25 Jazz Standards You Need To Know (Easiest To Hardest) Chord Analysis & Listening Guide

If you want to learn how to play and understand jazz, you need to learn jazz standards. Unfortunately, since there are so many standard tunes to learn, it can be a little overwhelming trying to know which tunes you should work on. This class takes you through the chord progressions of 25 important tunes, functionally analyzing all of the tonal centers and harmonic movements, arranged roughly from easiest to hardest. Learning these standards will teach you about common movements in jazz harmony, and also give you great vehicles to improvise on. With so many recordings of each tune, it can also be intimidating trying to figure out which versions by who to check out. To that end, I’ve put together a playlist of 5 recordings each of all 25 tunes on the list: a “pop” vocal recording, a jazz vocal recording, and 3 instrumental small group jazz recordings of each tune. Since this is such a large q