If you want to adapt popular music to jazz, the best approach is to think of the harmonic functions (rather than just the chords) and then use techniques of tonal harmony.
In the following video we show how to turn a very basic piano version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” into a jazz version of the song using Mapping Tonal Harmony Pro
This is an comprehensive 30 minute video showing many essential techniques used in tonal harmony and most importantly in jazz harmony.
Harmonic Techniques shown in this video
- Interpolation
- Secondary dominants
- Modal interchange
- Plagal cadence
- Deceptive cadence
- Inversions
- SubV7
- Bass-lines
The original version looked like this:
and here’s the final harmonic progression with full harmonic analysis and chord-scales:
To learn more about Mapping Tonal Harmony visit mDecks.com
mDecks Music Blog 
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