In my last article I laid out some of the reasons why song analysis is so important for us musicians to practice.
I gave you a challenge in the last article to look at the jazz piano standard Body And Soul and try to quickly grab these three pieces of information:
So let's answer these three questions...
A lot of the times you can look at the first chord and grab the key of the song. Not with Body And Soul. This song starts on the ii-7 chord (which is also a popular starting chord).
In this case I would look at the first and second endings. Notice the first chord in the endings is a Db chord?
The reason I look at the endings is because music naturally wants to come to a place of rest at the end of sections. It's almost like adding a period to the end of a sentence before moving on to the next sentence.
Look for this pattern in other jazz piano standards.
So, the answer is the KEY OF Db.
The 2 answers are either 8- or 16-measures. Or is it?
This is kind of a trick question. When I wrote the first part of the article, I noticed I wrote "in this first A section." I meant to write "How many measures are in the A section?" So technically, the correct answer is 8 measures. The A section is 8-measures long then repeated.
The entire form of Body And Soul is AABA with each section being 8-measures long.
This is one of the most important questions to answer.
When you are quickly looking at a new song you want to try to pick out some main patterns as fast as possible. Reason is, on a gig, a number of things can happen and you really want to commit the song to memory as fast as possible.
This is how I would look at the first 8-measures...in bullet form:
Here's my full analysis: