Honeysuckle Rose — chords & grille (gypsy jazz)
Honeysuckle Rose by Fats Waller & Andy Razaf — key of F (manouche), form A. Below is the full chord grid; on Haute Gitanerie you can play along with a scrolling chord ribbon, transpose to any key, set the tempo, and switch on a rhythm backing (la pompe) to practise your solos over the changes.
About
Music by Fats Waller, lyrics by Andy Razaf, written in 1929 for the revue Load of Coal. A cornerstone jazz standard whose ii-V vocabulary every improviser eventually meets.
The sound — F major, with an A section that simply rocks back and forth on a Gm-C7 ii-V before the bridge climbs by dominants. Deceptively simple, endlessly playable.
Practising it — it's the perfect ii-V workshop: loop Gm and C7 arpeggios into F and build guide-tone lines across them. Set a swinging pompe, then improvise choruses over that repeating cell before tackling the bridge.
Honeysuckle Rose chords — the grille
A : | Gm C7 | Gm C7 | Gm C7 | Gm C7 | F Dm | G7 C7 | F Gm | Am A♭° | Gm C7 | Gm C7 | Gm C7 | Gm C7 | F Dm | G7 C7 | F B♭ | F | F7 | F7 | B♭ | B♭ | G7 | G7 | C7 | C7 | Gm C7 | Gm C7 | Gm C7 | Gm C7 | F Dm | G7 C7 | F B♭ | F |
Chords used
Gm · C7 · F · Dm · G7 · Am · A♭° · B♭ · F7
Play along
Open the interactive grille for Honeysuckle Rose: loop any section, transpose to any key, set the tempo, and play over a rhythm accompaniment — with a real recorded pompe on featured tunes. In the browser, free.