Ten tunes: solid standards

Continuing our little ten tunes series of often-played tunes to learn— today's theme is solid standards; standards that are called a lot, that everyone still likes to play. Some things you play a thousand times and you want them permanently flushed (a list for another day?), but these are extremely durable— inherently pleasing and rewarding to play, for players of all levels.

There are multiple great recorded versions of all of these:


All the Things You Are

But Not For Me

Have You Met Miss Jones

I Could Write A Book

I Hear a Rhapsody

If I Should Lose You

If I Were a Bell

My Romance

The Song Is You

There Will Never Be Another You


There Will Never Be Another You may draw out a few whiners— it has to be one of the half dozen most played tunes ever— but it's still great. I get a little tired of playing All The Things You Are, but nobody else seems to.

Tune list for sessions

This is the tune list for a weekly session I play. We go through a lot of material, most of it kind of unusual, and many things that are rather challenging. I shlep this big pile of paper to every rehearsal.

There's really nothing here you would be expected to walk onto a gig and definitely already know. I have starred the things most likely to come up, either in conversation or on an actual gig. Lead sheets for most of these can be found online through a variety of sources if you want to play them. 

*A Felicidade - Antonio Carlos Jobim

Ambrosia - Kenny Barron

Ana Maria - Wayne Shorter 

Angeles Crest - Larry Koonse 

Aquarius - Joao Donato

Aunt Alice - Rob Thomas 

Backyard Groove - Kenny Garrett

Bananeira - Gilberto Gil/Joao Donato

Bicycle Ride - Toninho Horta 

Big Red - Tommy Turrentine

Black - Cedar Walton

Black Five - Gregory Fine

*Black Narcissus - Joe Henderson

Black Nile - Wayne Shorter 

Christina - Buster Williams

Compulsion - Harold Land

Con Brio - Jerry Bergonzi 

Dance Cadaverous - Wayne Shorter

*Dear Old Stockholm

Debonaire - George Colligan

Del Sasser - Sam Jones 

Desert Moonlight - Lee Morgan

Dhyana - Tina Brooks

Different Places Together - Jerry Bergonzi 

Dual Force - Buster Williams

East of the Village - Hank Mobley

Edda - Wayne Shorter 

Everybody's Song But My Own - Kenny Wheeler

Continued after the break:

Another list of standards

On George Colligan's Jazz Truth blog there is a group email sent out by a student who sounds nearly as dickish as I was in college, with the heading:

The George Colligan Standards List...LEARN THEM IN ALL 12 KEYS!

1. Stella By Starlight
2. All The Things You Are
3. Autumn Leaves
4. What Is This Thing Called Love
5. There Will Never Be Another You
6. Tune Up
7. Cherokee
8. Beautiful Love
9. Alone Together
10. Body and Soul
11. Confirmation
12. Someday My Prince Will Come
13. Footprints
14. Bye Bye Blackbird
15. On Green Dolphin Street
16. There Is No Greater Love
17. I Love You
18. How High The Moon
19. Just Friends
20. If I Were A Bell
21. Night and Day
22. Au Privave
23. Moose The Mooche


It's a fair college-level list. Traditionally in Portland we would substitute Scrapple From The Apple for Moose, and possibly Blues For Alice or Cheryl for Au Privave. I would get Softly As In A Morning Sunrise in there just because. And I guess they're assuming that everyone learned Blue Bossa, Recordame, Song For My Father, Stolen Moments, All Of Me, Billie's Bounce, Solar, Caravan, Take The A Train, and things of that ilk— only slightly more chestnut-y than the things they've included— in high school, because they still get played a lot, too. If you're plotting a move to Portland, you should also learn Milestones (old), Stablemates, The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, Invitation, I'll Remember April... well, call me...

More after the break...

2013 tour repertoire

Here's a list of the tunes we'll be working with on my group's Belgium trip next week. We won't end up playing all of this stuff, but it's in the books. A little over half of those are my own arrangements— I transcribed them off the record and made a playable lead sheet out of them, anyway.

Alice In Wonderland — Sammy Fain
Beatrice — Sam Rivers
The Blessing —  Ornette Coleman
*Blood — Paul Bley
Check Up — Ornette Coleman
Comme Il Faut  —  Ornette Coleman
Country Town Blues — Ornette Coleman
*The Empty Boat —  Caetano Veloso
Eighty-One — Ron Carter 
Enfant —  Ornette Coleman 
Feet Music — Ornette Coleman 
Guinea — Don Cherry
*Happy House — Ornette Coleman
Ida Lupino — Carla Bley
Las Vegas Tango — Gil Evans 
*Let's Play — Ornette Coleman
*Law Years — Ornette Coleman
Lonely Woman — Ornette Coleman
Mr. Joy — Annette Peacock
Mob Job —  Ornette Coleman 
Mopti — Don Cherry 
Mothers of the Veil — Ornette Coleman 

Never — Steve Swallow
Olhos de Gato —  Carla Bley
Owl of Cranston — Paul Motian
*Somnambulist — Rich Cole 
Strange As It Seems — Ornette Coleman
Syndrome — Carla Bley
Valse de Melody —  Serge Gainsbourg

Bold — likely players
 * —  new additions for 2013. We'll see if they work...

Putting some things in

This is me at my most masochistic.

I'm back in updating my events band's book again- it's a long, tedious process- and thought I would continue to share the gory "thought" process with you. Previously I made lists of tunes I was pulling, for various reasons, and things I added to keep the band from mutinying right on stage, and things I wanted never to darken my tunelist again. After that great purging I'm now ready to do something constructive and add fresh material to the book. Fresh may not be the right word for 80 year old tunes we just haven't played in a while, but I think it's going feel great not having to lash another mile out of some of these old dray-horses.

So, here we go:

Allright, Okay, You Win - Crowd-pleasing blues tune a level or two of hell above Blues In The Night. Shares a page with the truly abhorrent Always, which people also love, and we'll probably have to play again. Maybe if we play this we won't have to play Night Train.

Blue And Sentimental - Easy 30's tune. Pleasant.

The Breeze And I -  A little "exotic" number, an alternative rhumba so I don't get beaten up for calling Frenesi again...

Canadian Sunset - Yah! Why??? It's pure Nelson Eddie schlock, the long, static form bores the crap out of saxophonists- ok, everyone- and we've played it to death. But, like a favorite old threadbare, reeking, rapidly-perishing sweater I just can't give it up...

Close Your Eyes - "Cool" jazz a la Doris Day. I love those '50's white lady singers... words you never think you're going to say.



More after the break:

Tune of the moment: Eiderdown

Eiderdown is a great tune  by Steve Swallow that deserves to be played a lot more, and has been coming up a bunch  lately in sessions and in my listening. The lead sheet is available free, along with a lot of other great stuff, from Swallow's publishing site, shared with with Carla Bley, wattxtrawatt.com. So there's no excuse for not having it in your book!

John Stowell likes to play this one a lot, but he hasn't recorded it yet, that I know of. The version I've been listening to is from Jack Dejohnette's 1975 record Cosmic Chicken. It's been out of print for years, and was never reissued on CD, so good luck finding it. It is available through some of the LP ripping blogs, if you google around for it.



One version that is legally available is from Pete LaRoca's Basra:



Get Basra | get Eiderdown

The abyss

In this third installment of my events/swing band repertoire series (hopefully it's of some interest to the bandleaders/working drummers out there), we'll be confronting some of the things I've kept around strictly out of commercial necessity (the band would debate that, but never mind). Keep in mind this list represents but a tiny fraction of the godawful things I've been made to play in my life. And the most palatable fraction at that- many of these are not bad tunes at all- we've just played them so many times over the years we can't stand the sight of them. Yet in my book they remain...

As Time Goes By - Few things would give me greater pleasure than to purge this thing, but unfortunately it has become a standard father/daughter dance request at every single last bloody wedding in the world, and generally gets people dancing.

Begin the Beguine - The long, annoying form is a little bit of a crutch- the guys can glaze over and just play this little game of Chutes & Ladders and forget what is happening to them. We do swing this all the way through, in 4; we don't play it as a Latin.

Blue Moon - All-purpose "bluesy" 50's pop ballad. This song is to lounge pianists what Summertime is to girl singers in musical theater.

Cheek to Cheek - The dancers love it. Like it. Sort of. What am I supposed to do?


More of this sort of thing after the break:

Keeping the band happy.

More notes from revamping my book (my events band's performing repertoire, that is). Here I thought I would share some of the tunes I use to keep the band from going nuts over the more crass Moon River/Fascination/Makin' Whoopee-level of stuff we also perform.
 
A Sleepin' Bee, Look for the Silver Lining, There's a Small Hotel, This Can't Be Love, The Way You Look Tonight, Lullaby of the Leaves are good for establishing a mood before people are dancing, without wearing the band down with stuff like All of Me.

You Are Too Beautiful, Dedicated to You, I Loves You Porgy, Nancy with the Laughing Face, Stairway to the Stars are set-piece ballads that everyone loves- the band, listeners, slow dancers.

Beautiful Love, I Hear a Rhapsody, If I Should Lose You, You and the Night and the Music are regular blowing tunes for when you can get away with them. We try to get a couple of these in every night.  

More tunes after the break:

Getting started soloing over a form

This is more a roughly-progressive series of guidelines than a step-by-step how-to; this is a much larger subject than can be fully addressed in one little blog post. Players spend years or decades developing a mature soloing style, hopefully continuing to grow over an entire career. I'll certainly be addressing each topic below in stand-alone posts in the near future.

Soloing does require you to make the leap into creative playing on your own- study materials and a pure intellectual approach will not get you there. We're assuming here that you're reasonably comfortable playing general solo stuff (even if very simple) in time and without losing your place in the measure. If you're not, see the tip at the end of the piece, and/or start getting comfortable improvising with very simple materials: quarter notes, quarter rests, 8th notes, and 8th rests.

Get comfortable with generic four and eight measure phrases. At first you should be able to just play for that many measures without getting lost, maybe with a crash at the beginning; soon you should be able to put a more musical ending on each section, and set up the next section. The goal is to make a coherent melodic phrase, with a conversational arc, just as if you were telling someone something interesting vocally for an equal length of time. If you experience problems keeping track, start with two-measure phrases. It will also help (and is good practice musically) to restrict yourself to one or maybe two ideas per phrase.

Much more after the break:

Popular jazz tunes

Via NPR's A Blog Supreme here is Jazz24.org's list of top 100 jazz tunes, as suggested by their listeners. It's not a bad place to start for beginners looking to get their repertoire together. There might be 10-15 of these I have never been called upon to play. Titles in bold are priority tunes for first year jazz students. Here's the list:

1. Take Five - Dave Brubeck
2. So What - Miles Davis
3. Take The A Train - Duke Ellington
4. Round Midnight - Thelonious Monk
5. My Favorite Things - John Coltrane
6. A Love Supreme (Acknowledgment) - John Coltrane
7. All Blues - Miles Davis
8. Birdland - Weather Report
9. The Girl From Ipanema - Stan Getz & Astrud Gilberto
10. Sing, Sing, Sing - Benny Goodman

The rest are after the break: