Every working jazz guitarist hits the same wall eventually: you've played "Autumn Leaves" five thousand times, you can hear your own clichés before you play them, and the audience can hear them too. The standards aren't the problem — your relationship to them is. The fix isn't to retire the tune; it's to find a way back into it.
This is exactly the territory John Stowell takes on in his MMC class Modulation as an Arranging Technique. The class opens with the observation that most working players play the same tunes at the same tempos in the same keys at every gig — and walks through one of Stowell's personal antidotes: arranging standards to include genuine modulations partway through.
What modulation does that mere reharmonization doesn't
Reharmonizing a tune is a familiar move — substitute the changes underneath the melody, keep the melody where it is. It's a useful tool but it doesn't fundamentally reset the listener's experience of the tune. Modulation does. When you bridge a chorus of "Body and Soul" from Db to E and the band has to relocate, the playing field changes — your fretboard intuition for the new key kicks in, the audience hears the tune from a new angle, and your improvising can't coast on the patterns you'd built up in the original key.
Stowell's approach isn't gimmicky modulation for its own sake. He works through the harmonic logic of which modulations land, how to set them up so the band hears them coming, and how to use them to highlight specific sections of a tune rather than disrupt them.
Other ways to find your way back into a standard
Modulation is one tool. A few others are worth keeping in the bag:
- Borrow a master's harmonic conception. Bill Evans's reharmonizations of standards are a complete vocabulary of substitutions — once you've played a tune through Evans's changes, the original feels new again. Tom Lippincott's Spring Is Here: Exploring the Harmony of Bill Evans uses Evans's "Spring Is Here" reharm as a case study you can transplant.
- Change the form. Play the bridge before the A. Take the head out of time. Play a chorus in a different feel — bossa, waltz, or ballad-tempo even on a medium-swing tune. These work because the melody and harmony are intact; only the framing has changed.
- Change the tempo enough that it matters. Not 5 BPM faster — try playing a familiar medium swing as a slow ballad, or a ballad at double-time. The melody itself takes on different meaning at different speeds, and you'll hear shapes in the line you'd glossed over.
The longer game
The deeper version of this problem is that boredom with a standard is sometimes a signal that you've stopped listening to the actual notes and started playing your memory of them. Stowell's class is most useful as a forcing function: a real arrangement decision (a key change at bar 17, say) makes you reread the chart and re-hear the tune. The novelty is the side effect; the real work is the re-attention.
Which is why this kind of work pays off well beyond a single tune. Once you've genuinely re-engaged with three or four standards through this process, the habit of approaching every tune that way starts to stick.
