All The Things You Are is one of those jazz standards that every jazz musician needs to know. Memorizing it is one thing, but improvising over it is another! It can be a bit of a challenge to solo over this tune with all of its cycles and key center changes.
In this lesson, I’ve provided 4 lines to play over some of the more challenging transitional areas of this song. These are great examples of how to navigate these changes with some solid jazz language. For best results, take these lines through all 12 keys to really get them in your ear and onto your instrument. Then use these lines to help you develop your own!
All of these lines were adapted from an etude in the upcoming e-book (2016) “15 Essential Jazz Etudes”. This e-book will include a selection of etudes based on the chord changes to popular jazz standards, and will help you improve your jazz language. If you’d like to be notified when we release this e-book, sign up in the form at the bottom of this post!
You can reference the entire chord chart to All The Things You Are here: All The Things You Are PDF
Take a look at the first line:
This line comes from the first 4 bars of the form. It starts on the vi chord and moves to the ii-V-I in Ab major. The main transition is from the Fmin7 to the Bbmin7.
This line is played over bars 5-7. The main transition is the half step movement from the Dbmaj7 to the Dmin7.
This line is played over bars 13-16. The main transition is the Abmaj7 to the Amin7.
This line is played over bars 29-32. This chord progression is a bit more challenging! The Dbmaj7 changes to Dbmin7-Gb7 (you can think of this as a ii-V in the key of B major) and then shifts down to a Cmin7-Bdim7. The Bdim7 is acting as a passing chord into the Bbmin7 which comes up in bar 33.