Learning Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: What You Actually Need to Know
The chord changes in this Cole Porter tune are more deceptively busy than they sound on the surface. Most people hear the melody and think it's a straightforward bluesy ballad. It isn't. The harmony moves in ways that will catch you off guard the first few times you try to play through it, especially if you're coming at it from a pop or rock background where progressions tend to stay on longer chords. Here's the A section as Porter wrote it. A minor seven, D seven, G minor seven, C seven, F minor seven, B flat seven, E flat minor seven, A flat seven. Then it moves to D flat major seven, G minor seven, C seven, moving back into the relative key area before resolving. The bridge kicks you into F major territory with a different set of movements. The whole form is 32 bars, standard AABA, but the harmonic rhythm inside each bar is what makes this one worth paying attention to. I spent about three weeks just trying to internalize the A section during late-night practice sessions at a rehearsal space I had access to through a friend's studio. The problem wasn't the chords themselves — it was that your fingers tend to slide into familiar patterns on the guitar or piano, and those patterns don't work here. Your muscle memory will try to play a ii-V-I when the tune demands a series of descending minor-seventh sevenths that don't resolve the way you expect. I kept landing on wrong voicings and not hearing why until I actually sat down and mapped every single change bar by bar instead of relying on rote memorization of similar progressions.
One thing that trips people up constantly: the C seven chord in bar 4. Beginners treat it as a dominant and plan a resolution that never comes in the way they anticipate. It functions more as a secondary dominant pointing toward F minor, but the way Porter resolves it creates a chromatic line that doesn't follow textbook voice leading. Write out the individual notes and you'll see the G sharp moving to A, the B moving to B flat. That G sharp is the one that sounds wrong in your head until you hear it in context.
What Works in Practice
Learn it instrument by instrument approach doesn't work here. You need to sing the melody while you play the changes because the phrasing is tied to harmonic tension points. The first time I tried to learn this purely from a lead sheet without vocalizing, I placed my chord changes a half beat off from where they actually hit, and it made the whole thing sound clunky. Once I started singing along with the melody — any recording, Frank Sinatra or Peggy Lee work fine for reference — the timing of the changes clicked into place almost immediately. If you're playing guitar, drop the low E string tuning option. Standard tuning works but the voicings get cramped around the middle register where the changes happen fastest. A partial capo on the second fret opens up some shapes that make the descending minor sequences much more manageable. I switched to this setup after trying to force standard tuning voicings for about a month and realizing I was spending more mental energy on finger placement than on actually hearing the harmony. For piano players, don't try to comp with full voicings through the entire first chorus. You'll sound muddy. Leave the left hand mostly to single roots or octaves on the first pass while you learn the changes. Once the progression is locked in mechanically, then layer in the fuller harmonies. This cut the practice time significantly compared to trying to coordinate everything at once from day one.
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Common Pitfalls and Where This Approach Falls Apart
The main issue is tempo. This tune works at a slow ballad pace and it also works swinging at a moderate uptempo. What it doesn't work well at is anything in between. If you're playing this in a setting where the drummer or bandleader wants it somewhere around a medium swing feel, the harmonic complexity starts to blur and the progression loses its clarity. I've played this at tempos where the chords became almost indistinguishable and the tune sounded like it was going nowhere. That's not a flaw in the composition — it's a flaw in the execution context. Another limitation: if you're relying entirely on sheet music or a fake book, you might miss the original key center shifts that come naturally in a jazz interpretation. Many fake books transcribe this at concert pitch without accounting for the way instrumentalists traditionally alter the bridge key area. Check against at least two different recordings before committing to a particular voicing set. I learned this the hard way when I once showed up to a session with a fake book version that had the bridge in the wrong key for the horns, and we spent twenty minutes figure it out on the spot. The melody itself has some intervallic jumps that aren't obvious on paper. That opening leap of a sixth followed by a stepwise descent requires vocal control if you're singing it, or clean technique if you're playing it on an instrument. Rushing through the first eight bars to get to the harmony faster is a mistake that compounds. Take the time to nail the melodic contour first.
Recording References That Actually Help
Charlie Parker's version on his 1946 session is essential listening for understanding how the changes breathe in a bebop context. Frank Sinatra's studio recording shows how the melody can be phrased with rubato without losing the harmonic anchor. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong's duet version demonstrates what happens when two strong musicians navigate the bridge together — you can hear how they anticipate the key movement and set up the return to the A section cleanly. Each recording teaches something different about the tune. Play through the changes slowly at first, maybe 60 beats per minute if you're using a metronome, and mark each chord change with a breath or a fingering shift. Then gradually increase. The tune rewards patience in the practice room more than almost any other standard I've worked with. It's not a tune you fake your way through successfully.
