This site was made in order to help exploring the standard repertoire.

The list of 'Top 201 Jazz Standards' it uses was compiled by consulting other people's lists of "top n standards" on the internet for a baseline, and then coming up with one that represented a consensus view.

I then adjusted it to make sure it had some missing tunes that regularly get called at London jam sessions, and to make room for one or two personal favourites.

Since then I've been collecting data from jam sessions, gigs et cetera to validate the list.

Other Resources

Other great resources for researching the repertoire include:

• The Ted Gioa Book "The Jazz Standards"
• LearnJazzStandards.com
• JazzStandards.com

Good sources of lead sheets (Melody lines plus chords, sometimes lyrics) include:

• The Hal Leonard Real Book Volume 1 (Bb) (Eb) (Bass clef)
• The Hal Leonard Real Book Volume 2 (Bb) (Eb) (Bass clef)
• The Ultimate Jazz Fake Book

You can also make your own using the excellent Musescore (The community contributed charts for this also often plug gaps in the real books if you're struggling to find something.)

Colophon

The chord charts on this site are exported from IrealPro.

Typography and styling leans on the Tachyons library.

Such code as exists makes use of the Pelican static site generator.

Hosting is provided free by Github Pages.

These four things are excellent.

This site is made by David Miller.

Source code is available.

Get in touch with thoughts, ideas, corrections etc by emailing david @ deadpansincerity.com