Blue in Green Chord Progression & Harmonic Analysis

Chord progression

Analyzed excerpt

Bars 1–5

Gm6 | A7#9 | Dm7 Db7 | Cm7 F7 | Bbmaj7#11

The books behind this page

Every one of these tunes is assembled out of the same handful of harmonic resources. Jazz Harmony is those resources, explained in the order in which they build on each other.

See all the books

Start here Project 03 · Harmony

Play Blue in Green in JamShed

The whole form, not just these bars: JamShed’s trio — double bass, drums and piano — plays it with you at the tempo and in the key you choose. Loop the bars that trip you up, mute the instrument you play, share the link.

▶ Open in JamShed

Harmonic analysis

Key

D minor

Tonal center

D

Confidence

Low

Chords analysed

7

Read in D minor, the key of the tune. Taken on its own, with nothing around it, this excerpt is just as easy to hear in B♭ major — a few bars are often not enough to fix a tonic, and that ambiguity is a real property of the music rather than a gap in the analysis.

Chord	Roman numeral	Function	What it is doing	Confidence
Gm6	iv	Predominant	Gm6 is the iv chord of Dm: the minor subdominant.	High
A7#9	V7	Dominant	A7#9 is the dominant of Dm. In a minor key it borrows its major third from harmonic minor — that raised note is the leading tone.	High
Dm7	i	Tonic	Dm7 is the tonic of Dm. It is where the progression is at rest.	High
Db7	subV7/bVII	Dominant	Db7 is a tritone substitute — subV7/bVII. It carries the same tritone as G7, the real dominant of C, but resolves down a semitone instead of down a fifth.	High
Cm7	ii/bVI	Predominant	Cm7 is the ii of a secondary ii-V. Together with F7 it prepares Bb, so the pair tonicizes bVI without leaving the key.	High
F7	V7/bVI	Dominant	F7 is functioning as V7/bVI: a secondary dominant. It is the dominant of Bb, not of the home key, so it borrows the pull of a V-I and points it at bVI instead.	High
Bbmaj7#11	bVI	Predominant	Bbmaj7#11 is bVI of Dm, a predominant on the sixth degree of natural minor.	High

What the analyzer found in it

i - subV7/bVII - ii/bVIDm7 - Db7 - Cm7

A ii-V-I where the dominant has been replaced by its tritone substitute: Db7 in place of G7. The bass walks down by semitone into Cm7.

ii/bVI - V7/bVI - bVICm7 - F7 - Bbmaj7#11

A complete ii-V-I in Bb. Predominant, dominant, tonic: the sentence jazz harmony is built out of.

High, medium and low next to each numeral are judgements about musical context, not probabilities. A low rating marks a bar that can honestly be read more than one way. How the ratings are decided →

The complete analysis of Blue in Green — every chord of the whole form, with its Roman numeral and its ii–V–Is marked on the chart — is in JamShed with the Practice Pass, ready to print. Open it in JamShed →

Why this example matters

In D minor the excerpt reads iv – V7 – i – subV7/bVII – ii/bVI – V7/bVI – bVI. Inside those 7 chords there is a complete ii-V-I, at least one secondary dominant and a tritone substitute. Play it slowly with only two voices — the third and seventh of each chord. In A7#9 those are Db and G, and watching where that pair goes next tells you more about the progression than the root movement does. The same device turns up in Blues for Alice, All Blues and So What, in other keys and at other tempos.

How the rest of Blue in Green goes

Ten bars, played as a continuous loop with no strong sense of where the chorus starts. It begins on the iv chord, passes through a chromatic descent and a B♭ major seventh with a sharp eleven, and returns to D minor by way of an altered A7 and an E7 — a minor key that is reached but never really announced. Many versions double the durations, which turns it into a twenty-bar form with the same shape.

Blue in Green on record

On Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), credited to Davis. Bill Evans, who played piano on the session, later said that he wrote it, and his own trio recorded it on Portrait in Jazz later the same year. The authorship is still disputed; the Kind of Blue recording is the one everyone learns.

Analyze this progression

Take these bars into the analyzer and interfere with them. The fastest way to learn what a chord was doing is to remove it and read what the analysis says instead.

Open in Jazz Harmony Analyzer →

Blue in Green — Chord Progression & Harmonic Analysis

Chord progression

The books behind this page

Jazz Harmony

The Jazz Guitar Shortcut

Harmonic Narrative

The Jazz Roadmap Lite

Play Blue in Green in JamShed

Harmonic analysis

What the analyzer found in it

Why this example matters

How the rest of Blue in Green goes

Blue in Green on record

Analyze this progression

Related

ii-V-I

Secondary dominants

Tritone substitution

Blues for Alice

All Blues

So What

Jazz chord progressions