Must Know Jazz Standards — List With A Twist

The internet is full of websites suggesting lists of “must know” jazz standards.

Of course they all list many of the same great songs. And most certainly fall into the category of songs you really should be able to play.

Occasionally you’ll find a song or two that is questionable importance and other times there are songs that you might deem critical, but are missing from the list.

Most if not all of the time these lists represent the author’s personal favorites — in other words, personal opinion.

So why am I putting up yet another “Jazz Standards You Should Know” page?

Data.

That’s why.

I’ve always been something of a vinyl junkie.

The photo shows one wall, 8 feet tall by 12 feet wide, of jazz albums. Many are quite collectible and difficult if not impossible to find.

That’s a lot of jazz. Of course this doesn’t take into account the walls of CDs either.

A while back I decided I really needed a reference for all of the albums in the collection. But not just the albums either.

The songs, the artists, the composers, the sidemen. You name it.

It was an enormous undertaking.

Needless to say, I did this before the days when there was so much great information available on the internet about pretty much whatever you wanted to find out.

However having all of this great information in the database that I created gives me all kinds of resources and insights that would be impossible to find on the internet.

That is the data I referred to a second ago.

This gave me the ability to sort through all of these songs specifically looking for the absolute most commonly recorded jazz standards by the very top jazz artists.

I think we can all agree that the absolute jazz heyday was from the 1940’s through the mid 1960’s.

This seemed to be when straight ahead jazz was at its absolute most powerful.

Then it began to branch off into variations of itself and appealing to a different audience than the club-going audiences of that period.

The artists who were around in this period are household names. The pioneers of jazz. The flag bearers, the stalwarts, the trailblazers. The jazz stars.

Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Art Blakey.

By taking all of this information, I was able to create a list of “must know” jazz standards that wasn’t based on mere opinion.

It was based on the choices that the Pantheon of Jazz Giants had selected to record during the Magical Age of Jazz.

Blue Note, Atlantic, Riverside, Pacific Jazz, Columbia, Verve, Impulse, Savoy, Dial, the Milestone and Fantasy reissues, and more brought us some incredible jazz.

I’ve presented this list below in order of the most recorded songs on down.

This list will give you an honest look at what the top 50 jazz standards the jazz greats think you should be spending your time on first.

No opinion, just data.

All of these songs along with their original recordings can be found in the Real Book Series Volume 1, 2 and 3.

Based on the database of recordings from the golden age of jazz, here are the top 50 songs chosen by the masters themselves.

My next bit of research was to go online and search for as many lists of “Essential Jazz Standards You Should Know” that I could find.

I put all of these songs into a spreadsheet and sorted them by how many times they were recommended.

Here’s that list with the song form and original keys indicated. It is sorted from most recommended on down.

Finally let’s compare these two lists.

First we’ll leave them sorted by the highest to the lowest.

And now both lists sorted alphabetically.

These are the songs that appear in both lists. So if you are looking for the best songs to start learning or teaching, this would be a great list to use.

Again, all of these songs along with their original recordings can be found in the Real Book Series Volume 1, 2 and 3.