On typical jazz gigs, weddings, casuals, or club dates, you are expected to lay down a bass line—without music—to everything from “Kansas City” to “Chameleon” to “My Way.” How can a bass player remember all that stuff? When you pull out a fake book, you might help yourself get through “Love for Sale” (not a great wedding standard, considering the lyrics), but you aren’t helping yourself actually learn the chord progression so that you will remember Cole Porter’s gem forever.

Let’s look at techniques and tricks for learning songs and remembering chord progressions. It’s possible to memorize changes to standard tunes and build a huge repertoire of music that you can play off the top of your head, but you must understand both the theoretical and the practical sides of the music. The famous acting teacher Sanford Meisner encouraged his students to memorize their lines so well that they could then forget them. Similarly, bass players must have a song’s form and harmony deeply ingrained in order to relax and make music.

Let’s start with something basic—a tune you’ve been singing since you were two years old: “Happy Birthday.” Don’t give up and flip the page until you’ve proven to me (and to yourself) that you can actually do this. Let’s play it in C. Sing the melody starting on G, and play your bass line starting on the C below that. Ready, go: “Happy birthday da dah, happy birthday doo dah....” Go on, sing!

Hopefully, you nailed this. If not, don’t be discouraged; it’s actually a tricky little tune. Let’s assume you have never heard “Happy Birthday” before, but you want to learn it. In addition to just singing and playing it over and over, you should look at the song’s form—how it is divided into sections—and look for the key harmonic spots.

Ex. 1 shows the “Happy Birthday” chord progression in all of its splendid simplicity. It’s eight bars long and contains four two-bar phrases. You can think of the beginning of these phrases as landmarks. If you hit the landmark, you know you’re keeping your place in the chord progression. After studying Ex. 1, see if you can write out the changes to “Happy Birthday” from memory. Don’t cheat.

It’s good practice to step away from the bass and analyze a chord progression that you want to learn. Take a tune like Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island,” which is a 16-bar form: four bars of Fm7, four bars of Db7, four bars Dm7, and four more bars of Fm7. Think about the form for a minute or two without your bass and envision playing through the chords in time. Now pick up your bass and play a medium, rockish bass line over the chord progression while you say the name of the chord on beat one of every measure. If you want to keep things simple, you can just play the roots on each downbeat. Be sure to call out the chord on one of each measure.

Now you can play “Cantaloupe Island” from memory—not because you’re reading the changes (Ex. 2) but because you took the time to analyze the changes before jumping in and playing. You probably don’t need to read the “Cantaloupe Island” chart ever again. (If I do catch you reading the changes, you’ll have some explaining to do).

As a teacher, I’ve noticed that bass players often stare at a chart for chorus after repeated chorus, even though they could memorize the chord progression with minimal effort. So don’t just gawk at the music and let your fingers do the walking. Take a minute, analyze the music you are learning, and note the following characteristics:

• Form How long is the whole song, and how is it divided into sections? For example: does it have four-bar, eight-bar, or ten-bar phrases, or a combination of phrases of different lengths?
• Key centers Which key does the song start in, and does it move to other key centers?
• Landmark Chords Look for the first chord in each new section, and look for harmonic cadences—where the progression finally comes to rest on a tonic chord.

If you are learning a song by ear (without written music), the same techniques apply: Listen for the form, listen for various key centers, and listen for landmark chords at the beginnings of new phrases and at harmonic resolution points.

But what about really long and tricky progressions? Next time, we’ll look at John Coltrane’s “Moment’s Notice” to learn how to apply these simple memorization techniques to a complicated harmonic structure. Until then, look for new songs to memorize. You already know two classic chord progressions: “Happy Birthday” and “Cantaloupe Island,” and that’s the start of a great set list.