This article is written by Toru Hoshino, a jazz bassist and instructor based in Japan who teaches online lessons to students worldwide. In this article, he shares two things he looks for when arranging a pop song into a jazz version.
It’s cool to take a famous song and turn it into a jazz arrangement, but the truth is, not every song actually works as a jazz arrangement. When I’m arranging a pop song into jazz, I personally make the call based on two things:
Does it have a ii-V progression?
What’s the section structure?
Let’s get into what that actually means.
Contents
Does It Have a ii-V Progression?
A ii-V (or ii-V-I) progression has some real advantages:
It’s easy to lay a jazz-sounding melody over it
It’s easy to lay tension chords over it
It’s easy to lay a walking bass line over it
Since most readers here are bassists, let’s focus on that last point — how easy it is to build a walking bass line over it.
Here’s an example of a ii-V-I progression:
Play through it and you’ll see — it’s incredibly easy to build a walking bass line over this. Compare that to a common pop chord movement, the IV-V-I progression (not usually called that, but bear with me):
This kind of progression just doesn’t pair as naturally with a walking bass line. Play through it and you’ll notice — it’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s genuinely hard to build a smooth, connected flow.
So: when arranging a pop song into jazz, it’s worth checking whether the chord progression contains a ii-V movement somewhere in it.
The Section Structure
“Section” here just means things like the verse or the chorus. Pop songs commonly follow a flow like:
Intro → Verse → Pre-chorus → Chorus
Jazz tunes, on the other hand, tend to follow forms like:
ABAC
(e.g. “Fly Me to the Moon,” “All of Me”)
or
AABC
(e.g. “Autumn Leaves”)
AABA
(e.g. “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Take the ‘A’ Train”)
In other words, I tend to gravitate toward pop songs that happen to follow one of these jazz-friendly structural formats.
Spotting these structural cues in theory is one thing — actually getting a walking bass line to flow naturally through an arrangement like this is exactly where a teacher’s feedback speeds up the process.
Want Personalized Feedback on Your Playing?
This is exactly the kind of thing that’s hard to fix alone — and where having a teacher makes all the difference.
At Line on Bass, I offer an online lesson service where you send me a video of your playing, and I give you specific, detailed feedback — every single day if you want.
Students from around the world are using this to fix exactly these kinds of issues and steadily improve their jazz bass skills.