Jazz 2 5 1 Progressions

2-5-1 chord progressions are on of the most important things you will learn about when starting to play jazz and in this article I am going to show you everything you need to know about playing over a two five one. A 2-5-1 progression refers to a chord progression made up from the 2nd, 5th and 1st chords in the major scale. We will go into more depth about the actual progression in a minute. Basically if you are going to play jazz you will need to know how to improvise over a 2-5-1 progression simply because they occur in almost every jazz standard you will come across. The simple two, five, one chord sequence is so important that you can find jazz songs made up entirely of this one progression.

There are two different two five one progressions and they are the major 251 and the minor 251 progression. The difference is that the major 251 is taken from the chords of the major scale and the minor 251 uses the chords from the harmonic minor scale.

Chords Of The Major Scale

In order to understand where the two five one comes from, we will need to understand a little bit about the chords that come from the major scale. In this example we will harmonise the major scale and find the chords present within it. This is a fairly basic process and you should at least have some idea about what chords are in the major scale but we will go over it just in case.

The notes of the C major scale are

C, D, E, F, G, A, B

The intervals of the C major scale are:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

As you can see there are no sharp of flat notes in the C major scale and if you were to play it on the piano you would see that the C major scale is made up from all the “white” keys on the keyboard.

Now that we have the notes of the C major scale, the next thing you will want to know is what chords are found in the scale. This is a very important step in learning any scale and the process is basically the same no matter what scale you are trying to harmonise. We create chords by taking the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th note of the scale. If you think visually like I do you can see that you start at your root note, skip a note and then land on the next one and so on. So to create our first chord, we start on the first note ( C ) , skip one note and then we add the third note ( E ), skip one note and take the fifth note ( G ), skip one note and take the seventh note ( B ). Now we have four notes C, E, G, and B. These four notes make up a CMajor7 chord. We can continue this process up the scale starting our next chord on D, skipping one note and landing on an F and so on. Eventually we end up with seven chords with the following notes

C, E, G, B

D, F, A, C,

E, G, B, D

F, A, C, E

G, B, D, F

A, C, E, G

B, D, F, A

These chords are

C major

D minor 7

E minor 7

F major 7

G Dominant 7

A minor 7

B minor 7b5

The major 2 5 1 progression

Now that we have the chords of the C major scale we can really begin to look at where the two five one chord progression comes from and gets its name. As you have probably guessed a two five one in C major contains the 2nd, 5th and 1st chords of the scale which are D minor 7, G dominant 7 and C major 7.

It is important to realise that this chord progression is a major two five one because the chords are taken from the C major scale.

The four bar major 2 5 1 progression in C looks like this

Dm7 | G7 | Cmaj7 | Cmaj7

Tension and resolution

Part of the appeal of the 2 5 1 chord progression is that the fifth chord, in this case G7, sounds tense and your ear wants the five chord to resolve back to the tonic note of C. Tension and resolution is an essential part of all music, especially jazz. When improvising over the 2 5 1 progression you need to be aware of this because often when you hear altered and dissonant sounding scales being played over a dominant chord, they are simply there to make the dominant five chord sound even more tense. This means that when the five chord finally resolves back to the one chord there is a sense of relief for the listener.

The minor 2 5 1 progression

The minor 2 5 1 progression follows the same idea as the major 2 5 1 but this time we are going to use the chords from the C harmonic minor scale.

The notes of the C harmonic minor scale are

C, D, Eb, F, G, Ab, B

The intervals of the C harmonic minor scale are

1, 2, b3, 4, 5, b6, 7

We basically use the same methods for harmonising the C minor scale that we used to harmonise the C major scale. For our first chord we start at C, skip one note to get to Eb, skip another note to get to G and then skip one note to land on B. So the first chord of the C harmonic minor scale contains the notes C, Eb, G and B which produces a rather spooky sounding minor major seven chord. It is a called a minor major seven chord because it contains a minor third note and a major seventh note.

If we continue this process up the scale we create the following chords

C min/maj7

D minor 7 b5

Eb major 7

F minor 7

G7

Ab major 7

B diminished

A four bar 2 5 1 progression in C minor would look like this

Dm7b5 | G7 | Cmin/maj7 | Cmin/maj7

As you can see we are simply taking the second, fifth and first chords from the harmonic minor scale. Because the chords are taken from the harmonic minor scale, you can use C harmonic minor to play over the whole progression.

Playing over the 2 5 1 chord progression

There are many ways you can improvise over the 2 51 chord progression and you will need to experiment until you come to learn ways that sound good to your own ear. Typically the main thing you want to think about is that the more tension you create on the five chord, the more satisfying the result will be when you finally resolve to the one chord

Using arpeggios to improvise over a 2 5 1 progression

By far the most professional sounding way to play over the 2 5 1 progression is to use notes from arpeggios. Arpeggios are the notes of a chord played individually and they really spell out the harmony of a chord progression. If you just use scales to play over a 2 5 1 progression, it may sound a bit haphazard and random whereas using arpeggios is a great way to show to your listener that you really know what you are doing and spell out the harmonic movement. The most basic and efficient way to play over a 2 5 1 chord progression in C major would therefore to play over it using a D minor 7, G dominant 7 and a C major 7 arpeggio. This will really outline the harmony and sound good because all of the notes you are using are also present in the chords you are playing over. Using this method you won’t be able to hit any wrong notes, which is always nice to know.
As well as just using the standard arpeggios, you can also apply a technique known as arpeggio superimposition to play other arpeggios on top of the chord to create different sounds. Because this is a large and potentially complex topic that should be looked at separately, I am going to skip through it for the sake of this article. When you first start playing over a 2 5 1 progression, make sure you practise just playing the arpeggios up and down through the chord progression.

Using scales to improvise over a 2 5 1 progression

It is possible to play over the major 2 5 1 progression using the major scale and to play over the minor 2 5 1 progression using the harmonic minor scale. They will both sound good because they chords you are playing over come from each scale. The only problem with just playing the scale over the whole thing is that it can sound a bit boring after a while. A better way to approach the chord progression would be to thing in terms of using a different scale for each chord.

Hopefully you will now have a much better understanding of the 2 5 1 chord progression. Practice playing over 2 5 1 progressions in different keys as much as possible because being able to play naturally over a 2 5 2 is an essential skill for all jazz musicians.