Well, You Needn’t Chord Progression & Harmonic Analysis

Chord progression

Analyzed excerpt

Section: A1 · Bars 1–8

F7 | Gb7 | F7 | Gb7 | F7 | Gb7 | F7 | Gb7

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

8

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 Bb 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
F7	I7	Tonic	F7 is the tonic, but built as a dominant seventh — the sound that defines the blues. The tonic keeps a b7 and stays at home anyway.	High
Gb7	subV7	Dominant	Gb7 is a tritone substitute for the dominant. It shares its tritone with C7 and slides down a semitone into F.	High
F7	I7	Tonic	F7 is the tonic, but built as a dominant seventh — the sound that defines the blues. The tonic keeps a b7 and stays at home anyway.	High
Gb7	subV7	Dominant	Gb7 is a tritone substitute for the dominant. It shares its tritone with C7 and slides down a semitone into F.	High
F7	I7	Tonic	F7 is the tonic, but built as a dominant seventh — the sound that defines the blues. The tonic keeps a b7 and stays at home anyway.	High
Gb7	subV7	Dominant	Gb7 is a tritone substitute for the dominant. It shares its tritone with C7 and slides down a semitone into F.	High
F7	I7	Tonic	F7 is the tonic, but built as a dominant seventh — the sound that defines the blues. The tonic keeps a b7 and stays at home anyway.	High
Gb7	subV7	Dominant	Gb7 is a tritone substitute for the dominant. It shares its tritone with C7 and slides down a semitone into F.	Medium

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

Against a tonic of F major the passage numbers as I7 – subV7. Inside those 8 chords there is a tritone substitute. Strip it to two notes per chord, the third and the seventh, and play it under tempo. F7 gives you A and Eb; follow that pair from chord to chord and the voice leading becomes audible in a way the root motion never makes it. Once you can hear it here, it is hard to miss in Blues for Alice, All Blues and So What.

How the rest of Well, You Needn’t goes

The A sections alternate between the tonic and a chord a semitone above it, shifting back and forth without either one being prepared — parallel motion rather than functional harmony. The bridge is more famous still: a series of dominant chords moving in parallel up and then back down by semitone, which resolves nothing and is meant to resolve nothing. There is a well-known discrepancy between the published chart and what its composer actually played, so the bridge exists in two circulating versions.

Well, You Needn’t on record

Monk wrote it in 1944 and recorded it repeatedly. Miles Davis recorded it in 1954 at the session where he and Monk reportedly disagreed about accompaniment, an incident that has been retold so often it has become part of the tune’s biography. The parallel bridge is one of the clearest early examples of harmony used as sound rather than as function.

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.

Open in Jazz Harmony Analyzer →

Well, You Needn’t — Chord Progression & Harmonic Analysis

Chord progression

The books behind this page

Jazz Harmony

Harmonic Narrative

Jazz Guitar Comping

Harmonic analysis

Why this example matters

How the rest of Well, You Needn’t goes

Well, You Needn’t on record

Analyze this progression

Related

Tritone substitution

Blues for Alice

All Blues

So What

Jazz chord progressions