I can still remember the day I discovered how amazing the ii V7 chord progression could be. After struggling for years, It was as if a locked door finally opened and I was granted access to a secret society…
I finally saw what all the fuss over ii Vs was about and why they mattered so much…ii Vs became my primary improvisation tool – they were my hammer. But like the saying goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I was so enamored with ii Vs that virtually my whole approach to playing centered around them. They literally were the core of how I improvised and anything that didn’t quite fit the ii V mold, well I did what anyone would do…I noodled around in the appropriate scales and faked it…all the while ignoring my inability to actually know what was truly going on in the chord changes.
And this became very apparent when I first encountered tunes that didn’t use the common ii V7 I formula – these weird tunes that I hadn’t seen before used a II dominant chord in place of the ii minor…
I was lost.
Now you wouldn’t think that such a small change would make such a big difference, but it certainly can.
Most people’s ears are so accustomed to hearing the standard ii V I, that a dominant chord in place of a minor ii chord sounds completely out of place.
But today, we’re going to change that…
Welcome to the V7 of V7
So why might it be difficult for us to hear and conceptualize a II7 dominant chord where we’re used to hearing and seeing a ii minor chord?
A lot of this difficulty has to do with the layers of abstraction necessary to understand a particular music theory concept…
For instance, In a regular ii V I, you have a logical progression born directly from major harmony that completely makes sense in terms of music theory.
There are no abstractions to deal with, no exceptions to the rules…it works exactly the way it’s supposed to. The ii minor of the key moves to the V7 of the key, and the V7 naturally resolves to the Tonic.
But not every musical chord progression or concept is so clear and easy to grasp as a ii V7 I. Sometimes there are levels of abstraction to understand and that’s okay, as long as we work towards understanding them rather than moving past them without fully conceptualizing why something works the way it does.
If you can’t hear and understand the WHY behind a chord progression, you don’t really know it
Most of the time, when you’re having trouble conceptualizing the why behind a chord progression, all it takes is a subtle shift in perspective and voila, the chords make perfect sense!
This new found perspective helps you hear the chord progression clearly and understand how to more effectively improvise over it.
So to deconstruct the nature of this dominant chord in place of the ii minor, let’s start with our ii V I
Now, let’s zoom in on the V7 to I part of the progression…
And let’s take a look at the how & why behind V7 moving to I by examining the voice leading.
The voice leading of the 3rd and 7th, moving from the V7 dominant chord to the Tonic major chord, resolves the tension within the dominant chord.
In other words, the tritone interval between the 3rd and 7th of the dominant chord we hear as tension in the context of the underlying key center…and this changes to a stable interval of a perfect 4th (or perfect 5th if you invert it) when we move from dominant to major.
But, what people often forget is that a dominant chord does NOT have to resolve to a major chord – the voice leading can just as easily move us to a minor chord, or even another dominant chord!
That’s right, the tension within a dominant chord can move not only to major or minor, but it can also move to the tension of another dominant chord.
And when you realize that dominant chords can move like this and are not restricted to resolving to I major, or even i minor, your entire understanding opens up.
You begin to realize how and why a dominant chord can lead you anywhere…
So, if we go back to the ii V I, what if we were to say…let’s get to the V7 dominant chord from another dominant chord, instead of moving to it from the ii minor….What might that look like?
Well, to conjure up the dominant chord that would move to the V7 chord, we can extrapolate the V7 of the V7 like this…
So you can see, the V7 of the V7 (F7), moves us perfectly to V7 (Bb7), and the V7 resolves to the tonic, Eb major.
With this new understanding, the V7 of V7 becomes a new entity, sound, and concept that helps you realize the how and why behind the chord changes.
But keep in mind that the V7 of V7 is frequently voiced by the chording instrument with a b5 /#11 in the chord structure…
As we study examples with the V7 of V7, we’ll just notate it as a standard dominant chord, so be aware that the chord voicings may include the b5 /#11 even when it’s not notated.
Okay, now that you have a good idea behind where the V7 of V7 comes from, let’s take a look at a timeless tune and jazz solo that uses this specific sound…
Sonny Rollins Solo – But Not For Me
The tune we’ll be talking about today, Gershwin’s But Not For Me, has been recorded by many jazz musicians.
But of course, the chord changes that most people play today were made popular by Miles Davis, which instead of starting with 4 bars of the tonic chord like the original, makes use of the V7 of V7. Take a look at the first 8 bars…
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