ii V Or Not ii V
Published: Wed, 05/17/23
Many pre-World War II songs popularized by swing-era musicians like Count Basie and Benny Goodman rely on less elaborate structures – think "Pennies From Heaven," "Exactly Like You," "Rose Room," and so on. But postwar bebop musicians often took those seemingly simpler prewar tunes and superimposed additional chord substitutions upon the original changes, and inserting ii-V moves where none previously existed was a central strategy. As a result, for decades, woodshedding musicians hoping to be as prepared as possible for rapid tempos on unfamiliar material have long relied on preparing a stockpile of ii-V licks to be readily applied in a fast, flexible way.
All of which would be almost totally irrelevant to this week's discussion, which is focused exclusively on how to apply swing ideas to the twelve bar blues, except for the fact that swing and bebop versions of the blues chord changes often involve replacing the standard V-IV-I chord sequence in bars nine through eleven with the chords ii-V-I. In other words, on a blues in Bb, instead of starting the third line of the progression on F7, going to Eb7 in the next bar and finally landing on Bb in the second-to-last bar of the chorus, swing musicians tend to start bar nine on C minor 7 and go to F7 in bar ten, before landing on Bb as usual in bar eleven.
Which could easily lead the aspiring swing guitarist to think "dang, I better get myself a stack of those ii-V licks too." But no – not so fast. While some swing and bebop musicians do apply the usual ii-V thinking to the blues turnaround, many of them do something entirely unexpected and different, bypassing the V chord altogether in favor of using blues scale licks as a way resolve from ii back to I.
It's much easier to demonstrate than to type about, so in today's video I provide a short demonstration of just how this works. You can find it at the link below:
How Not To Play A ii-V
Like the rest of this week's topics, the ii-V turnaround is just one of the essential swing soloing strategies I'll be covering in detail in this weekend's online workshop, The Swing Scale. You can learn more about the workshop and sign up at the following link:
The Swing Scale Workshop
More soon,
David