Play these five notes, bottom to top: D, G, C, F, A. Left hand takes the D and the G, right hand takes the C, F and A.
You have played the So What chord, named after the Miles Davis tune it opens on Kind of Blue in 1959, where Bill Evans plays it behind the melody. Nearly every description of it you will read calls it a stack of fourths. Count the intervals and that turns out not to be quite true.
Three fourths and one third
D up to G is a perfect fourth. G up to C is a perfect fourth. C up to F is a perfect fourth. F to A, though, is a major third.
Be careful about what that third is doing, because it is easy to give it the wrong job. It is not what makes the chord minor. The note that does that is the F inside the stack, which is the flat third of D, and it is there whether or not anything sits above it. The A on top is the fifth.
What the major third buys is the break in the pattern. Three fourths in a row is a shape with one texture all the way up; ending on a third stops it, completes the chord with its fifth, and puts a comfortable melody note at the top. Take the A away and you still have an unmistakable D minor — root, eleventh, flat seventh, flat third — only blanker and more open, because now nothing interrupts the fourths.
Reorder the same five notes so that the A sits at the bottom and you get A, D, G, C, F: four consecutive perfect fourths, with no third between any two neighbouring notes. The chord still has a flat third — the F is still in there, and over a D bass it still does its job — but nothing in the spacing announces it any more. Same pitches, different arrangement, and the character changes completely. It is worth playing both back to back once, because after that you can hear which one a record is using.
Why it answers to three names
Here is the part that makes the voicing worth memorising rather than just learning. Those five notes — C, D, F, G, A — do not belong to one chord. Put a different root underneath and the same hand position reads as a different chord entirely. The top note does not move — it is the A every time. What changes is the job the A is doing.
| Bass note | Reads as | Degrees, bottom to top | Note on top |
|---|---|---|---|
| D | D minor 7 | root, 11, ♭7, ♭3, 5 | A, the 5th |
| B♭ | B♭ major 7 | 3, 6, 9, 5, maj7 | A, the major 7th |
| E♭ | E♭ major, Lydian | maj7, 3, 6, 9, ♯11 | A, the ♯11 |
One shape covers a minor chord where the melody sits on the fifth, a major seventh chord where the melody sits on the seventh, and a Lydian chord where the melody sits on the sharp eleventh. You are not learning three voicings. You are learning one, and then learning to hear which chord the bass has decided it is.
The five notes are also, taken as a scale, the F major pentatonic — F, G, A, C, D. Which is the shortest explanation anyone has ever given for why pentatonic scales and quartal voicings turn up in the same music, played by the same people, in the same bars. They are the same five notes wearing different clothes.
The fourths series, and where the purity goes
Stack four perfect fourths from the third of a C major chord and you get E, A, D, G, C. Read the degrees: 3rd, 6th, 9th, 5th, root. That is a C6/9 — a chord most people first meet as a tertian pile of extensions — sitting there as four identical intervals, which is a far easier thing to find under the hand.
Now move that shape one step up the scale of C major, keeping every note in the key: F, B, E, A, D. The bottom interval, F to B, is no longer a perfect fourth. It is a tritone. Everything above it is still a fourth.
Run the shape all the way up the scale and count: of the seven positions, four contain a tritone somewhere in the stack and three do not. The scale simply will not give you seven pure ones. Players treat that as the point rather than as damage — the tritone-carrying positions are the tense ones, and having a graded set of them is exactly what you want when you are comping for eight bars on one chord and need somewhere to go.
That F–B–E–A–D shape is worth its own paragraph, because it has the same trick the So What chord has. Under a D bass it reads as a D minor 6/9 — the degrees are ♭3, 6, 9, 5, root. Under a G bass the identical notes read as a G7: ♭7, 3, 13, 9, 5. Add one more fourth on top, a G above the D, and you have the six-note dominant voicing that turns up on more records than almost any other: ♭7, 3, 13, 9, 5, root.
Take the top note off and the chord changes its job
There is a second reason to hold all this as shapes rather than as chord symbols. Take a note off the top and you have changed which chord tone is in the melody, which is usually the reason you would want a different voicing in the first place.
Take the top C off the C6/9 stack and you are left with E, A, D, G. The chord is still a C6/9, but the note on top is now the fifth instead of the root, and the voicing no longer contains the root at all — so it wants a bass player, or a left hand low down, which is exactly the texture it is normally used in.
Take the top A off the So What chord and you are left with D, G, C, F: three perfect fourths and no adjacent third, with the flat third of the chord sitting on top as the melody note. That is the blanker version mentioned earlier, arrived at by subtraction. Nothing about the hand changed except that one finger did not play.
Both are worth practising as deliberate choices rather than as accidents. The question a voicing has to answer is what note is on top — and taking one off is the cheapest way to change the answer.
What McCoy Tyner actually did
He did not invent fourth chords, and he is still the reason most pianists have them: what he popularised was a whole language — quartal voicings, pentatonic right hands and a rhythmic attack, working as one thing. The chord itself came from elsewhere. Bud Powell was comping in fourths and voicing melody in parallel fourths on “So Sorry Please” more than a decade before Tyner’s quartet years; his brother Richie Powell was doing the same behind Clifford Brown; Bill Evans and Kenny Barron both have well-known parallel-fourths passages. The So What chord itself predates Tyner’s time with Coltrane.
Inside that language there is one device that is unmistakably his, and it is about timing rather than harmony.
The device is sequential, and that is the part people miss when they try to copy the sound by holding down one big quartal chord. The left hand hits low down on the first beat — an octave, or an octave with the fifth added — and then, after it, the same hand throws a three-note stack of fourths into the middle register. The low notes are not held underneath the stack. They are a strike, the fourths are the answer to it, and the gap between the two is where the momentum comes from.
Over the top of that, the right hand runs pentatonics. This is where the pentatonic identity above stops being a curiosity: choose the pentatonic the voicing is built from and the two hands cannot disagree, because they are drawing on the same five notes. That is what lets the playing be as fast and as loud as it is without ever sounding like it is dodging something.
What to practise
Learn the So What chord in its home position first — left hand root and eleventh, right hand the other three — and move it through the cycle of fifths until the shape is under your hand without counting.
Then do the thing that makes it worth having. Play it with a D in the bass, then with a B♭, then with an E♭, and listen to the top note change its job each time without your right hand moving at all. That is not a party trick. It is how you will actually use the voicing: you will be reading a chart, the melody note will be the fifth of a minor chord or the seventh of a major one, and it will be the same grip either way.
Only after that is automatic should you go looking for the tritone positions up the scale. They are the colour, and colour is the last thing to add.
Questions people actually ask
- What notes are in the So What chord?
- In its home key it is D, G, C, F, A, from the bottom up, with the left hand taking the D and the G and the right hand taking the C, F and A. The first three intervals are perfect fourths and the last one is a major third. It is named after the Miles Davis tune "So What", from Kind of Blue in 1959, where Bill Evans plays it behind the melody.
- Are quartal voicings the same as fourth chords?
- In practice yes, and both names describe a voicing built by stacking fourths rather than thirds. What the names hide is that the shape does not stay pure as you move it. Run it up a major scale and some positions keep their intervals exactly, while others turn one of the fourths into a tritone or a major third into a minor one. The hand shape is constant; the intervals inside it are not, and that is where the variety comes from.
- Why do quartal voicings sound modal rather than functional?
- Not because they lack thirds and sevenths — that is the usual explanation and it is wrong. Which degrees a fourth stack supplies depends entirely on the root underneath it, and over most roots it supplies plenty. What it under-determines is everything else. It does not name its own root, because the same five notes sit equally well under several; and even once the root is fixed it often has no third, so the chord's quality is still open. A pure stack over an established D, for instance, can read as a suspended dominant or as a minor sonority, and only the harmony around it settles which. That double vagueness is exactly what a static modal passage wants and what a functioning ii-V-I has to resolve.