Learning Song Forms
With all the chords you have learned, you now have all the knowledge you need to become a great rhythm player. The important thing is to use your knowledge and technique regularly in musical situations. By now you should be playing with other musicians as often as possible, as well as performing live. You should also be playing along with albums every day, sometimes copying what you hear and sometimes improvising, as well as transcribing parts by your favorite players, and analyzing them in terms of chord and note choices and use of rhythm.
To play with other musicians, you need to know a wide range of songs. Get a book with a large collection of standards and start learning both the melody and chord changes to as many songs as you can. Make a habit of memorizing them and then transposing them to all keys. As you 丨earn more songs, you will find that there are certain progressions which come up regularly, the most common being II V I. If you play with Jazz musicians, there are certain song forms which they will assume you know from memory. These include Rhythm Changes (a chord progression based on George Gershwin's I Got Rhythm) and several variations on the 12 bar Blues form.
Rhythm Changes is a typical example of 32 bar Song Form, or AABA form. This form consists of an A section played twice, followed by a B section (called a bridge) and then a return to the A section (or sometimes a variation of the A section). There are literally thousands of songs which use the AABA form.
