[NickCormier]

Well If I applied in time for some college, I will have an audition and have to play one normal song of my choice and one Standard blues or jazz song.. So I was looking up to find abit more standard jazz songs (I only really knew of the basics, take five, all blues, my favorite things, etc) and found this sweet website..

http://partoches.bearteam.org/#jazz

Its pretty sweet.. lists the more popular jazz standards, along with sheetmusic for all of them..

Pretty sure im gonna take All Blues and add in some fills to the chord progression and work on improvising over it for my audition.. Anyone else have to learn a jazz standard song for an audition and how did it go?

[distressed_romeo]

Holy crap! That will be useful! Good find.

[Drew]

Nice find.

I've never had to audition with jazz material, nick, but I used to play with jazz groups on occasion back in college.

Two things to keep in mind. The most obvious is playing over changes, and getting comfortable phrasing while changing from scale/arpeggio to scale/arpeggio.

The real biggie though that most beginning jazz players don't think about is while soloing is an absolute bitch if you're not familiar with playing through changes, about 80% of your time playing with a jazz group is going to be spent comping. And, the larger the ensemble, the harder that becomes - if you're playing in a trio with guitar, bass, and drums then you have a lot of room to work with, but comping on guitar in an ensemble where there's also a keyboardist is pretty tricky because you have to be careful not to step on each other's toes.

My advice is to learn as many 3 or 4-note 7th chord grips. If I think of it tonight I;ve got this great ii-V-I excersize I got from the guy I studied with in college that's a great way to practice this stuff - you sort of run through the chromatic scale with ii-V-I turnarounds. Say, Am7-D7-Gmaj7, then Gm7-C7-Fmaj7, etc. Not only is a ii-V-I one of the most common turnarounds you're going to find in jazz music, but because the chords are arranged to fall in a comparatively small section of the neck, you go through a LOT of different compact voicings.