Small Bands Repertoire
Our tutors provide music for the groups to work on which can vary enormously and cover many different styles of jazz. As a taster, to show the range of material covered, here is a selection of tunes the bands played in one week...
Sing On (The Eureka Brass Band), Jana's Delight (Don Pullen), Tin Tin Deo (Dizzy Gillespie), Southern Smiles (Keith Jarrett), Ramblin' (Ornette Coleman), Bock to Bock (Wes Montgomery), Thunder Walk (George Benson), Home at Last (Hank Mobley), Sonnymoon for Two (Sonny Rollins), Dedication to Thomas Mapfumo (Don Cherry), An Gliomach (trad Irish), Holy Family (Albert Ayler), In Deep (Bill Frisell), Walking on the Moon (Andy LaVerne), I Mean You (Thelonious Monk), Moon Alley (Tom Harrell), Just Squeeze Me (Duke Ellington), Rio (Victor Feldman), Moonglow (Irving Mills), Birk's Works (Dizzy Gillespie), Celeste (Ralph Towner and Norma Winstone), Caravan (Juan Tizol), Sidewinder (Lee Morgan).
Preparing Repertoire for our Jam Sessions
Before discussing repertoire lists, can we say that if you don't already have the "irealpro" app then you should consider getting it as soon as possible. This is a very useful tool for jazz musicians and singers and will be a great help when playing at jam sessions. It gives you the chord progressions for a vast number of tunes and can transpose them immediately into any key. It also has backing track options, enabling you to practice the repertoire by yourself, to prepare in advance. It is available for apple and android systems and you can find it on our "Recommended Resources" page.
When getting a jam session together it can really help expedite matters if the participants have a common repertoire of tunes they already know, or at least have done some work on beforehand. There are probably as many repertoire lists of jazz tunes as there are jazz musicians. Therefore, and only for the reason that we all work from the same list, we suggest the repertoire list below as useful starting points. Each jam session will start with two of the tunes from this list. Please note, it is in no way mandatory for you to know all (or any) of these tunes in order to come on the course. It is simply so that you can find some common ground to jam on.
Don't Get Around Much Any More
All of these tunes (plus 62 others!) are included in the lesson vault at www.learn2playjazz.com. Each lesson includes a 1hr video class teaching you how to improvise on the tune, transcriptions from the original recordings, full band parts and custom play-along tracks to practice with. You can get a 14-day free trial which includes 85hrs of lessons by clicking HERE.