All guitarists love chords, especially new and unfamiliar ones. The thrill of finally fingering a clean chord and the hearing all that sound come out of one’s own guitar is a big part of the early excitement of playing, and building a collection of playable chords is a tangible way to measure progress in the first stages of learning. Some song-oriented students only want an open-position vocabulary, and for others, the hurdle of barre chords and power chords is enough to keep them busy for quite a while. But with a student for whom such early mysteries as minor and seventh chords have become comfortable and routine, jazz chords offer a large, fertile, and uncharted territory to explore in search of new shapes and sounds.

A student doesn’t have to be interested in jazz per se to learn and find applications for such chords, but it’s your job to find a way to make these new sounds relevant to something they are interested in, rather than just presenting them with pages of chord grids with elaborate new names. In short, teach these chords the way you would open-position or barre chords—by showing the student how they can use them to play cool-sounding songs that they like, as well as explaining the meaning and logic of the individual voicings.

If your students are interested in any kind of roots music, this will be relatively easy. If they like classic country music, you can teach them some Bob Wills material, show how to apply those sounds to country shuffles by Ernest Tubb or Ray Price, or even get into some of Willie Nelson’s versions of jazz standards. Contemporary artists like George Strait and Lyle Lovett also make use of those same western swing sounds in a more familiar and contemporary context. Blues students can find their way in through the jump blues of T-Bone Walker and Gatemouth Brown or modern practitioners like Rod Piazza and Little Charlie and the Nightcats. Former Stray Cat and rockabilly revivalist Brian Setzer is no stranger to hip chords, and his recent big-band and Christmas albums are full of hopped-up, contemporary swing sounds mixed with hot guitar solos.

For more pop-oriented students, there are plenty of songs to draw on from the classic rock era and beyond that include more than just I, IV, and V and utilize grooves that lend themselves to jazz voicings. For starters, try the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four,” Santana’s “Europa,” Van Morrison’s “Moondance,” Sting’s “Moon Over Bourbon Street,” and Sade’s “Smooth Operator.”

Teaching jazz chord voicings can be a great way to get a non-jazz student fired up about the fingerboard, and curiosity about those exotic chord names can provide an opportunity to talk a little about the theory along the way. Take, for instance, the chord forms shown here. Finding a place for any one of these voicings in a song gives you a chance to explain how and why musicians add new color tones to a chord, or to discuss the concept of controlling the sustain of a chord and the technique involved in doing so. Using the Dom7b13 could open a discussion on what altered chords are and how they help create stronger resolutions to the I chord, while the Dom13 voicing is just a cool, fun sound straight out of Freddy King’s “Hideaway”—surely a winning piece of information for any Clapton fan.