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In the song Lenny by SRV, there is a bridge section where the chords do not follow the traditional harmony, i.e. I ii iii IV V vi vii-dim

Why does this sequence of chords work harmonically and how do they resolve to one another? B6 --> D6 --> G6 --> Bb6 --> A6 -->Emaj13

Whitey Winn
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user29030
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  • Basic analysis questions are off topic unfortunately. – Neil Meyer May 31 '16 at 14:33
  • Thought he played in Eb mostly. – Tim May 31 '16 at 14:56
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    You might able to keep this from being closed by changing it a bit. If you asked, "How can I understand a string of 6 chords with these kinds of intervals?" and use Lenny as an example only, then it would not constitute song element identification and would be an interesting question, IMHO. Certainly that chord progression is strange and I'm interested in seeing a breakdown of how it "works". – Todd Wilcox May 31 '16 at 17:07
  • Regarding whether it's "in E or Eb", a detuned guitar is often seen as a transposing instrument - certainly when playing one is "thinking in standard tuning" even though the sounding notes are not at the normal pitch, and if that's not a transposing instrument, I don't know what is. I'm not 100% sure whether solo works for transposing instruments are considered to be in the key in which they are written (as opposed to sounding). In this case, I feel like it's easier for us to proceed as the asker has requested with the written key of E major, rather than the sounding key of Eb major. – Todd Wilcox May 31 '16 at 17:48

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It looks like the chorus in Lenny is an example of parallel harmony or parallelism. The first chord (the A6) is repeated with different root notes, but otherwise with the exact same intervals and even the same voicing.

Arguably the modern godfather of parallelism is Claude Debussy. When asked by his teacher about the "theory" of parallelism, Debussy replied, "There is no theory. You have merely to listen. Pleasure is the law."

So parallel chords don't really admit themselves to "normal" analysis. One way to get a grip on them is to look at the melodic motion of the root notes and see them as almost single-note runs that just have a very complex timbre (sort of like a stacked 5ths monosynth patch, or a set of organ stops that emphasize the partials over the fundamental). The PDF linked above describes it as "a melodic line amplified by a chordal layer". And later on in the PDF (emphasis mine):

Such instances of parallel chords are certainly coloristic, but it is important to recognize that they nevertheless are essentially melodic events, whose specific harmonic function is suspended; moreover, they are guided by the chromatic scale, almost never the diatonic.

In the case of Lenny, the G and D naturals firmly take us out of E major. My interpretation is it in a minor mode of A, perhaps Phrygian or Aeolian, more likely the former in light of two B flats and only one B natural. Then we come out of the chorus with IV-I plagal cadence back to E major.

Todd Wilcox
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