Speak No Evil Chord Progression & Harmonic Analysis

Chord progression

Analyzed excerpt

Section: A1 · Bars 1–4

Cm7 | Dbmaj7 | Cm7 | Dbmaj7

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.

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Start here Project 03 · Harmony

Play Speak No Evil 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.

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Harmonic analysis

Key

C minor

Tonal center

C

Confidence

Low

Chords analysed

4

Read in C minor, the key of the tune. Taken on its own, with nothing around it, this excerpt is just as easy to hear in Ab 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
Cm7	i	Tonic	Cm7 is the tonic of Cm. It is where the progression is at rest.	High
Dbmaj7	bII	Other	Dbmaj7 does not take a functional role in Cm. It sits on bII and is best heard as colour, or as a sign that the tonal center has moved.	Low
Cm7	i	Tonic	Cm7 is the tonic of Cm. It is where the progression is at rest.	High
Dbmaj7	bII	Other	Dbmaj7 does not take a functional role in Cm. It sits on bII and is best heard as colour, or as a sign that the tonal center has moved.	Low

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 Speak No Evil — 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

Against a tonic of C minor the passage numbers as i – bII. Inside those 4 chords there is a chord borrowed from the parallel mode. With no dominant anywhere in it, nothing is obliged to resolve. Hold each chord until you find the note that still wants to go somewhere — that one is doing the work here. Once you can hear it here, it is hard to miss in Blues for Alice, All Blues and So What.

How the rest of Speak No Evil goes

AABA with long A sections built on the excerpt’s two chords, C minor and D♭ major seventh, followed by a chromatic descent of minor seventh chords and two bars of A7alt against B♭ minor. The bridge breaks the minor colour with a slow run of chords moving down by half steps, ending on a D-over-E♭ upper structure and D♭ major seventh with a sharp eleven. Little of it behaves like functional harmony; it is colour moving against colour.

Speak No Evil on record

The title track of Wayne Shorter’s 1964 Blue Note album, recorded while he was in the Miles Davis quintet, with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Elvin Jones. It is one of the pieces that defined the mid-sixties Blue Note sound, and one of the most played of Shorter’s compositions.

Analyze this progression

Load the progression and start altering it. Every edit is re-read from scratch, so you can test a hunch about one chord without rewriting the rest.

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Speak No Evil — Chord Progression & Harmonic Analysis

Chord progression

The books behind this page

Jazz Harmony

The Jazz Guitar Shortcut

Harmonic Narrative

The Jazz Roadmap Lite

Play Speak No Evil in JamShed

Harmonic analysis

Why this example matters

How the rest of Speak No Evil goes

Speak No Evil on record

Analyze this progression

Related

Modal interchange

Blues for Alice

All Blues

So What

Jazz chord progressions