Killer Joe — Chord Progression & Harmonic Analysis

Harmonic analysis

Read in C major, 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.

What the analyzer found in it

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 Killer Joe — 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 →

How the rest of Killer Joe goes

The main section alternates two dominant chords a whole tone apart, neither of which resolves — the harmony simply rocks between them for sixteen bars, which is closer to a vamp than to a chord progression. The bridge supplies conventional cadences. Because the two chords share so little, a soloist has to change material completely every two bars while the underlying feel stays identical, which is a specific and unusual demand.

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 →