Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy aren't names you'd immediately associate with jazz guitar, but the harmonic vocabulary they developed at the turn of the 20th century has been quietly informing jazz players for almost as long as jazz has existed. The extended chords, the modal blur, the ambiguous-to-resolved gestures — that lineage runs straight from the Paris of 1905 into the language Bill Evans was speaking sixty years later, and Bill Frisell still speaks today.
Mike Godette's MMC class The Harmony of Ravel & Debussy For Guitar sits exactly in that gap. He works through specific chord voicings drawn from the piano works of both composers, then shows how those voicings translate to guitar across major, minor, dominant, and altered-dominant settings.
What jazz players actually borrowed
Three threads from Ravel and Debussy show up consistently in jazz guitar harmony:
- Extended chord stacks — 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths used as colors in their own right rather than tensions resolving back to triads. The opening chord of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune doesn't need to "go" anywhere; the color is the point. Jazz players use the same logic on a hundred standards.
- Modal harmony — passages anchored on a single mode or pitch center rather than driven by a chord progression. This shows up in Miles Davis-era modal jazz directly, and the guitar voicings trace back through Bill Evans's piano voicings to Debussy.
- Ambiguous, slow-resolving harmony — chords that hint at multiple keys at once, sliding through them rather than confirming any one. This is the "impressionistic" sound, and it's the engine behind a lot of modern ballad arranging on the guitar.
Why it lands on the guitar
Ravel and Debussy wrote for piano, and a lot of their chord voicings spread across two hands in ways the guitar can't directly copy. The work of translating them is finding fingerings that preserve the voice spacing — the unique vertical color of the chord — without losing the smooth horizontal motion between chords. Godette's class is essentially that translation work, condensed into a system you can practice.
Pianistic voicings on guitar tend to require rootless or shell-style forms; the bass note often has to come from a bassist or from your left-hand thumb. The class shows several practical approaches, including the kind of three- and four-note rootless extended voicings that Genil Castro covers in detail from a different angle.
Counterpoint, the other classical inheritance
Independent of impressionist harmony, the broader classical tradition of counterpoint — two or more independent melodic lines moving simultaneously — has also fed jazz guitar vocabulary. Sid Jacobs traces the line from Bach to bebop in Counterpoint Concepts, and Steve Herberman extends the technique into contrary motion in Contrary Motion Counterpoint Part 1.
Where to start
If you're already comfortable with standard jazz chord voicings (drop 2, drop 3, shells) and want to add the impressionist palette on top, the Godette class is the direct route. If you're earlier in your harmonic development, work through the diatonic harmony fundamentals first — the impressionist sound depends on understanding the standard sound it's coloring outside of.
