Easy Jazz Standards for Beginners: 10 Tunes to Learn First

These are 10 easy jazz standards for beginners, listed in the order we suggest you learn them. Two blues tunes come first, “Bags’ Groove” and “Watermelon Man,” then Herbie Hancock’s three-chord “Cantaloupe Island,” then songs that teach the minor key and the ii-V-I progression, such as “Summertime,” “Autumn Leaves” and “All of Me,” and finally two AABA tunes, “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Misty.” For each tune you get the composer, the form, the usual key, what makes it easy (and where its one hard spot is) and a recording to learn it from.

What Makes a Jazz Standard Easy

A jazz standard is a tune that jazz musicians know well enough to play together without rehearsal, usually from a lead sheet that gives only the melody and the chord symbols. Our list of the 25 best jazz standards covers the core repertoire. The tunes below are the ones a beginner can play soonest, chosen on four points.

A short, repeating form. A 12-bar blues repeats the same three four-bar lines every chorus. Many songs use the 32-bar AABA form: an eight-bar main strain played twice, an eight-bar contrasting bridge, and the main strain again. ABAC songs such as “All of Me” bring the main strain back once, halfway through. Once you know the form, you always know where you are.

Slow-moving chords. A chord that lasts a bar or two gives you time to hear it and find its notes. The tunes that stop beginners are the ones whose chords change on every beat or keep switching key: “Giant Steps” moves between three key centers in 16 bars.

Familiar patterns. Almost every tune here is built from the blues or from the ii-V-I, the chord sequence that is typical of jazz and is explained in our guide to common jazz chord progressions.

A melody you can sing. Riffs that repeat and melodies in a narrow range are quick to memorize. Where a tune breaks one of these rules, its entry says so.

The 10 Easiest Jazz Standards to Learn First

The order runs from the simplest forms to the tunes that ask more of your ear.

1. “Bags’ Groove” (Milt Jackson, 1952)

Vibraphonist Milt Jackson named this 12-bar blues after his own nickname, Bags, and first recorded it with his quintet for Blue Note on April 7, 1952. It is in F, and the melody is a short, repetitive riff, so you can learn the head in one sitting and spend your time on the blues form itself: three four-bar lines over the I, IV and V chords. The same form carries many other jazz tunes, from Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser” to Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints.” Learn it from the Miles Davis version recorded on December 24, 1954, with Jackson and Thelonious Monk, released on Bags’ Groove (Prestige, 1957). At Davis’s request Monk stopped playing behind the trumpet solo, then played one of his best-known solos.

2. “Watermelon Man” (Herbie Hancock, 1962)

Hancock wrote it for his debut album, Takin’ Off (Blue Note, 1962), as the first piece he had composed with a commercial goal in mind, and recorded it with Freddie Hubbard and Dexter Gordon. It is a 16-bar blues, most often played in F like “Bags’ Groove,” and it sits on a straight-eighth groove instead of a swing feel. The melody is a riff that repeats, which leaves your attention free for rhythm. Mongo Santamaría’s cha-cha version reached No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1963. Start with the 1962 original.

3. “Cantaloupe Island” (Herbie Hancock, 1964)

The whole tune uses three chords: F minor, D-flat 7 and D minor. With so few changes you can stay with one scale for a long stretch and work on rhythm, tone and phrasing, which is exactly what modal jazz asks of a player. Hancock recorded it on June 17, 1964, for Empyrean Isles (Blue Note) with Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, and his repeating piano figure drives the band. Us3 sampled “Cantaloupe Island” for “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” a No. 9 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 from their 1993 album Hand on the Torch. The 1964 original is the version to learn.

4. “Summertime” (George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward, 1935)

Gershwin wrote it in 1934 as Clara’s lullaby for the opera Porgy and Bess, which opened in 1935. It is 16 bars long, usually played in A minor, and the melody stays almost entirely on the pentatonic scale over slow, blues-like harmony. As JazzStandards.com’s musicologist K. J. McElrath notes, a beginner can improvise with the pentatonic scale over nearly the whole tune; the catch is the V7 chord in bars 7 and 8, where the melody note falls outside that scale. Learn it from Miles Davis and Gil Evans’s Porgy and Bess (Columbia), recorded in 1958. Singers should hear Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s version on their 1959 Verve album, but note that it is in B minor.

5. “Autumn Leaves” (Joseph Kosma, 1945)

Kosma wrote “Les Feuilles mortes” with the poet Jacques Prévert in 1945; Johnny Mercer added the English lyric in 1950. The form is AABC, and the chords are almost all ii-V-I and ii-V moves. In G minor, the usual key, each A section runs C minor 7, F7, B-flat major 7, E-flat major 7, which is a ii-V-I in the relative major, then A half-diminished, D7, G minor, the same cadence in the minor key. JazzStandards.com counts it among the first tunes novice jazz players learn and flags one tricky spot: the chain of chords descending by half steps six bars before the end. The reference recording is Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else (Blue Note, 1958) with Miles Davis, who said he took the idea for the arrangement from pianist Ahmad Jamal.

6. “All of Me” (Gerald Marks and Seymour Simons, 1931)

An ABAC song written in B-flat, though most jazz musicians play it in C. It is the tune for learning secondary dominants. In C the first section runs C, E7, A7, D minor: the roots move down by fifths, and E7 and A7 work as dominants of the chords that follow them. About half the chords in the tune fall outside the C major scale, yet the key never changes. The one real surprise is the F minor chord, borrowed from C minor, in the fifth bar of the last section. Louis Armstrong’s 1932 recording reached No. 1. Critic Ted Gioia calls Billie Holiday’s 1941 version the definitive one, and it is the one to sing or play along with.

7. “Blue Bossa” (Kenny Dorham, 1963)

Dorham’s tune first appeared on Joe Henderson’s debut album, Page One (Blue Note), recorded on June 3, 1963, with Dorham on trumpet. It is 16 bars in C minor with one four-bar detour, in bars 9 to 12, through a ii-V-I in D-flat major. That puts a minor ii-V-i and a major ii-V-I in one short chorus, so it is the natural next step after “Autumn Leaves,” and it gets you used to a bossa nova groove. Dorham may have picked up the idea for it at a jazz festival in Rio de Janeiro in 1961. Learn it from Page One.

8. “Just Friends” (John Klenner and Sam M. Lewis, 1931)

Red McKenzie introduced it in 1931 and Russ Columbo had the hit in 1932, but it was Charlie Parker who brought it into jazz, recording it on November 30, 1949, for his first Charlie Parker with Strings album (Mercury). The original key is G major and the form is A-B1-A-B2. What makes it easy is the pace: most of the tune has one chord every two bars, which is why a song written as a ballad is now usually played up-tempo. What makes it interesting is the start: instead of the home chord it opens on the IV chord, C, turns to C minor, and only then lands on G. Learn the Parker version, then try it faster.

9. “Take the ‘A’ Train” (Billy Strayhorn, 1939)

Strayhorn composed it in 1939, after Duke Ellington offered him a job and wrote him subway directions to his home, and it became the Ellington orchestra’s signature tune. The first commercial recording, made for Victor on February 15, 1941, is in the Grammy Hall of Fame. It is an AABA tune in C, and the harmony moves slowly, with chords held for up to two bars. The one unusual chord is the D7 with a flatted fifth in bars 3 and 4, with the melody sitting on that A-flat. The melody is the hard part: it jumps in wide leaps and ends each A section with a quick chromatic run, so practice those bars slowly. There is more on the band in our list of the best Duke Ellington songs.

10. “Misty” (Erroll Garner, 1954)

Garner wrote “Misty” as an instrumental in the traditional 32-bar form and recorded it with his trio on July 27, 1954, for Contrasts (EmArcy); Johnny Burke added the lyrics later. It is an AABA ballad, usually played in E-flat, and the slow tempo gives you time to think about every chord. It comes last because the melody is demanding: it covers nearly two octaves, often lands on the major seventh, ninth or eleventh of the chord, and the bridge moves toward A-flat before taking a detour that resolves to C minor. Hear Garner’s original first, then the vocal versions by Sarah Vaughan (1958) and Johnny Mathis (1959), whose recording reached No. 12 on the pop chart.

How to Learn a Jazz Standard

1. Listen until you can sing the melody. Use the recording named in the entry and sing along before you touch your instrument. If you cannot sing the head from memory, you do not know it yet.
2. Learn the chords as a sequence, not a chart. Say the chord names in time, play the roots, then the thirds and sevenths. In “Autumn Leaves” that means hearing two cadences instead of memorizing a list of separate chords.
3. Put melody and chords together slowly. A play-along app such as iReal Pro plays a backing band, loops a tricky section, and changes the key and tempo; its user forums share chord charts for thousands of songs.
4. Improvise in small pieces. Start with chord tones over four bars at a time, then vary the melody itself. Our guide to learning to improvise has exercises for this stage.
5. Move it to a second key. A jam session will not always use the key you learned, and transposing shows whether you know the tune or only the fingering.

For written music, the usual reference is the Real Book. It began in the mid-1970s as an illegal collection of lead sheets compiled by two Berklee College of Music students; since 2004 Hal Leonard has published legal editions, in versions for C, B-flat and E-flat instruments and in bass clef. Horn players need the edition for their instrument: in “Autumn Leaves,” concert G minor becomes A minor for a B-flat trumpet or tenor saxophone and E minor for an E-flat alto saxophone.

Which Tunes Suit Your Instrument

Pianists can start with “Cantaloupe Island,” whose piano figure is the accompaniment, and “All of Me” for left-hand voicings; our guide to jazz piano chords covers the shapes. Guitarists get the most from “Autumn Leaves” and “Blue Bossa,” where the same ii-V-I fingerings keep coming back; see our jazz guitar chord voicings. Horn players can begin with the two blues tunes and “Summertime,” whose riff and pentatonic melodies leave room to work on sound and breath. Singers should start with “Summertime” and pick their own key. For records to listen to alongside these tunes, see our list of the best jazz albums for beginners.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the easiest jazz standard to learn?

Bags’ Groove is the easiest place to start. It is a 12-bar blues in F with a short, repetitive riff for a melody, so there is no bridge to memorize and the form repeats every 12 bars. Cantaloupe Island is close behind, because the whole tune uses only three chords.

What is a jazz standard?

A jazz standard is a tune that jazz musicians know well enough to play together without rehearsal, usually from a lead sheet with the melody and chord symbols. Many began as Broadway, Hollywood or Tin Pan Alley songs, such as All of Me and Summertime; others were written by jazz musicians, such as Blue Bossa and Cantaloupe Island. There is no official list.

How many jazz standards should a beginner learn?

There is no set number. Ten tunes you can play from memory, in more than one key, are more useful at a jam session than a long list you can only read from a book. Learn them one at a time and keep playing the earlier ones while you add new ones.

What is the easiest jazz standard to sing?

Of these ten, Summertime is the easiest for most singers: it is only 16 bars long, the melody stays close to the pentatonic scale, and the chords move slowly. Choose a key that suits your voice; Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong sang it in B minor. Misty sounds gentle, but its melody covers nearly two octaves.