Post 413: I - II7 - V7 - I : THE FOUR-LEAF CHORD PROGRESSION

What do all the following tunes have in common?

Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None Of My Jelly Roll 

Big Butter and Egg Man
Big Chief Battleaxe (Main Theme)

Button Up Your Overcoat 

By the Light of the Silvery Moon
Congratulations 

Darktown Strutters Ball 

Destination Moon 

Do Do Blues (Nothing Can Be Right...)
Don’t Sweetheart Me 

Down In Honky Tonk Town 

Down In Jungle Town 

Eccentric [first theme]
Exactly Like You 

Honey
I Can't Escape 

If You Were The Only Girl In The World 

Jersey Bounce 

I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones 

I Love You So Much It Hurts Me
I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy
I’m Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover 

I'm Nobody's Baby
Lulu's Back in Town [in half-bars] 

Ma, He's Making Eyes At Me
Mandy, Make Up Your Mind

Me, Myself and I
Memories 

My Cutie's Due at Two to Two
New Orleans Shuffle
Oh, You Beautiful Doll 

On Treasure Island 

Peg o' My Heart 

Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet [the verse - not the refrain]
Red Hot Mamma
Six or Seven Times

Somebody Else Is Taking My Place 

Toot Toot Tootsie

True: You Don't Love Me
Ory’s Creole Trombone  [main theme]

Underneath the Arches
Walking My Baby Back Home
Working Man Blues [2nd theme]
You Made Me Love You

The answer is that they all use one of the most common chord patterns - usually called the 'Four-Leaf' progression.

What happens is that the tune starts on the Tonic Chord and then follows this with the commonest chord progression of all - known to musicians as II - V - I. So a tune beginning on the chord of C major, for example, would progress on to D major (the chord of the second note of the scale), followed by the chord of G7 (the dominant seventh - the fifth note of the scale) before returning to C major. A very satisfying 8-bar musical phrase can be built on two bars each of these four chords.

It is the basis of that iconic song of the music hall era, My Old Man Said Follow The Van. This song, made famous by Marie Lloyd, was written at the end of the Nineteenth Century by Fred Leigh and Charles Collins.

The chord sequence was most common in the early Twentieth Century. Famous tunes using it were Oh, You Beautiful Doll of 1911 (with music by Nat D. Ayer), The Darktown Strutters Ball (written by Shelton Brooks in 1917), and Button Up Your Overcoat (1928, with music by Ray Henderson).

Nat D. Ayer used it again in 1916 to start his lovely song If You Were The Only Girl In The World.

Exactly Like You, Destination Moon, Don’t Sweetheart Me, Con Conrad's 1940 hit Ma, He's Making Eyes At Me, Memories (the Robert Van Alstyne tune), On Treasure Island, and Somebody Else Is Taking My Place, Peg o' My Heart, Jersey Bounce, I Can't Escape, and Congratulations are eleven more tunes you may know: they are all in the Four-Leaf pattern. The Progression is sometimes used in 16-bar tunes, too: an example is Red Hot Mama of 1924.

Lil Hardin and King Oliver used the structure - exactly as in my example on the staves above - for the whole 8-bar (repeated) structure of the main theme in his Working Man Blues (1923).

And another tune in which the entire structure of the first, second and final eights is built on the pattern is that great Chris Yacich classic from 1935 I Like Bananas Because They Have No Bones.

Specifically in the field of traditional jazz good examples are Down In Jungle Town, Ain’t Gonna Give Nobody None Of My Jelly Roll, the main theme of Ory’s Creole Trombone (written and recorded by the great Kid Ory in 1922) and Down In Honky Tonk Town.

In fact Down In Honky Tonk Town begins with four bars on each of the chords ( 1 - 1 - 1 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 2 etc.); this is a feature it has in common with the ever-popular and eponymous I’m Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover (with music composed in 1927 by Harry M. Woods).

And another interesting variant is You Made Me Love You (1913, with music by James V. Monaco). After two bars on the tonic, it has just one bar on the second chord followed by just one on the dominant 7th. And Lulu's Back in Town follows the pattern in half-bars.

I am keeping things as simple as I can. I know that if we were to see the original piano sheet music of these songs, we would often find the use of four different chords in one bar, for example. What I am giving is the general sweep of the changing harmonies.

In connection with the FOUR-LEAF pattern, for example, some tunes begin with one bar on the tonic and then have one bar on the VI7th before moving on to the 'II'. My correspondent Allen Robnett has kindly emphasised this point and indicated some of the tunes to which this applies. He writes:

I think the following songs are improved by (and some demand)  the pattern   I  VI7  II7  V7  I:

Button Up Your Overcoat; 

If You Were The Only Girl In The World;

Memories;

Oh, You Beautiful Doll;

Peg O' My Heart;

Somebody Else Is Taking My Place.

It could be argued that the tonic chord can be substituted for the VI7, but then it could also be argued that you can play everything with just I, IV and V (and, unfortunately, some people do just that.)

Allen is right on both counts.

Post 29: IMPROVISING YOUR FIRST JAZZ SOLO

This post is aimed at any beginner trying to play traditional jazz and wanting to get established in a band. So I apologise to the many readers who will not find this topic of interest.

But, judging from many emails I have received,  I believe that the effort of writing it will be worthwhile.

O.K. You can play your instrument reasonably well and you have learned a few tunes. You have joined a band - maybe of fellow beginners, maybe an established band. Within the tunes you play, you will be expected occasionally to take 'solo' choruses.

Doing this at first can be a daunting experience. However hard you try, you are likely to play some 'wrong' and ugly-sounding notes. But don't worry. Your fellow musicians will support you. Stick at it and you will gradually improve.

The better prepared you are, the easier it will be. Get to know the correct notes of the tune well. Master keys and scales and be very conscious of the key in which you are playing. If possible, memorise the tune's chord sequence too.

Keep things simple when you first take a solo. It may help to do little more than play the melody, with minimal decoration.

Let's say you are going to improvise a Chorus on The Darktown Strutters Ball in the key of C.

Right, you know the first four bars go like this:

So you could play close to the melody but quite effectively, for example:

You are keeping in mind the chord structure of these bars, so you are using notes largely running through those chords. By the way, the 'passing' A7 chord is there in Bar 2 but when improvising you need not worry too much about that.

With a little experience, you can later start to be more adventurous. You can get away from the melody but still be in harmony with it and keeping on the chords. For example, if you know the first chord of a tune, it's often a good idea to begin your improvisation on the flattened third, going immediately from it to the third. So note how Eb and E are used in Bar 1 below.

In your anxiety, you may want to make sure that you are playing something on every beat of every bar. But good improvised solos often include little breaks - moments of silence. These can be specially effective on the first beat or two of the bar (as in Bar 3 here) and they give you time to 'feel' the chord and make sure you are on it.

That is simple enough but it runs nicely down through the C chord (Bars 1 and 2) and the D7 chord (Bars 3 and 4) and sounds effective.

The Chorus of The Darktown Strutters Ball actually comprises 20 bars, of which I have dealt with only the first four.

So you will have to treat the other 16 bars in the same way. But I hope I have given some ideas on how to get going.

As your confidence increases, try to be more relaxed. Allow for those moments of silence I have mentioned. This is easier said than done; and you must not be relaxed to the point of becoming casual. If you do so, you will make mistakes. But try not to be rushed. Listen to the other members of the band as you play: doing so will help to avoid playing those 'ugly' notes.