Jazz Standard Breakdown: Autumn Leaves

5 minute read

In this article I will be going over a beginner’s breakdown to the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves.” If this is your first time going over a jazz standard, I suggest first skimming over How to Read a Lead Sheet.

autumn-leaves.pdf

• Chords and Voice Leading
• Left Hand Comping
• Scales for Improvisation
• Improvisation Exercise/Embellishing the Melody
• Recordings
• Final Note

Chords and Voice Leading

If you are unfamiliar with forming chords, here is a pdf with all of the “Autumn Leaves” chords in root position. I would also check out Basics of Triads and Seventh Chords.

autumn-leaves-chords-in-root-position.pdf

We could play “Autumn Leaves” with these root positions chords in the left hand, but it wouldn’t sound very good. What you want to do is to voice lead each chord to the next.

Looking at the first 11 measures, we see that it is just going down the circle of fifths. D is a fifth below A, G is a fifth below D, C is a fith below G, and so forth. Utilizing inversions, this makes for some easy voice leading in the left hand.

Notice the pattern when we’re going down fifths? Now try filling in the chords for the rest of the song while taking into account voice leading. Pay attention to the root movements of fifths because they’ll allow for easy voice leading like these.

As a disclaimer, voice leading is not a hard and fast rule. You should voice lead when you can, but you’re not bounded to it.

Let’s say you get to measure 16 of “Autumn Leaves” and your left hand looks like this.

This sounds perfectly good, but let’s say that you don’t want your GMaj7 to sound that low. Then, you can bring it up to this.

There is a lapse in voice leading between D7 and GMaj7, but that’s fine. It’s all personal preference.

Left Hand Comping

Just playing whole notes in the left hand is good to start off with, but we can spice it up by changing up the rhythm.

There’s no set rule to this—just do what you feel. I would listen to recordings to get a feel for what kind of rhythms sound good. Playing on an upbeat is good for creating tension, and playing on a downbeat for releasing tension. Also this should be swung.

Scales for Improvisation

Check this for a quick primer on improvisation and how scales relate to chords.

“Autumn Leaves” is a great tune to start out with because you can basically use the G major scale over the entire tune.

You can even use them over the B7 chords, but there are some better scales we can use for those.

Level 1 is to use the E major scale over the B7 chords.

Level 2 is to use the B Dominant Lydian scale over the B7 chord and the B altered scale over the B7♭9 chord. These scales have fancy names, but they aren’t that hard and they’ll make your improvisation sound a lot better.

If you examine the B Dominant Lydian scale, you’ll see that it’s the same as the E major scale except the E is raised a half-step up to an F-natural. The B altered scale is just the C major scale with an E-flat, so it’s not that bad (a more correct scale for the B7♭9 chords in “Autumn Leaves” would be the B half-whole scale because the B7♭9 chords fall on an F♯, which is not a note in the B altered scale. But this scale is a bit harder and the B altered scale works fine).

Improvisation Exercise/Embellishing the Melody

There is an exercise you can do with “Autumn Leaves” to get your toes wet with improvisation, but not dip your whole foot in. Try to play through “Autumn Leaves,” but improvise over the measures for which there are whole notes or dotted half notes, then catch up with the melody when the whole note or dotted half note ends.

To give an idea of what I mean, here is a transcription of the first 8 measures played with this exercise in mind.

Notice how I’m only using the G major scale for the parts that are improvised (don’t worry about the B♭ in the 8th measure—that is what we call an approach note). Try this on your own and for the entire song.

Recordings

There are probably a million different great recordings of “Autumn Leaves” out there, as it’s one of the most popular jazz standards. These are just a couple of my personal favorites.

Final Note

When practicing improvisation, I suggest playing the chord in the left hand while improvising through the chord changes to keep track of where you are.

I also don’t go over in detail on how to embellish the melody, but you can get a general idea of how to do that in How to Read a Lead Sheet. When you walk through the improvisation exercise, you’ll find that it sounds a lot like embellishing the melody. That’s really all it is: improvising with the melody in mind.

The next step after you’ve gotten comfortable with all this, is to try adding in extensions and alterations and then reharmonizations. This will spice up your music and make it sound more jazzy.

Written on June 10th, 2020 by Chris Cheung