* 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 of those tunes you can't skip. It shows up on jam session lists constantly, and for good reason: 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 itself flopped, closing after just 59 performances. The song outlived it by decades. Kern also wrote a 16-bar verse for it, but it's almost never played today — bebop musicians replaced it with something else entirely, and that's where the tune's second life begins.
The version every jazz pianist should hear first is Dizzy Gillespie's 1945 sextet recording, with Charlie Parker on alto sax. It was one of the earliest bebop recordings of a standard, and it's the reason the tune is a jazz staple at all rather than a half-forgotten show tune. Gillespie and company opened the piece with a melodic introduction widely said to be inspired by Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor — that intro (and its matching outro) became so associated with the tune that many musicians treat it as part of the song itself.
Harmonically, this tune is unusual for its age. It runs 36 bars in an AABA'-type form — two eight-bar A sections, an eight-bar bridge, and a final section that stretches to twelve bars and adds a four-bar tag before landing home. Some analysts call the form AABC instead, since that last section departs so much from the earlier A's that it barely qualifies as a variation.
What really sets it apart is the key movement. Instead of staying anchored to one tonal center, the tune travels through several — Ab major, C major, Eb major, and G major — before finally resolving back to Ab. Along the way you'll find 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 packed into one chorus. That variety is exactly why it's such a good practice vehicle: work through this tune and you're touching most of the vocabulary you'll need across the rest of the songbook.
It's also worth knowing that 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.
Use the chord chart alongside this to get the changes under your hands, section by section, before you try soloing over the whole form at tempo. Once the key centers start to feel familiar rather than like a maze, you'll find this tune shows up as a building block in a lot of other harmony you'll encounter later.
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