First 50 Jazz Standards You Should Play On Guitar

First 50 Jazz Standards You Should Play on Guitar is a Hal Leonard volume for anyone who has looked at a guitar and thought, quite wrongly, that six strings would surely be enough to keep jazz under control. Here are fifty standards, which is a polite way of saying fifty beautifully durable songs that have survived generations of singers, horn players, pianists, guitarists, jam sessions, cocktail lounges, practice rooms, and men in waistcoats saying “let’s take it from the bridge.”

Jazz standards are not merely songs. They are social tests with chord changes. They arrive looking elegant, then immediately ask whether you know what to do with a ii-V-I, a diminished passing chord, a modulation, a melody that seems simple until your fingers begin negotiating with management, and a tempo that can expose all previous optimism. This book gathers the essentials in guitar-friendly form, giving the aspiring player a route into the repertoire without first requiring them to acquire a smoky basement, tragic romance, or a hat.

Expect familiar classics from the great American songbook and jazz tradition: tunes that have been played, bent, reharmonised, sung, swung, whispered, battered and rescued in every possible key. These are the pieces that teach a guitarist how songs are built, how harmony moves, how melody sits over changes, and how “easy listening” often means someone else has already done several decades of difficult work.

The irony of a “first 50” jazz book is that jazz rarely allows anything to remain first for long. Learn the melody and the chords, and suddenly there are voicings, substitutions, comping patterns, intros, endings, walking bass lines, chord-melody arrangements and the small personal crisis of improvisation. Still, one must begin somewhere, and beginning with standards is sensible. They are the shared language, the old currency, the tunes that let musicians nod at one another and then quietly discover who has practised.

For guitarists, students, teachers, hobby players, jazz beginners, lapsed rock players attempting sophistication, or anyone who owns a hollow-body guitar and would like to justify it, this is a useful and pleasingly practical volume. It belongs on the music stand, where it can sit open beside a pencil, a metronome, and the dawning suspicion that “Misty” is not going to play itself.

Very Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A smart, usable Hal Leonard music book, ready for practice, frustration, improvement, and the ancient musical ritual of playing the first eight bars beautifully before the chords begin asking personal questions.

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