Originally Posted by rharv
Personally I think Jaco made them ambiguous by his note choices.
In Mario's example, Jaco would not be playing the root of C - Bb - Gm .
His note choices were themselves melodic and weaved thru the chords many times.

Including sometimes maybe a 9th or 6th instead of the triad.
Example - C chord by a guitarist with bass playing an A suddenly makes that C chord ambiguous.
Is it C6, Am7, C/A .. kinda depends on what happens next and previous (IMHO)
I think we're talking past each other. Let me back up.
Levitin introduced me to the concept of "ambiguous chords" that Joni would play on her guitar. "Ambiguous" in that there may be 2 or more roots that could fit nicely with them. It's these ambiguous chords that I'm a) trying to find if anyone here knows anything about and b) whether yes or no, trying to learn something about them. So far no one seems to be able to directly engage on this subject which tells me this is an obscure subject; though I appreciate the side-topics as they are interesting too.

By definition, C - Bb - Gm are not ambiguous chords. As I understand it, they are well-defined chords with no ambiguity associated with them at all. If Jaco or other bassist can play notes other that C in the bar that contains the C chord is not surprising; I do it all the time. Quite frequently, there is ample room within a bar that contains a given chord to do many things on the bass including passing notes, the 5th, the 3rd, ghost notes, chromatic notes, slides and sometimes nothing. For it to "do justice" to a song, I need to play the root at some point to provide the grounding that I feel is needed. When I do stray from the root, I try to at least to return to it. And, to my knowledge, I've never played a song on the bass containing ambiguous chords. As we saw with Mario's example, when you go to GuitarCenter you find non-ambiguous chords. But we're not talking about non-ambiguous chords like C major, Bb or Gm.

Your example of a "C chord by a guitarist with bass playing an A suddenly makes that C chord ambiguous. Is it C6, Am7, C/A .." has 2 problems. First, the guitarist is playing a non-ambiguous C chord; Levitin is talking about ambiguous chords, not non-ambiguous ones. Second, you are talking about the composite chord formed by the guitarist and the bass player while Levitin (and I) are interested in the ambiguous chord the guitarist is playing.

To be sure what you bring up is interesting but doesn't help with my understanding of ambiguous chords played on a guitar or piano. The other disconnect is that you feel that "Jaco made them ambiguous by his note choices." Which could very well may be true but Levitin is saying the opposite, that Joni played the ambiguous chords to begin with and Jaco chose how to interpret them and played appropriately. Do you see this difference?

For me what would be ideal is to have an "understandable" (not free form jazz) Joni Mitchell song on YouTube with the corresponding notation showing the ambiguous chord that she is playing. Then I could attempt overlaying various bass notes on top of that ambiguous chord to observe the outcome.

And maybe this will help. I understand that chord ambiguity can happen at 2 very different levels; at the song/phrase level, and at the bar/chord level. I'm interested in the bar/chord level. And I'm thinking if the guitarist omits the root note of a traditional (non-ambiguous) chord then what emerges is an ambiguous chord. But I may be wrong on that.

Also note that I'm a self-taught newbie at music trying to learn what I can.

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