Limehouse Blues — chords & grille (gypsy jazz)
Limehouse Blues by Philip Braham & Douglas Furber — key of G (swing), 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
Limehouse Blues is a 1922 song by Philip Braham (music) and Douglas Furber (lyrics), written for a London revue and made famous by Gertrude Lawrence. Django Reinhardt and the Quintette recorded it, and it became a beloved gypsy barn-burner.
The sound — G major, but its trademark is long stretches sitting on a single dominant (C7, then D7) before the tune finally cadences — a wide-open runway for soloing.
Practising it — use those static dominant bars to stretch out: run C7 and G major arpeggios, mixolydian lines and chromatic approaches. It's a fast one, so build the vocabulary slowly before opening the throttle.
Limehouse Blues chords — the grille
A : | C7 | C7 | C7 | C7 | A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 | G | G | B7 | Em | A7 | A7 | D7 | D7 | C7 | C7 | C7 | C7 | A7 | A7 | A7 | A7 | G | E7 | Am | Cm6 | Am | D7 | G | G |
Chords used
C7 · A7 · G · B7 · Em · D7 · E7 · Am · Cm6
Play along
Open the interactive grille for Limehouse Blues: 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.