How to Learn a Jazz Standard

By: Athena Zapantis

If you’re here reading this, you must be a jazz musician. Great job! You’re already doing something right.

Jazz standards, also known as simply “standards”, are tunes that you might have to play off the cuff at a jam session, or even a live performance. Any good jazz musician is expected to have several dozens of standards in their head, ready to go. Standards are not just memorized and stored away in the “repertoire” section of one’s brain. Both the melody and chord changes should be second nature to improvise on effortlessly. As such, they should be constantly practiced. Many jazz legends even learn standards in more than one key—often all twelve of them!

For learning most things jazz, you will need an instrument (your voice counts too!), a metronome, and a backing track, which can be found on YouTube, iReal Pro, and even in Jamey Aebersold’s books. Music is really hard to make without sound, so you’re definitely going to need an instrument. A metronome is essential, as remaining in time is the most important thing. A backing track is one of the most valuable assets as a jazz musician. You are essentially giving yourself a free, live rhythm section. The backing track will help you stay in time and understand the harmony and style of a given tune.

The first step to learning a standard is learning the melody. Easy, right? Learning the melody to a jazz standard is not much different than learning the melody to classical pieces. Get the melody in your muscle memory regardless of what instrument you play. This enables you to play the melody at a moment’s notice. A strategy for learning melodies that is often overlooked is singing or scatting the melody of a song. You don’t have to be the next Dinah Washington or even a good singer—what’s more important is internalizing the pitches and hitting the notes. This not only helps you understand what the melody sounds like, but also helps you understand the harmony better. Hearing the pitches of a tune in your mind, rather than just going through the motions of playing the melody of a tune, will give you practically effortless insight on what harmonizes well with certain pitches. It will also help you voice lead over the chords and will tell you why the chords are moving in the direction they are. All of this information is indispensable as a jazz improviser.

The next step to learning a jazz standard is understanding the harmony and rhythm of a tune. This is the hard part—you have to gather information in order to improvise over the changes in a way that both makes sense within the song and makes it sound awesome. Understanding chords and chord changes is an incredibly long and difficult process that takes years to achieve competence in. Fortunately, this skill can be gained through repetitive practice and an incessantly attentive ear. When learning the chord changes to a specific standard, it’s important to create both scalar and chordal études for yourself to hear and understand the harmony as well as to pull from during improvisation. It’s also important to find commonly used patterns in jazz to find familiarity in unfamiliar tunes, such as locating where all of the 2-5-1s are. One such example is apparent in the first four bars of the below tune All the Things You Are by Jerome Kern.

The first four bars of All the Things You Are by Jerome Kern. A ii-7-V7-IΔ7 (a.k.a. “2-5-1”) can be seen in bars 2, 3, and 4, where a minor seventh on the ii chord moves to a Dominant seventh on the V chord, and resolves to a Major seventh on the I chord.

After practicing chordal and scalar études for a specific standard, it becomes vastly easier to learn the harmony of a tune, as you gain familiarity with the way that both the vertical (chord) and horizontal (scale) harmonies sound. This will give you something other than common licks (short melodic ideas) to draw from when you improvise.

The final step for learning a standard is to practice improvising over the standard. How do you do this? Listen to other musicians. Jazz musicians need to do this, especially when learning unfamiliar standards, so they can hear how other people improvise over the unfamiliar changes and melody. If you really want to learn a standard, you will have to spend hours and hours listening to different renditions of the same tune on many instruments (not just your own!). By doing this, you can “steal” licks from other people’s improvisation. Don’t worry, it’s not illegal—it’s an important part of building your arsenal of licks and quotes to pull out when improvising, all of which you choose, which makes it your unique voice. Listening also further drills into your head the melody, harmony, chords, and style of a piece. Without even trying, you will likely find yourself emulating the recordings you listened to.

It’s important to not feel insecure or afraid of improvising. At first, it’s an incredibly frightening task to just pull something out of your brain and translate it into music. However, there’s no way to become a good improviser without practicing improvisation constantly. To put it simply, just do it. It is, of course, important to do it smartly, using the exercises you have created as well as licks from other musicians to craft and tell a story. It often feels like everything improvised has to be something original, which isn’t entirely true (and is, in fact, very difficult). Don’t be afraid to steal and take bits and pieces of scales and chords, invert them, move them around, and make a “standard” tune unique to you.