Learning Song Forms
With all the arpeggios and scales you have learned, along with your instrumental and musical techniques, you now have all the knowledge you need to become a great 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 solos by your favorite players and analyzing them in terms of note choices and use of rhythm.
To play with other musicians, you will need to know lots of songs. Get a good fake 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 learn more songs, you will find that there are certain progressions which come up regularly, the most common being 2 5 1. 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. Both these will be discussed in this lesson.
Rhythm Changes are 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.
