Building a Repertoire

Repertoire is a jazz musician’s working capital. It’s the stock of tunes you can call, start, and play through from memory — melody, form, and changes — without a chart, on a bandstand of strangers. A jam session or a gig runs on the assumption that everyone present shares enough of this vocabulary to agree instantly on what happens next. “Knowing” a tune means producing it from nothing, under pressure, in the key someone actually calls.

What “Knowing a Tune” Actually Means

The bandstand test for a tune is concrete, not vague. Can you play the melody rubato, then in strict time? Can you comp or walk through the whole form without a lead sheet? Can you solo two or more choruses over the changes, and can you find your way back if you or someone else gets lost — using landmarks like the bridge or the final turnaround rather than counting bars in your head? If the answer to all of these is yes, in the key it’s normally called, the tune is performance-ready; anything less means you’re still learning it.

The Core Canon, Category by Category

Working musicians organize the repertoire by category, each teaching a different vocabulary. The blues and Rhythm Changes dominate jam sessions because their changes recur under hundreds of other tunes as Contrafacts — master the form once and it pays off everywhere.

Blues heads: “Now’s the Time” — F blues; Blue Monk — B♭ blues; “Tenor Madness” — B♭ blues.
Rhythm changes: I Got Rhythm — B♭, AABA Form, 32 bars; “Oleo” — B♭ rhythm changes.
Gateway standards: Autumn Leaves — commonly G minor at sessions; “All the Things You Are” — A♭ major; All of Me — C major.
Ballads: “My Funny Valentine” — C minor; “Body and Soul” — D♭ major; “Misty” — E♭ major.
Bossa novas: “Blue Bossa” — C minor; “The Girl from Ipanema” — F major.
Modal tunes: So What — D Dorian on the A sections, E♭ Dorian on the bridge; “Cantaloupe Island” — F minor vamp.
Minor tunes: “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” — C minor; Alone Together — D minor.

The Standard-Keys Discipline

Every tune has a key that gets called — a social fact, not a fixed law. Horn players — saxophone, trumpet — push the working canon toward flat keys (F, B♭, E♭, A♭) because those land as comfortable concert keys on transposing instruments, while piano, guitar, and bass are expected to follow into whatever key gets called. Vocalists transpose to fit their range, so accompanists must be ready to play a familiar tune in an unfamiliar key on the spot. The same tune can even have two standard keys — Autumn Leaves circulates in both G minor and E minor — so part of the discipline is knowing which one your local session uses.

A Tiered System, and Honest Numbers

Most working musicians keep their tune list in three rough tiers: performance-ready (memorized, gig-tested, playable in the standard key), in-progress (changes known but melody shaky or untested live), and want-to-learn (on the list, not started). A commonly cited baseline for jam-session survival is 25 to 50 tunes — a blues, rhythm changes, a few gateway standards, a ballad — while working pros accumulate several hundred. That number is folklore, not a target: a short list you can truly play beats a long list of half-learned changes.

The Fake-Book Trap

Fake books are fine as quick reference, but they carry wrong changes, wrong melodies, and arrangement choices nobody on the bandstand plays — leaning on them instead of learning tunes by ear from recordings is the most common beginner pitfall. Most of this canon comes out of the Great American Songbook, and treating tunes as vehicles you absorb from records, not text you memorize from a page, is what actually holds up at a real jam session.

♫ Listen

Miles Davis — “So What” (Kind of Blue, 1959): the recording that made this tune a jam-session standard — listen for how the rhythm section outlines the D Dorian/E♭ Dorian form with no functional chord motion at all.
Cannonball Adderley (feat. Miles Davis) — “Autumn Leaves” (Somethin’ Else, 1958): a widely studied reading of the tune’s minor-key head; listen for the intro and how the horns state the melody together before trading solos.
Sonny Rollins — “Tenor Madness” (1956): a straightforward B♭ blues head — a good reference for how blues form gets phrased and traded on the bandstand.