Standards and form
Learn how standards are built, how to learn them by ear and keep them in your memory, which progressions they share, and how to play them with other people on a bandstand or at a session.
- Count and feel the 12-bar, 16-bar, 32-bar AABA and ABAC forms without a chart, and navigate repeats, codas and tags in real time
- Learn a tune from a recording with a repeatable seven-step method, analyse its key centres and bass motion, and memorise it by Roman numerals
- Recognise the progression families that make up most of the repertoire (cycle of fifths, ii–V chains, the relative major/minor loop, major-third key shifts, backdoor cadences, turnarounds) and play each in every key
- Comp supportively behind a soloist, a pianist or a singer, trade fours, play stock intros and endings, and count a band in
- Behave like a professional at a jam session: call tunes and keys, transpose for singers, play without a chart, recover from mistakes and build a set
Everything you have learned so far has been in service of one activity: playing tunes with other people. This module is about the tunes themselves and the social machinery around them. The first lesson takes the forms apart (blues, 16-bar, AABA, ABAC) and teaches you to keep your place in them while improvising. The second gives you a method for learning tunes from recordings and keeping them in your memory for years. The third shows that the hundreds of standards on the repertoire list are built from perhaps eight progression families, and tables each family in all twelve keys. The last two lessons move to the bandstand: comping behind other people, trading fours, intros, endings and count-offs, and then the etiquette and survival skills of the jam session.
Before starting, you should be comfortable reading a chart (Reading chord charts and lead sheets), comping through a jazz blues with voice-led shapes (Comping the blues) and voice leading drop-2 shapes through turnarounds (Voice leading through ii–V–I, turnarounds and the cycle). Every example here is written as chord symbols over comping rhythms so that you practise the form, not a melody; the melodies of the standards themselves you will learn from the records, which is where they belong.