Intermediate

The Tunes

Song forms and the standards every player is expected to know.

By the end You'll be able to navigate a lead sheet, recognize common forms, and learn a handful of essential standards.

Begin with “Song Forms in Jazz” →

1 Song Forms in Jazz Every jazz performance needs a repeating container — a fixed number of bars with a fixed harmonic path — that everyone in the band can hold in their head at once. That container is… form & repertoire tier 2 →
2 AABA Form AABA is the workhorse structure of the Great American Songbook: eight bars of melody, repeated, then eight bars of something else, then a return home. It packs a complete musical a… form & repertoire tier 2 →
3 The 12-Bar Blues The 12-bar blues is three 4-bar phrases built around a single musical idea: state it, restate it with a slight push, then answer it. That AAB shape comes straight out of African-Am… form & repertoire tier 1 →
4 Blues Harmony Blues harmony breaks the central rule of classical functional harmony: instead of treating the dominant seventh as an unstable chord that must resolve, it treats every chord in the… harmony tier 2 →
5 Rhythm Changes Rhythm Changes is the 32-bar chord progression lifted from George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" (1930), stripped of its melody and its vocal tag, and reused as a harmonic chassis for h… form & repertoire tier 2 →
6 Jazz Standards as Vehicles A jazz standard is not a fixed piece of music the way a Chopin étude is. It's a vehicle: a shared melody and chord progression that a group of musicians — often strangers — can cli… form & repertoire tier 2 →
7 Fake Books and The Real Book A fake book is a collection of lead sheets — melody, chord symbols, and sometimes lyrics — that lets a musician "fake" a tune they've never played by reading a skeleton chart inste… form & repertoire tier 2 →
8 Autumn Leaves "Autumn Leaves" is the tune nearly every jazz student learns first, and for good reason: in one 32-bar melody it teaches both the major and minor ii–V–I, connected by nothing more… form & repertoire tier 3 →
9 All the Things You Are Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote "All the Things You Are" for the 1939 musical Very Warm for May, and it has outlived that short-lived show to become one of the Great Ame… form & repertoire tier 3 →
10 So What "So What" is the tune that put Modal Jazz on the map. Opening Kind of Blue (1959), Miles Davis's composition strips harmony down to two scales and a single question-and-answer gest… form & repertoire tier 3 →
11 Giant Steps "Giant Steps" is the tune that made an entire generation of saxophonists sweat. John Coltrane took the familiar ii-V-I cadence, kept its shape, but pointed it at three key centers… form & repertoire tier 3 →

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