Ted Dunbar’s Bebop Tune List

Ted Dunbar’s Bebop Tune List

In 1990 while working on my Masters Degree, I had the very good fortune to study with the great guitarist and teacher Ted Dunbar.  It was then that I first encountered Ted Dunbar’s Bebop Tune List (which most of us simply referred to as “the list”).  This was a list of tunes which each presented specific challenges to the player; be it the sinuous bebop lines of “Confirmation” and “Donna Lee” or the angular intervals of “Freedom Jazz Dance” the earthy bluesiness of “Cookin’ at the Continental” the harmonic complexity of “Giant Steps” or the wide-open modalness of “Impressions.”  Each one of these tunes taught you something important about the jazz repertoire.  And in order to really grasp the jazz tradition, you need to have a solid understanding of this music.  The music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Jimmy Heath, Tadd Dameron, Lee Morgan and so many others.  Ted handed me this list of tunes on my first lesson and very matter-of-fact-ly just said that they were to be memorized in a single semester (and yes, I really did that).  As Ted described them, these were our “etudes” (studies) that we would practice every day (and yes, I did that too!).  It was a pretty tall order, but probably taught me more about jazz phrasing and technique than anything I’d done up to that point.

Ted Dunbar’s Bebop Tune List (with Representative Recordings)

Many of these songs are in the Real Book, but a few aren’t.  And truth be told, the best way to learn them is through listening to the recordings anyway.  Try to learn the melodies by ear if you can and write out the chord changes.  At some point when I moved all my music to my computer and iPod, I organized representative versions of all the songs into a play list (prior to that, I used to keep them all on a cassette tape).  The list below is a printout of that playlist.

This list appeared previously in an article I wrote for AllAboutJazz

Learning the Tunes

In order to learn these tunes, you need to immerse yourself.  As I said, I had put them all on a cassette tape and would listen to it constantly.  Then about every other day I would take one new tune and and start to practice it (slowly at first) and then gradually work it up to tempo.  And of course I’d continue to play the ones I’d already started.  I’m really happy to say that I did manage to memorize all of these in a single semester, so it is doable!  I continued to practice them daily for the next few years, and still go back to them from time-to-time just to refresh.   The interesting thing is, the more of these tunes you learn, the easier they become.  They really build your chops teach you so much about jazz phrasing.  It’s a big job, but I guarantee if you take it on, you’ll be richly rewarded!

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