Exploring Modern Ideas for Jazz Standards: Pt. 1

John Stowell calls this lesson "Standards 2.0": ways to reimagine familiar jazz standards through modulation, fresh comping ideas, and pianistic chord thinking. Working through three jam-session staples — Days of Wine and Roses, On Green Dolphin Street, and Like Someone in Love — John shows how building a minor-third modulation into an arrangement sharpens your ability to see relationships, transpose, and memorize changes.

What's covered

• The Toots Thielemans arrangement of Days of Wine and Roses (written for Bill Evans), with the second 16 bars taken up a minor third — walked through in both F and A flat
• Breaking chords into double stops and three-note shapes with hybrid picking, an idea influenced by Jimmy Wyble
• Voice leading the top note of your comping, including common tones between chords
• Open string voicings — how one open G string can color five different chords in the same progression
• Asymmetric comping phrases played over the bar line for less predictable accompaniment
• Green Dolphin Street's modified II-V-I (2 dominant, flat-2 dominant) and applying borrowed cadences to other tunes
• Like Someone in Love arranged in two keys, C and E flat

You'll come away with new soloing and comping ideas, fresh voicings, and a stronger ability to internalize chord progressions in any key. Full video is about 32 minutes.