Use Them Over a ii-V-I in a Solo?Jazz Guitar Upper Structures: How Do You
To use upper structures in a solo, stop thinking of them as one chord and start hearing them as a line that moves through a chord change. Over a ii-V-I, that means building the guide-tone voice leading first, then letting the upper structure supply the new notes on top. VoiceLid Jazz Guitar founder Junewon Choi walked through this on a recent live stream, and it is the first step toward superimposition, the idea behind most of the modern sounds in jazz guitar lessons online.
Why Doesn't a Single Chord Work as an Upper Structure?
Looking at one chord alone as an upper structure is not very effective. A viewer asked whether, over C major, they should think "Em" or "C with extensions"; the short answer is Em, but the better answer is that the question only makes sense inside a progression. Upper structures show their value as a flow of chord changes, and the first progression to practice them in is the ii-V-I. A single grip tells you nothing about where to go next; a connected sequence tells you everything.
What Do Upper Structures Look Like Over Dm7–G7–Cmaj7?
Start with the root-less shell voicings, so the guide tones are already in place. Then read the progression like this:
Dm7: drop the root and an Fmaj7 shape (a drop 2 voicing) sits on top.
G7: move a single note and the same shape becomes Fmaj7♭5. That one-note motion is the guide-tone line you already built.
Cmaj7: the upper structure becomes Em7.
Junewon also showed the same idea in a George Benson solo on All the Things You Are: over B♭m7–E♭7–A♭maj7 it is a D♭ major triad, the same shape with one note moved, then Cm. The shape travels; only one note changes.
What Comes First: The Voice Leading or the Colors?
The voice leading. Junewon was clear that the guide-tone voice leading must already be in your ears, in the shell voicing, before the upper structure sounds meaningful. He explained it with a drawing metaphor from an art class he took at a neighboring school while at Berklee: a point connects to make a line, a line extends to make a plane. The guide tones are the points. Soloing with an upper structure is the line that joins them. Superimposition, playing your own changes over the band's, is the first step into that plane.
Where Did This Idea Come From?
From the history of jazz harmony itself. Classical music built its harmony on triads, and it took roughly two hundred years to make the seventh chord the new default. Junewon points to Charlie Parker as the player who added another note above the seventh and dropped the root, which is the upper structure idea in a sentence. In other words, jazz keeps moving up the chord, and the guitar is an unusually direct place to hear it. For more detail on how this plays out over a minor ii-V-I, see How Do You Play Upper Structures Over a Minor ii-V-I?, and for three different shapes over one ii-V-I, see What Is Superimposition on Jazz Guitar?.
How Do You Practice It?
Berklee students were taught to prepare a chart before they played it. Write the upper structure above each chord in pencil first:
Major chord: a minor chord built from the 3rd.
Minor chord: a major chord built from the 3rd.
Dominant chord: a m7♭5 or maj7♭5 shape, whichever fits the melody.
Then choose the smallest move between chords and let the Wes Montgomery line and the Django Reinhardt line guide how you travel. The Bridge Series shows this process one step at a time.
Start with Dm7–G7–Cmaj7, slow and clean, and sing the guide-tone line as you play. When that is automatic, Fundamental 1: Wes Diagonal System is the natural next step for organizing those lines across the fretboard.
About the Author
Junewon Choi is a Berklee-trained jazz guitarist and the founder of VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, an online education platform teaching jazz harmony and improvisation through the Functional Diagonal Approach (FDA) — a chord-first method built on voice-leading rather than scale boxes.
Wes' Insight — Wes Montgomery's fretboard logic, in lesson form
Fundamental 1: Wes Diagonal System — the FDA from the ground up