Memorizing Chord Progressions

All Jazz players come to a part of their journey where they need to memorize repertoire. Since a chord progression is a fairly abstract construction that can be difficult. In this video I am going to try to go over some ways that understanding the harmony and the form can help you memorize the song. Next I will demonstrate how it works by going over an analysis of There will never be another you.

One of my supporters on Patreon, Max e-mailed this question:

Using analysis to memorize

A chord progression is not a random set of letters that you have to be able to recite! Think of phone numbers where we use country and area codes to remember long rows of numbers.

The key to this is to understand that a jazz song is often a long progression that is constructed of a lot of smaller common progressions. Understanding this makes it easier to organize and remember the progression.