What Is a Jazz Standard? The Two Kinds of Tunes Every Jazz Guitarist Plays
A jazz standard is a tune that the whole jazz community agrees to know — the shared repertoire that lets musicians who have never met play a full night of music together. At VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, Junewon Choi gets this question constantly in his online jazz guitar lessons, and the confusion is understandable, because the word "standard" actually covers two different families of tunes: show tunes, which jazz borrowed from movies and Broadway, and jazz standards, which jazz musicians composed themselves. The single clearest dividing line is lyrics. Show tunes have them. Jazz standards, for the most part, were born as instrumentals.
There is also a third, unrelated use of the phrase — "standard jazz" as a style — which we will untangle below, because mixing up the repertoire meaning and the style meaning is exactly what makes this topic feel slippery.
What does "standard" actually mean in jazz?
It means shared repertoire. Early jazz needed songs audiences already recognized, so it borrowed the popular music of its day: songs from Broadway shows and Hollywood films. Those borrowed tunes became the common ground of the jam session — the reason a guitarist from Seoul and a bassist from New York can count off the same song without a chart. When you learn a standard, you are not just learning a song; you are buying into a shared language. That is why repertoire, not scale drills, is the real curriculum of jazz — and why choosing which tunes to learn is one of the most important decisions a beginner makes.
What is a show tune?
A show tune is a standard that began life outside jazz — in musical theater or film — and came with words attached. Because audiences already knew these melodies, jazz musicians could reharmonize and improvise on them while keeping the listener oriented. Classic examples:
The Days of Wine and Roses — written for a film, now played at nearly every jam session
If I Were a Bell — a Broadway show tune that Miles Davis arranged so beautifully it became jazz property
How High the Moon — a theater song that bebop later transformed
The lyric is not decoration, either. Singers carried these songs to the public first; instrumentalists inherited melodies that were built to be sung, which is exactly why they teach phrasing so well.
What is a jazz standard, then?
In the narrower sense, a jazz standard is a tune composed by a jazz musician, usually as an instrumental. Herbie Hancock's Dolphin Dance and Miles Davis's So What live here — nobody wrote them for a Broadway plot; they were written for the band on the stand. Bebop sits in a fascinating middle zone: Charlie Parker took the chord progression of How High the Moon and composed a brand-new melody over it, creating Ornithology — technically bebop, broadly a jazz standard, and historically a show tune wearing a new suit. That trick, writing a new melody over borrowed changes, is how jazz built its own repertoire on top of the one it inherited.
Is "standard jazz" also a style?
Yes — and this is the second meaning that causes the confusion. When people say "standard jazz" about a sound rather than a song list, they usually mean what musicians call traditional or straight-ahead jazz: the swinging, acoustic, 1950s–60s language of ride cymbals and walking bass. So one phrase points at two things: a repertoire category (standard tunes) and a style category (straight-ahead). When someone asks "do you play standard jazz?", they might mean either — and now you can ask which.
Why does this matter when you're learning jazz guitar?
Because it tells you what to practice. The repertoire is the method: melodies teach phrasing, progressions teach harmony, and every standard you finish compounds into the next one. If you want a curated place to start, June's Song Book collects the standards Junewon actually teaches from, in an order that builds. For a deeper look at what "finishing" a tune really means, see How Do You Build a Jazz Guitar Repertoire? Own One Tune From Intro to Ending. And if you are starting completely from zero, this simple sequence works: How to Start Self-Taught Jazz Guitar: A 3-Step Method.
Ready to build the foundation that makes any standard learnable? Start with Essential: Building Blocks — the free entry point to the whole VoiceLid system.
About the Author
Junewon Choi is a Berklee-trained jazz guitarist and the founder of VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, an online education platform teaching jazz harmony and improvisation through the Functional Diagonal Approach (FDA) — a chord-first method built on voice-leading rather than scale boxes.
Wes' Insight — Wes Montgomery's fretboard logic, in lesson form
Fundamental 1: Wes Diagonal System — the FDA from the ground up