This week’s lesson is a highly-requested one.
Quite often, people ask me “what jazz tunes should I learn?” And there are thousands to choose from, from musical classics of Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer, to big band suites from Duke Ellington, to Charlie Parker reworks of famous songs, to the originals of everybody from Dizzy to Monk. (Not to mention the “modern classics” I did a whole video about.)
The obvious answer is “whichever tunes inspire you to play, and fire you up to learn fastest”. Which is still an answer I’d give, but I’d hedge a little with this: “also, probably learn the tunes people are most likely to call at jam sessions.”
It’s not about prestige, or bragging points, though if you can make it through these tunes you’ll certainly get a little of that. On a basic level, if you want to play jazz with other humans, in a jazz scene, much less at music school, it helps to know the canon everybody’s going to be drawing from in addition to everything else you think is cool/that inspires you.
Once I had the nine tunes I’ll discuss in this video under my belt, it became fun to start suggesting other tunes I’d heard on various records: Boo Boo’s Birthday, Time After Time, Blue in Green, Cheek to Cheek, etc.
So it’s in that spirit that I’m going to recommend these nine tunes: what I’d classify as the 3 most commonly-called in my experience in New York’s public and private jam sessions, at each of the 3 levels - beginner, intermediate, and advanced.
A quick word about what makes a jazz tune “hard”: none of these is exactly “movie hard”, the way the Caravan arrangement in Whiplash appears to be (or something like Gary Smulyan’s Lickety Split is in real life) - i.e. with tons of unpredictable figures and changing meters. The “hardness” of a jazz standard comes from the fact that you have to play the form reliably, and keep the exact number of sections/bars/harmonies in your head while the soloist is playing over them, often taking liberties with phrasing, etc.
In a word - can you keep the form in Stablemates when Aaron Goldberg intentionally plays a harmonic change 2 bars early, just for fun?
(That’s why I also chafe at the trope that drummers don’t know harmony. Ask me to whistle an unaccompanied solo over any of these sometime. Or at the very least hum a bass line. And I’m not unique. Any jazz drummer worth his/her salt knows these forms deeply.)
So the “beginner” catalogue is tunes that are pretty easy for a beginner to play over, with a soloist, without losing the beat or the form.
And as they get more “advanced”, they require a more and more experienced drummer not to get lost.
I had a ton of fun making this one, and I hope you enjoy.
