* We omit melodies from our charts for copyright reasons.
If you're learning jazz piano, you'll run into "Take the A Train" early and often. It's a 32-bar AABA tune built almost entirely from chords you'll see again and again in the standard repertoire, which makes it one of the most useful tunes you can put under your fingers.
Billy Strayhorn wrote it in 1939, right after Duke Ellington hired him and gave him directions to his Harlem apartment by subway. Those directions started with "take the A train," and Strayhorn turned them into a song almost immediately. He handed Ellington the score and then... nothing happened. It sat unused for two years. The tune only got recorded because of a 1941 ASCAP royalty dispute that cut off broadcast access to ASCAP-registered music. Strayhorn wasn't an ASCAP member yet, so his tune was one of the few available options. It became the Ellington Orchestra's signature theme almost by accident.
The one to hear is Duke Ellington's February 15, 1941 recording for Victor, later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Trumpeter Ray Nance's solo on that take is the one most later trumpet players borrow from, whether they admit it or not.
The A section opens on a I chord, then jumps to a II7 — often colored with a #11 or b5. That move is the tune's fingerprint, and it's worth isolating on its own before you try to solo over the whole form. You'll hear the same secondary-dominant idea in tunes like "The Girl From Ipanema," so getting comfortable with it here pays off elsewhere too.
It's also worth knowing that Strayhorn built the A section's changes on top of Jimmy McHugh's 1930 standard "Exactly Like You." That's not a knock on the tune. Recycling a chord progression and writing new melody and harmony details on top of it was (and still is) completely normal jazz composition practice. Knowing the source tune just gives you another reference point when you're working out how the changes function.
The bridge shifts to the IV chord, a common move in swing-era bridges (you'll hear the same setup in "Stompin' at the Savoy"), then works its way back through a ii-V into the final A. Nothing exotic, but the sequencing is clean enough that it's a good tune for internalizing how a bridge is supposed to set up a return home.
Grab the chord chart above and start slow: root position chords in the left hand, just enough right-hand voicing to hear the II7 clearly. Once that first eight bars feels automatic, the rest of the form falls into place fast.
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