Days of Wine and Roses Chord Progression & Harmonic Analysis

Chord progression

Analyzed excerpt

Section: A · Bars 1–4

Fmaj7 | Eb7 | Am7 D7 | Gm7

This is a short excerpt quoted for analysis, not the full chart, and this composition is very likely still in copyright. Published versions and recordings disagree with each other about the rest of the tune, and often about these bars too.

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.

Start here Project 03 · Harmony

Harmonic analysis

Key

F major

Tonal center

F

Confidence

Low

Chords analysed

5

Read in F major, the key of the tune. Taken on its own, with nothing around it, this excerpt is just as easy to hear in G minor — 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
Fmaj7	I	Tonic	Fmaj7 is the tonic of F. It is where the progression is at rest.	High
Eb7	bVII7	Modal interchange	Eb7 is bVII7 — the backdoor dominant. It comes from the parallel minor and resolves up a whole tone to the tonic instead of down a fifth. Also readable as V7/bIII.	Medium
Am7	ii/ii	Predominant	Am7 is the ii of a secondary ii-V. Together with D7 it prepares G, so the pair tonicizes ii without leaving the key. Also readable as iii.	High
D7	V7/ii	Dominant	D7 is functioning as V7/ii: a secondary dominant. It is the dominant of G, not of the home key, so it borrows the pull of a V-I and points it at ii instead.	High
Gm7	ii	Predominant	Gm7 is the ii chord of F: the classic predominant. It prepares the dominant and almost always moves to it.	High

What the analyzer found in it

ii/ii - V7/ii - iiAm7 - D7 - Gm7

A complete minor ii-V-i in Gm, with the half-diminished ii and a dominant that borrows its leading tone from harmonic minor.

modal interchangeEb7

Modal interchange: Eb7 come from the parallel mode of F, not from the key itself.

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 →

Why this example matters

In F major the excerpt reads I – bVII7 – ii/ii – V7/ii – ii. Inside those 5 chords there is a complete ii-V-I, at least one secondary dominant and a chord borrowed from the parallel mode. Play it slowly with only two voices — the third and seventh of each chord. In Eb7 those are G and Db, and watching where that pair goes next tells you more about the progression than the root movement does. The same device turns up in Misty, Just Friends and The Sidewinder, in other keys and at other tempos.

How the rest of Days of Wine and Roses goes

The harmony moves by a repeated pattern of descending fourths, but the detail worth the page is the cadence that gets the tune home: instead of the expected dominant, it uses the pair of chords a whole tone below the tonic, borrowed from the parallel minor. That is the backdoor cadence, and this tune is where most players meet it first, because here it is unmistakable — it arrives in a well-lit context where the ordinary alternative is obvious by comparison.

Days of Wine and Roses on record

Henry Mancini wrote it in 1962 for the film of the same name, with a lyric by Johnny Mercer, and it won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. It entered the jazz repertoire quickly and unusually — most film songs take a decade — largely because the harmony is more interesting than the genre normally allowed. Bill Evans and Wes Montgomery both recorded it within a few years of its release.

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.

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Days of Wine and Roses — Chord Progression & Harmonic Analysis

Chord progression

The books behind this page

Jazz Harmony

Harmonic Narrative

Jazz Guitar Comping

Harmonic analysis

What the analyzer found in it

Why this example matters

How the rest of Days of Wine and Roses goes

Days of Wine and Roses on record

Analyze this progression

Related

Modal interchange

ii-V-I

Secondary dominants

Backdoor progression

Misty

Just Friends

The Sidewinder

Jazz chord progressions