. There are layers of synthesizers, lite-funk rhythms, lite-funk bass, elastic guitars, and either trumpets, alto, or soprano saxophones. The music isn't cerebral, like hard bop, nor is it gritty and funky like soul-jazz or groove -- it is unobtrusive, slick, and highly polished, where the overall sound matters more than the individual parts

The word "smooth" in the term smooth jazz is perhaps the best word to describe it.  In typical smooth jazz pieces of music it is unlikely that one is going to hear chords and phrases that throw a listener off and make them go "what was that?" like they may do whilst listening to another fusion based style.  It's intended to be easy, or "smooth" listening.

What about its harmony? What does this mean for my project?

Smooth jazz harmony is less obtrusive than other forms of jazz harmony.  Reharmonizing pieces into the smooth jazz style will require me to pay much closer attention to the melody of the piece being examined.
Earlier in the blog I talked about harmony that can cause a tune to be unrecognisable until a certain point.  With these new smooth jazz reharmonisations I'll focus on making the tune recognisable, keeping key melodic and harmonic elements as they are whilst spicing up the harmony around it.

Within the next few posts, I'll begin posting links to some examples of smooth jazz pieces from artists most commonly associated with the genre.  In addition to this, I'll post existing smooth jazz covers of well known tunes, analysing certain snippets of the reharmonized chord sequences, taking a close look at the theory behind each chord that has been reharmonized.

J