MFCCs and chord recognition
MFCC's are related strictly to spectrum shape and what's more - these are relaying on the mel scale. Additionally each coefficient is a DCT value from fitted cosinusoids to log-energies. Thus interpretation of pitch would be troublesome for you. 

Chord recognition is usually based on chromagram calculation or so called chroma features. Check out work and publications of guys from QMUL, i.e: Real-time Chord Recognition for live performance - in here you will find another references. 

You might also find their software useful: Sonic Visualizer together with lot's of so called Vamp plugins. You can check out the code and even use command line tool to extract features you want.