In this short article for intermediate jazz students, I’ll tackle the problem of memorising the chord changes for a given tune. Once you start to put this advice into practice, you should find the problem’s a lot smaller than you imagined.
By this stage, you’ll have memorised the changes for a few blues variants in different keys, and maybe the changes for some simpler standards, but you’re beginning to find the process an uphill struggle. But if you’re ever going to improvise over a set of changes, this is work you’ll need to do.
The main principle is to gain an understanding of how the tune’s constructed – you need to enter into the mind of the tune’s composer. Otherwise, the changes will always seem like one damned chord after another, a meaningless string of events.
So how do you go about this? First, look at the phrase lengths. How does the tune break down into sections? With standards (i.e. showtunes, as opposed to tunes by jazz composers), you’ll often find a structure with a repeated first section of 8 bars, a middle section of 8 bars (“middle eight”) and a reprise of the first section – 32 bars in total, with an AABA form. Helpfully, the New Real Book series, commonly used at jam sessions, sets out tunes in lines of 4 bars, but not all books of lead sheets do this. You’ll already know how 12-bar blues break down, and you’ll probably be familiar with the 16-bar variant used in Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man and elsewhere. Now try to use and extend the expertise you’ve already acquired.
On the smaller scale, your main task will be to find II-V and II-V-I progressions. Try studying Charlie Parker’s Blues for Alice, which will provide you with the perfect exercise to expand your knowledge of blues structures so that you’ll be ready to analyse standards and jazz tunes. What Parker does here is to preserve the barest outlines of a 12-bar blues, while filling in the details with a wide variety of II-V progressions. Look, for example, at the first five bars: here Parker moves from his opening FM chord (F major, instead of the usual blues F7) to the expected Bb7 in bar 5, but the way he moves to his destination draws on bebop rather than blues. After his opening bar of FM, he employs a descending sequence of II-V progressions that bring him round in bar 4 to a II-V-I onto Bb. The first five bars look like this:
FM | E- A7 | D- G7 | C- F7 | Bb7 |
Once you’ve worked through all of Blues for Alice, move on to Parker’s Confirmation, and see how he’s taken the main ideas from Blues for Alice and expanded them into a 16-bar structure. In outline, he shortens his modified blues structure from 12 down to 8 bars, repeats this, adds a middle section of 8 bars, and then closes with a reprise of the shortened blues pattern. This gaves us the same 32-bar AABA structure that I mentioned above, the structure that’s most commonly found in standards. Note that the first 8 bars are open ended, leading back to FM, while on each of the repetitions, the 8-bar structure closes on FM. When you’ve worked through Confirmation in this way, you’ll be well equipped to tackle most standards and jazz tunes.
To take things a little further, I’ll give you an example of a jazz tune that turns out to follow the normal 32-bar structure, but which includes a few tricks along the way that might throw you off track: Clifford Brown’s Joy Spring. You’ll get part of the way by picking out the II-V and II-V-I progressions, but on the larger scale, something a little unusual is happening. The tune begins in F major, and a normal 8-bar unit seems to be unfolding, but then the key shifts a semitone up to Gb major and the tune repeats in that key. At the end of the second 8-bar unit, the same shift takes place, and the tune restarts a third time, now in G major. After this, instead of ascending another semitone, Brown takes us back down to the original key of F major. But stop to look more closely at the section that starts in G major: while it opens with the same tune as before, it soon changes course, and follows a new series of II-V-I progressions designed to take us back to F major (but in a very unpredictable manner).
Lastly, a reminder that memorising the structures of tunes through their II-V and II-V-I progressions will immediately give you fuel for improvising, since a lot of your practice will be based on precisely those progressions. As you gradually fix the tune in your head, try plugging in whatever II-V and II-V-I patterns you’ve been working on lately. Do this quite mechanically – don’t worry, there’s no audience, and it’s the best way to make further progress on memorising the changes once you’ve analysed the structure. If you try from the start to produce the kind of improvisation that would pass muster at a gig, then you’ll have much more trouble memorising the changes – it’ll all fall into place in good time, so don’t rush the process. Keep running through previously memorised tunes, although you’ll find you can play them less and less as they become embedded in your memory. Try concentrating on one new tune each week, and work gradually through all the improvising possibilities that you’d like to explore. If you’re already able to improvise bass lines, this is another good method for memorising the changes, since properly constructed bass lines force you to connect up the chords into progressions. You’ll soon have a good set of tunes at the ready. Good luck!
