How to NAIL short ii-Vs

The ii-V-I chord progression is a jazz staple. It quickly establishes a key center with tension and release, and because of this, it’s often used to change keys quickly and easily.

One flavor of ii-V is the short ii-V, meaning it happens in one measure (rather than over 2 measures like the aptly named long ii-V). Since the ii-V fits into one measure, each of the chords gets one beat. 

You can also use the short ii-V as a way to spice up a vamp on the tonic chord. 

But when you’re improvising, these chords happen quickly and it can be overwhelming to try and create a line over them. In a fast tune, you get less than a second to consider things like chord tones, making a melody, voice leading, and all the other options like pentatonics, enclosures, and substitutions. 

So how do we effectively conquer short ii-Vs in our improvised solos? Well today we’re going to run through 5 tips that can help you nail these short ii-Vs. All of these examples come from our resource entitled 100 Short ii-V Phrases, which includes 50 major and 50 minor phrases starting from all 12 pitches of the chromatic scale. They’re organized by diatonic phrases to lines with alterations, then non-diatonic starting points, and transcribed vocabulary from the masters like Bird and Cannonball. Plus, there’s an extra 12 lines for both major and minor keys to keep you shedding. If you want to hear how Nathan plays through any of this material, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, How to NAIL Short ii-Vs. 

Now let’s get going!

Contents

Get to know the short ii-V

Change up the rhythm

Extend the V chord

Make the phrases work for you

Play it out

Get to know the short ii-V

Our first tip is nothing crazy, but it is going to be huge in terms of progress for you. That’s getting to know your short ii-Vs by studying and memorizing a ton of great examples. A short ii-V should feel like one unit of information rather than a bunch of separate notes. 

We’re going to start by looking at one of Cannonball’s tunes, “Minority.”

The first five notes make up a pretty common enclosure in bebop. We’re essential playing two voices at once that target a note from above and below. In this case, the target is the third of G7—which is B, and we approach it from above, starting on the root of this Dm7 chord and gradually walking down until it arrives to the target note, B. From here, we finally deviate by arpeggiating up a fully diminished upper structure. Normally this b9 wants to resolve down to the 5 of our tonic chord, but Cannonball cleverly delays this resolution by adding two chromatic approach notes from below, then we land on the 5. 

Another great example is this one from John Coltrane.

As you can see here, we’re going to chromatically approach the 5 of this Fm7 chord and walk down a backwards 1, 2, 3, 5 cell in F minor. When we arrive at the end of the cell, we are now on the 5 of our Bb7 chord, and we simply walk up the Bb dominant scale until we arrive on the root. And then we resolve to the tonic chord, Ebmaj7 and drop down to a chromatic approach tone that targets the 3 of this chord. Then we play the root and return to the 3 that now acts as an approach tone to the 4. Finally, we walk down the scale until we arrive at the 9.

But besides the greats, you can study some standard minor ii-Vs as well. Here’s one from the C minor section of the book.

We’re starting on the Dm7b5 chord but from the 6 of D Locrian and playing a Bb 1, 2, 3, 5 cell, which gives us this chord’s b6, b7, 1, and b3. Then on the V chord, we start on the b9 and chromatically fall down to the b7 and play a two-note enclosure that targets the b3 of the tonic chord. 

Here’s another minor ii-V, this time also from Coltrane.

This time we’ll start on the b5 of Dm7b5 and walk down the D Locrian scale, and then back up until we land on the 11 of the G7b9. From here, we can just play thirds in G Phrygian Dominant, first going up and then going down. You can call these zigzag thirds or up-down, forward-backward thirds or whatever makes sense to you. The last two notes end up being a nice enclosure around the root of our tonic chord, and we end off with a melodic figure of 5, 4, b3, 5.

Change up the rhythm

Now we’re on to our second tip, which is to change up the rhythm. Whenever something is just a bunch of eighth notes, consider it like a blank canvas, ready for you to embellish the rhythm. If you play a constant stream of eighth notes in your solo, you run the risk of sounding like a robot. 

Let’s check out a few ways you can make things more interesting by altering the rhythm. Here’s a phrase that we can look at from the resource.

Now think of this as a starting point. Take away the duration of these notes and just feel different ways to work through the contour. 

To see some of the ways that Nathan alters the rhythm of this phrase, make sure to check out our accompanying YouTube video, How to NAIL Short ii-Vs. 

Extend the V chord

Our third tip is to not overcomplicate things. Instead of thinking how to play over a ii and a V within one bar, think about just playing over the V. 

What’s cool is how this also enables you to easily make substitutions. For example in the fourth bar of a blues, we have a short ii-V to the Eb7. We can take this short ii-V and see it as just a Bb7.

However, we know that one of the most popular substitutions in jazz is the tritone sub. So let’s change this Bb7 up a tritone to an E7. E7 is the V chord in the key of A, and so one strategy is to look at the section of our resource 100 Short ii-V Phrases and pull up the section for A major, and voilà, you have 50 tritone substitution lines that you can experiment with over this measure for some inspiration.

We’ll take this one and see how it works.

Try this phrase over the E7 tritone substitution leading to Eb7.

Now how about we try the backdoor dominant? So in this case we’ll take this Bb7 and shift it up a minor third to C#7, which is the V7 of F#.

Now we can skip to the F# major chapter of the resource and explore the potential backdoor seventh options. Here’s a nice phrase by Charlie Parker from the resource.

Backdoor dominant phrase over C#7 leading to Eb7

The possibilities are endless, and it gives you a bit more to focus on that jumping from the ii to the V.

Make the phrases work for you

Now beyond studying the ii-V phrases, you do have to make them work for you, too. Our fourth tip is to take a phrase that you’re working on, get really comfortable with it in all 12 keys, and then in a practice setting, force it into your improvisation. 

The best way to do this is to take a standard you’re already pretty comfortable playing that has a lot of short ii-Vs and then deliberately play that line in all those keys every time. In between, you can improvise your own lines—just make sure that for the ii-V phrases you play the single phrase. An example from Nathan is to take this phrase and use it over the tune “Recorda Me.”

So now the best thing to do is loop a backing track and try this for 15 minutes a day for about a week. Then go ahead and forget about it—because by then, it will be cemented in your vocabulary.  

Play it out

Our final tip is to check in with yourself and see how your progress is coming along by forgetting about everything we talked about and just playing. Everything we talked about today is concept and theory heavy, but when you’re improvising in a real-life setting, you don’t want to have to be bogged down by theory—you want to be able to move instinctually. So the best thing is to work through these exercises and then be honest with yourself about what actually works for you.

Well that’s all we have for this time, but make sure to check out our resource 100 Short ii-V Phrases as well as our accompanying YouTube video “How to NAIL Short ii-Vs” to hear how Nathan tackles them. See you next time!