* We omit melodies from our charts for copyright reasons.
If you're building your repertoire as a jazz pianist, "All the Things You Are" is one you can't skip. It shows up on jam session lists constantly, and there's a reason for that: the changes will teach you more about moving between keys than almost any other standard.
Jerome Kern wrote the music, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, for the 1939 Broadway musical Very Warm for May. The show flopped — 59 performances and it was gone. The song outlived it by decades. Kern also wrote a 16-bar verse for it, but almost nobody plays that today. Bebop musicians swapped in something else entirely, and that's where the tune actually starts to matter to jazz players.
Start with Dizzy Gillespie's 1945 sextet recording, with Charlie Parker on alto. It's one of the earliest bebop recordings of a standard, and honestly it's probably the reason this tune is a jazz staple instead of a half-forgotten show tune nobody plays anymore. Gillespie and the band open the piece with a melodic introduction that people usually trace back to Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor. That intro (and the matching outro) got so tied to the tune that a lot of musicians now treat it as part of the song itself.
For a tune this old, the harmony is strange in a good way. It runs 36 bars in a form usually labeled AABA' — two eight-bar A sections, an eight-bar bridge, then a final section that stretches to twelve bars and tacks on a four-bar tag before it resolves. Some people call the form AABC instead, since that last section drifts so far from the earlier A's that "variation" feels generous.
The real story is the key movement. Instead of sitting in one tonal center, the tune passes through Ab major, C major, Eb major, and G major before landing back home in Ab. Along the way you get long ii-V-I's (one chord per bar), quick ii-V-I's (two chords per bar), and cadences in both major and minor keys — all in a single chorus. That's what makes it such a good practice tune. Get through this one and you've touched most of the vocabulary you'll run into everywhere else in the songbook.
Worth knowing too: several other bebop heads were built on these same changes. Charlie Parker's "Bird of Paradise" is a contrafact of this tune, and other musicians wrote their own melodies over the same harmony as well.
Work through the chord chart section by section before you try soloing over the whole form at tempo. Once the key centers start feeling familiar instead of like a maze, you'll notice this tune popping up as a building block in a lot of other harmony down the road.
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