In music, an altered chord', an example of alteration, is a chord with one or more diatonic notes replaced by, or altered to, a neighboring pitch in the chromatic scale. For example the following progression:
In jazz music, an altered chord is a dominant chord that has the 5th and the 9th flatted or sharped. An altered chord may contain any of the following:
b5, #5, b9, #9
They may be in any combination. It is more common to have one of each, for example an altered 5th and an altered 9th rather than both being altered 5ths (or altered 9ths).
The altered chords create more tension and dissonance and in jazz harmony they are preferable to a generic dominant chord with either diatonic tensions (9 and 13) or no tensions whatsoever.
However, in more recent times, even such altered harmony has become commonplace, and more dissonant chromatic harmony is being explored by jazz players such as David Liebman and Randy Sandke.
The chord changes to the song "I Got Rhythm" by George Gershwin were so often used that they are often referred to simply as "Rhythm Changes." Jazz musicians had always improvised solos over chord changes, but writing entirely new compositions based on existing chord changes was an innovation.
The capacity to improvise over a complex sequence of alteredchords using only the implied scales requires a mental agility of a mathematical, problem-solving kind that is another hallmark of bebop.
Although it had occasionally been used for passing chords or special harmonic effects in the 20s or 30s, and is an intrinsic member of the "blues" scale derived from African music, the feature had never played an integral role in the foundation of a style to the extent it does in bebop.
A: V of IV (in a major key) is not an alteredchord, it is the regular tonic chord: I. V7/IV is an alteredchord (it is not the same as I7).
A: The origin of secondary chords is from the use of chromatic non-harmonic tones.
Although the altered tones must still be prepared linearly (stepwise), root and 1st inverstion secondary chords as a whole need not be treated as linear chords.
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