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 five jazz standards he practiced constantly as a beginner, back when he was coming from a rock background.
These are tunes that make it relatively easy to build a walking bass line, with melodies catchy enough that they’re approachable right from the start.
I hope this is useful if you’re just getting into jazz bass.
Contents
Jazz Standards I Practiced Constantly as a Beginner
Autumn Leaves
This is a tune even people who don’t follow jazz tend to recognize.
It’s easy to build an efficient, comfortable walking bass line for, and the melody has that wistful, melancholic quality. It also comes up constantly at jam sessions, so it’s well worth having under your fingers.
Fly Me to the Moon
A catchy, singable tune that gets covered by vocalists constantly.
Bye Bye Blackbird
Another tune with a catchy, memorable melody that comes up often at sessions.
That said, the first four bars all sit on the same F chord, and I remember being genuinely unsure how to approach that stretch when I was starting out.
The Girl from Ipanema
The defining tune of bossa nova — a genre with a feel and rhythmic approach a bit different from straight-ahead jazz.
The bass line here is mostly built around the root and the 5th.
→ Read my full breakdown of the bass line for “The Girl from Ipanema” here.
F Blues
There’s no single tune actually called “F Blues” — it just refers to any tune built on the standard 12-bar blues progression shown below, in the key of F.
Tunes like “Bags’ Groove,” “Now’s the Time,” and “Billie’s Bounce” are all commonly played F blues tunes.
→ Read my full step-by-step practice method for improvising over an F blues here.
After That
These five tunes are usually what I have students work through first in lessons.
Once those are sounding solid, I have them move on to new tunes — and beyond these five, I also put together a list of 40 tunes I personally played constantly at sessions around Tokyo over the years.
→ See the full list of 40 jazz standards here.
Once you’re comfortable with the basics, I’ll often have students pick their next tune from that list themselves. Listen to plenty of bebop, Coltrane-style playing, Bill Evans, Monk, bossa and Latin tunes, bluesy stuff — and your own sense of what kind of jazz you actually love will start to take shape.
There’s a lot to work through either way, so you might as well dive into whatever tune catches your ear or sounds genuinely cool to you.
I hope this gives you something useful for your day-to-day practice — and once you’ve got a few of these standards under your fingers, getting feedback on how you’re actually playing them is exactly the next step worth taking.
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.