Navigating Chord Changes in Jazz Guitar with Three Different Fingering Approaches

Dr Diego Celi is an Ecuadorian jazz guitarist, composer, pedagogue, and scholar with experience as a performer, researcher, and educator in South and North America. Prior to joining LASALLE College of the Arts—University of the Arts Singapore, he was a Full Professor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito for nearly 18 years, where he also served as Coordinator, Chair, Vice Dean, and Dean of the College of Music. Dr Celi started his studies in jazz performance at Florida International University and received a Master of Arts in Music Education from Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas. He pursued his doctoral studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and received his Doctorate of Musical Arts in Jazz Performance in 2016 with the Doctoral Dissertation ‘Polymodality, Counterpoint, and Heptatonic Synthetic Scales in Jazz Composition; and Its Application in an Original Piece: Polymodal Jazz Suite for Quartet.’ His current research centers on Western art compositional techniques applied to jazz, jazz counterpoint, and music education, emphasizing jazz guitar pedagogy, jazz theory pedagogy, and music curriculum and assessment. Dr Celi’s areas of expertise include traditional and contemporary jazz, Afro-Cuban and Brazilian popular music (MPB), jazz harmony, arranging and composition, and common practice period and contemporary Western art music theory. He also specializes in injury prevention for guitar players and pedagogical approaches to teaching jazz guitar and jazz theory and composition. His research in jazz theory has been presented at the Jazz Education Network Conference and the International Jazz Composers’ Symposium, and his books have trained hundreds of music students for almost two decades. Dr Celi’s performing career includes concerts and recitals throughout Ecuador, Cuba, Miami, Illinois, and Singapore, and he has also taught clinics and workshops in Colombia and Ecuador.