The first thing that all jazz improvisers must master is song form, or just “the form” of the tune. “Keeping the form” is perhaps the most foundational skill for the jazz improviser. The moment the form is lost, one’s solo loses all meaning.
For advanced improvisers, the form is so fundamental that they hardly notice its existence, anymore than someone walking somewhere thinks about the ground they’re walking on — it’s just there. It hardly merits discussion, or even notice.
For the beginning improviser though, “keeping the form” represents a barrier to entry. For some, this is a skill easily acquired. But others struggle mightily to keep an awareness of their place in the form while they improvise. It’s a strange thing, sort of — to have to “fly like a bird” and play creatively while also keeping one’s place in the form. Managing both tasks at once is a seeming contradiction, and a skill all jazz improvisers must learn.
Fortunately for us, classic straight-ahead jazz does not have an infinite variety of song forms in common use. Quite the opposite — there are only five recurring forms that occur with any frequency. An informal survey of the standard repertoire shows that fully 80% of the standard repertoire uses only the five forms shown above — and the remaining 20% is generally some variation or slight modification of one of these five forms.
This is great news for those of us who are trying to learn and internalize as many of these forms as possible. This job would be much harder if there was no pattern, rhyme or reason to these forms.
The picture above shows these forms, which I have designated as:
32 bar AABA
32 bar AB (some people like to call this form ABAC — not my preference, but it’s OK if it’s what you prefer)
12 bar (usually a blues form)
16 bar
24 bar (the least common of all of these)
When we encounter a new tune, then, the first thing to do is to try to discern the form of the tune. Is it one of these five? (If it’s a standard written before 1965 or so, the answer is almost certainly “yes”.) If not, is it a variation of one of these five?
One thing that can complicate our experience as jazz musicians is that the primary source most of us use to learn these tunes is the Real Book. Published by Hal Leonard in 2006, this is a generally high-quality volume of carefully selected songs, with a great visual style. However, in the forward to this book, the publisher makes this dubious claim:
“Form within each tune, including both phrases and larger sections, is clearly delineated and placed in obvious visual arrangement.” (emphasis mine)
Um — well, not so much. For example, one can find within this book 10 different layouts of the same 32-bar AABA form. For the student, new to jazz and new to these tunes, this can be crazy-making. If we’re going to use the Real Book to learn these tunes — and most of us are, because that’s the world we live in — then the onus is on us (onus/on us? wow, language is interesting) to see through whatever poor layout the chart may have, and to recognize that we’re likely looking at one of these five forms.
All students of straight-ahead jazz must work to internalize these forms. Doing so will make it easier for us to memorize these tunes, and also to be more adventurous as improvisers as our ability to keep the form gets stronger.
Ethan Iverson, former pianist for The Bad Plus, makes this statement in his excellent blog “Do The Math”:
“In my experience, once you learn 10 or 20 of (the standards), the rest go easy. In the end, they are very similar, so all your brain needs to learn are the differences. After learning 50, almost any other standard can be learned in real time. You will never have to say, ‘I don’t know it,’ again.”
A big part of what he is saying here involves these forms. Remember, he’s talking about learning these tunes to the point where you can play them without a chart. This is an attainable goal for anyone, but not without some work!
Look again at that picture at the beginning of this article — if you master those forms, you have established a real foothold as a jazz musician. And you will have learned a truism of all artistic expression — “art lives from constraints and dies from freedom” (or so said Leonardo da Vinci). Finding the freedom in these forms is a lot of what playing jazz is about.