repertoire

Here are our Spotify playlists for our 2024-25 season:

TUNES

Here's our long list of learners. These are tunes that most jazz players will have as part of their essential repertoire - we'll be using these in the performance sessions of our ensemble days.

Tune keys are interesting - most tunes have one or two standard keys that people have tended to use through their jazz history. But players also use different keys, and for various reasons. Sometimes a tune will sit better on the instrument in another key, sometimes players just prefer the sound of a different key for a particular tune, and sometimes players like to challenge themselves (and others) in live performance (or recording) by picking an unfamiliar key for a tune. It is a fundamental jazz skill (for the very advanced player) to be able to play anything they hear in any key. The emerging virtuosi of the 1940 bebop jam sessions used the strategy of shifting a tune through all the keys to keep the chancers off the stage!

The standard keys for tunes can sometimes be those of the originals, or sometimes the keys of the most widely-known versions - and these are usually, although not always, reflected in the various 'Real Books' that we have increasingly tended to use as reference charts. There is a movement though, I can feel it in the air, to return to the glorious past, when players learned by ear, not from the page...

Singers, have special constraints, in that they have to find a key for each tune that provides the best fit between the range of the melody and the range of their voice. Players who accompany singers quickly acquire advanced transposition skills, or else die a lonely death. Then again, the very best singers seem to make any tune work in any key, if they have to...

Here's a playlist with some great versions of the tunes: