Jazz standard

A widely performed song in jazz musicians’ shared repertoire. Its melody and chord progression provide a common basis for improvisation and reinterpretation.

Lead sheet: A compact musical score showing a song’s melody, lyrics, and chord symbols. Lead sheets often preserve the melody and harmony that musicians use to perform a standard.
Autumn Leaves: A popular song composed by Joseph Kosma, widely performed by jazz musicians. Its recurring chord sequence makes it a common vehicle for jazz improvisation.
Head (music): The principal melody of a jazz performance, usually played at the beginning and end. A performance often states a standard’s melody before improvisations and returns to it afterward.
Tin Pan Alley: A New York music-publishing district and industry that produced popular songs from the late nineteenth century onward. Its songwriters supplied much of the material jazz musicians later adopted as standards.
Jazz repertoire: The body of music regularly performed and recorded by jazz musicians. Standards form a central, evolving portion of this shared musical body.
Chord progression: A sequence of chords that structures a piece of music. A standard’s chord progression gives improvisers a harmonic path through its form.
Body and Soul: A 1930 song by Johnny Green, Edward Heyman, Robert Sour, and Frank Eyton. Coleman Hawkins’s influential 1939 recording helped establish the song as a jazz standard.
Chord-scale system: A method for relating musical scales to the chords over which they are played. Improvisers use chord-scale relationships to shape solos over a standard’s harmony.
Great American Songbook: A body of influential American popular songs, especially those written for Broadway and Hollywood from the 1920s through the 1950s. Many standards come from the songwriters and shows associated with this repertoire.
Fake book: A collection of lead sheets used by musicians to learn and perform songs quickly. Fake books helped circulate standard melodies and chord changes across musicians and venues.

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