Branching off of my thoughts in the “First Private Lesson…” thread, I’m looking for some suggestions of good jazz or similar “Great American Songbook” type standards that I can use as vehicles to understand jazz and bass skills.
The goal is for these to be practical test beds to come back to over and over to analyze and experiment with different music theory and playing technique concepts. Things like - learning walking bass, playing chord tones, improvisation practice, playing with rhythm and syncopation, etc.
Not a complex piece to memorize, but a jazz form progression with room to mess around when I’m in my evening low-pressure mode. Songs that lots of artists have done renditions of.
I want to have a short list that I can take to my instructor to get input, feedback, and direction as I keep working on them.
Long term goal is to have the foundational grounding to move into playing funk, soul, R&B, and Fusion.
This is a whole lot. Essentially, each of these is a topic of study unto itself.
For example, I have been doing a deep dive on walking bass for many months. It is fascinating to me, but it’s also not easily done without prior knowledge of music theory, chord tones, scales, technique work, and more.
Meaningful improvisation is only possible after achieving a working vocabulary derived from all these topics.
It’s certainly not impossible to get there, but it does require desire, intent, study and practice.
I want to work on each topic like that one after another, but using a couple known song forms to keep coming back to as vehicles to explore each of these different topics. I can focus on practicing the technique or exploring the concept, rather than on learning a song.
So like - I learn three songs. The first month I focus on chord tones. The next month I focus on a technique. After that I focus on walking lines. Etc.
I figure jazz standards are a good vehicle for this. I can experiment making them as busy or as spare as I want, which I can’t do with a pop line.
It wasn’t always called “real.” That’s a play on “fake book” as it turns out. Not that the songs were fake, mind you, but that they weren’t fully fleshed out and notated. Rather, there was enough information—chord markings, the song’s head and main groove, et. al.—to get you going enough so that you could fake your way through the rest of the tune…hence the name. For the solos you’re on your own.
I have a copy of the edition in the link. 452 pages of sheet music covering jazz standards from the last half century, with most being from the 60s and 70s. If you’re looking for basic song structures to improvise and experiment over, this might be the ticket. It’s not the cheapest option out there, but it’s something you can work from for a long time. And it requires a certain comfort with music notation, as there is no tablature.
I’m just now dipping my toe into Jazz. Autumn Leaves is a highly recommended Jazz tune to begin with because it has a typical ii-V-I chord progression, in both the major and its relative minor key.
I have completed talkingbass chord tones and am 2/3rds through talkingbass sight reading, and similarly 2/3rds through Theory for Bass and am only just now feeling ready to play around with Jazz. That being said, it’s very engaging music to study and learn to play so have fun!
I’ve found a lot of sheet music for common Jazz Standards online, also maybe do a search for beginning Jazz standards, or perhaps this forum can suggest stuff. I’m not an authority by any means, I chose Autumn Leaves because both Mark at talkingbass and Scott at SBL both cover in depth so it’s what I’m starting with.
