One could examine composition after composition and find that a few basic forms account for many, many, many jazz works. Blues form is discussed on another web page, so all I would mention here is that one can here a blues sometimes without even being aware that the piece is in the form -- harmonic substitutions and bright tempi can sometimes disguise blues-form pieces. The listener might compare Charlie Parker's K.C. Blues with one of Woody Herman's late 1930s or early 1940s recordings of Woodchoppers Ball and not immediately realize that the two pieces are very clear examples of blues form.
Since many jazz performances have been of Tin Pan Alley-type pop songs or original compositions inspired by Tin Pan Alley forms, the other great form in jazz is AABA. As I thumb through a fakebook, I can see that Duke Ellington's African Flower, John Lewis's Afternoon in Paris, Dennis and Brent's Angel Eyes, Charlie Parker's Anthropology, the old standard As Time Goes By , and Duke Ellington's Cottontail are all AABA form pieces--and that's just from flipping through the beginning of the book. Those tunes that are not blues or AABA are either shorter, simpler stuctures (a couple of AAB and a couple of really short blues-oriented eight-measure heads) or extended phrase structure pieces like some of A.C. Jobim's bossa novas. [Bossa novas and other even more recent Brazilian music, like some of the extended form melodies of Caetano Veloso, make for interesting study for American musicians as they differ so greatly in length and phrase structure from most pop and jazz melodies written by musicians in the United States.]
In many AABA-form pieces, the B sections (particularly in bop era compositions) often are influenced by the chord progression of the B section of George Gershwin's I Got Rhythm. Some of these pieces simply work around the circle of fifths: III7 (E7 if the piece is in C), VI7 (A7), II7 (D7), V7 (G7), or use a variation. One variation that can be found is a sequential ii7-V7-I progression in which the root of I becomes the root of the next ii chord: (an example would be: F#m7, B7, Emaj7; Em7, A7, Dmaj7; Dm7, G7, Cmaj7). In fact, these modulating ii-V-I sequences are sometimes used in the A section (the start of How High the Moon is an example). But, let's get back to the B section... One interesting approach to the AABA structure is John Coltrane's Impressions, a piece in which Dm7 is used for the entire eight-measure A sectiion and Ebm7 is used for the entire eight-measure B section. Melodically the A and B sections of the Coltrane piece are not vastly different. Obviously this is a piece meant for Coltrane's virtuosic modal improvisation.
Of course, we have been looking at the structure of the heads of the pieces themselves. Arrangements may include introductions, additional sections in the middle and so forth. One of the more interesting aspects of jazz is the way in which the arranger sometimes plays a more prominent role than the composer in terms of the final product.
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