Chord of the Day: The Jump Monk V

I want to quickly have a look at this chord I stumbled across in Charles Mingus’s 1955 piece, Jump Monk, which can be found on the album, Mingus at the Bohemia. Mingus’s hard-bop tribute to Thelonious Monk deserves pages of its own but I really just want to focus on a chord in the ‘B’ section, which kicks in at 1.46. Jump Monk is in the key of F minor. The chords in the head are Fm7, Db7, Gø7 and C7 or i, bVI, ii, V) in F minor.

The Chord

The B section is in Bb minor and opens with the horns traversing the Bb harmonic minor scale before flirting around some chromatics and finishing with a syncopated line. The chords for this section are written Bbm6, Bbm(maj7), Cø7 and F+7, which is i, iiø, V+7 in Bb minor.

It’s the second chord that I want to look at. Ordinarily, Bbm(maj7) would use the notes Bb, Db, F and A, but I prefer to think of it as a substitution for an Eb chord functioning as chord IV in Bb minor. It could also bee seen as chord V in Ab which is the relative major key of F minor, which the A section is in.

The voicing I prefer to use for the first chord is a simple Bbm7 (Bb, Ab, C, Db, F) which leads nicely to an Eb9 by switching the bass note from Bb to Eb and dropping the Ab to a G (Eb, G, C, Db, F). Here’s the chord on its own:

I would spell this Eb13(b5) as it has the notes from Eb7 (Eb, G, Db), C is the 6th degree (which would read as a 13) and the A is a flattened 5th degree (Bb > A).

A nice easy way to remember this would be C minor first inversion in your left hand (Eb, G, C) and Db augmented in your right hand (Db, F, A); or, perhaps even easier, an Eb7 shell voicing (Eb, G, Db) with an F triad over the top (F A C). Starting the F triad in different places will give you different top notes which affect the overall feel of the chord.

And… voilà! The chord can slot into any situation preparing the tonic in a major or minor key or, like in the Jump Monk example, prepare a iiø.

*edit* It got its own page.