* We omit melodies from our charts for copyright reasons.
If you're working through jazz standards in Ab, this is one of the friendlier ones to start with. The changes move, but they move in a way that teaches you something real about how major and minor keys talk to each other, which is most of what you need to know before you sit down with the chart.
George Shearing wrote "Lullaby of Birdland" in 1952, and by his own account it took him about ten minutes. Morris Levy, who owned the New York jazz club Birdland, asked Shearing for a theme song. Shearing wasn't happy with what he'd been handed and wrote his own instead, naming it after the club, which itself was named for Charlie "Bird" Parker.
The lyrics came later, from George David Weiss. Weiss is credited under the pseudonym "B. Y. Forster" on early pressings, a workaround for a rule that kept ASCAP and BMI composers from collaborating under their own names. Shearing recorded the tune with his quintet on July 17, 1952, as a straight instrumental. The words wouldn't show up until Ella Fitzgerald's version two years later.
Start with Shearing's original quintet recording if you want to hear the tune the way it was conceived, before anyone was singing over it. But Ella Fitzgerald's 1954 vocal, recorded that June and released that July, is the version most people mean when they bring up "Lullaby of Birdland" by name. Sarah Vaughan cut it too, backed by Clifford Brown, and that recording gets cited often enough that it's worth tracking down alongside Ella's.
The whole tune sits on one idea: Ab major and its relative minor, F minor, sharing the stage almost equally. You spend real time in each, not just passing through one on your way to the other. That's the ear training this tune gives you for free.
The A sections lean toward a I–vi–ii7–V7 move in the major, and Shearing wrote a minor-key mirror of that same progression using the half-diminished vi and ii chords, so you're playing essentially the same shape twice with a different color each time. It's a clean way to internalize how a major ii-V and its relative-minor cousin relate to each other, because the tune hands you both back to back.
There's also a documented debt here: some of Shearing's changes trace back to Walter Donaldson's "Love Me or Leave Me," an older standard with a similar harmonic skeleton. Worth a listen side by side if you want to hear where the borrowing shows up.
Pull up the chord chart that goes with this article and work through the A sections first, since that's where the major/minor trade-off lives. Once that feels comfortable in your hands, the bridge is a much smaller lift. This is a good tune to loop slowly with a metronome before you try to swing it, since the key changes are subtle enough to blur if you rush them.
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