Breaking Down the Jazz Repertoire – It Could Happen To You

You’ve got a list of tunes that you’re excited to learn. Song titles scribbled on a piece of paper, lead sheets saved on your phone, and videos of your favorite players killing the changes. However, you’ve been down this road before…

After a few days, your cherished goal of learning more tunes slowly morphs into a “musical chore” that you force yourself through in the practice room, checking off songs one by one. The result? A bunch of uninspired tunes that sound like memorized notes and chords.

But shouldn’t the process of learning jazz standards be more than a trivial memorization exercise…

If you’re like me, you’re ready for a fresh start with the jazz repertoire. No more long lists with hundreds of tunes, staring at pages in the realbook, or fumbling through another set of chord symbols at jam sessions and gigs…

Instead of the same old approach to repertoire, we’re going to show you a process for learning tunes where you’ll actually remember the melody and harmony, and be able to create music.

“Get away from the production-line mentality in learning jazz standards. Quickly memorizing notes and chord symbols and moving on. You’ve got to live with a tune for a while, to love it even, before you can truly tell a story with it.”

It’s one thing for your instructors to say “Just learn the tune from the recording!” and another thing for you to actually close the fakebook and do it.

That’s why in today’s lesson we’ll dig into the most effective way to learn the melody, memorize the chord progression, and build a foundation for creating a musical solo with the jazz repertoire.

A aural process for learning standards that isn’t making lists of songs and memorizing chord symbols. And you might be surprised to learn that it’s easier than you think.

To see what I mean, let’s take a look at the jazz standard It Could Happen To You…

Start with the melody

With any tune that you want to learn, the best place to begin is with the melody. Specifically, with focused listening to a recording, rather than reading notes from a page.

Let’s check out the well-known Miles Davis version of the tune from the album Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet:

Instead of running straight to your instrument and trying to pick out random notes, start the learning process by singing the melody along with the recording. This will immediately ingrain the sound of these notes and intervals in your ear.

If you’ve struggled with memorizing tunes in the past or have had trouble remembering melodic lines while performing, singing is an effective path to overcoming these obstacles.

Transition from a visual or theory approach to memorizing the melody [“OK start on a Bb, then C to Db …”] to focusing on the sound of the notes and intervals.

Sure, it’ll take a little more time learning the melody based on what you’re hearing as opposed to what you’re seeing, but remember, you don’t have to learn the entire thing at once.

The secret to this lies in breaking down the melody into individual phrases and ingraining them one by one. Let’s take the first four bars of It Could Happen To You:

As you close your eyes and listen, focus on the intervals and contour of the phrase. Don’t worry about the chords yet – you’ll have plenty of time for that later!

You’ll know you have the line in your ear when you can sing it without the aid of the recording. Don’t move on until you get each phrase to this point.

Next, isolate the intervals that make the phrase unique. For example, in the opening of the melody you have scalar motion up a minor 3rd and then an ascending perfect 5th:

Ingraining the structure of the line in this manner, instead of note names or fingerings, will allow you to play it from any starting note.

The one skill that will make this process of learning tunes by ear much easier is the ability to aurally identify intervals and chord tones. Immediately recognizing the sound of a Major 3rd, a perfect 4th, a 6th, a minor 7th, etc.

This is where some ear training practice comes in handy. Remember, the better your ears are, the quicker this process will go.

“Don’t rely on just one recording to learn a tune – listen to as many versions as you can! Not only will you find different interpretations of the melody, you’ll find different keys, different chords, and different approaches to soloing.”

As you probably noticed, Miles doesn’t exactly stick to the written melody note for note, so it’s a good idea to listen to multiple recordings to find the “definitive” version you’re likely to encounter on the bandstand.

A quick search online will give you dozens of results. Let’s check out how Kenny Dorham plays the tune:

Listen to how he interprets the melody in the last 8 bars at [0:51 sec]. Again, focus on the shape and intervallic content of the phrase and sing it:

In the first part of this phrase, the notable part of the melody is the enclosure of the Eb and and ascending perfect 5th:

And in the last phrase it’s the ascending minor 7th:

Continue this process with each phrase until you have the entire melody ingrained. Singing, playing, and analyzing the structure of each line along the way. This might seem tedious, but the process will go faster than you think!

Not only will you be able to ingrain the melody without relying on a hazy recollection of a lead sheet, you’ll be able to perform it in other keys without having to transpose notes names, fingerings, or even scales.