The OffBeat #24: Identifying Your Career "Jazz Standards"

Assembling your professional playbook

Here’s when, back in high school, I first felt like a legitimate pre-professional jazz drummer: not when I made the all-county honors jazz band, or when I played in my first non-school gig. Not when I learned to play Joe Morello’s Take Five drum solo by heart. It was when I got my Real Book.

The thick cream-cardstock-covered, plastic-spiral-bound book is a compilation of sheet music for hundreds of jazz tunes, known as standards. This “bootleg bible of jazz,” or “unofficial official handbook of jazz,” was created by a couple of Berklee College of Music students in the 1970s, published covertly via local photocopying shops to avoid paying licensing fees. Fast forward to the mid-2000s: music publisher Hal Leonard legitimized the Real Book, securing rights to each song and legally publishing an updated copy.

So what’s the point in lugging around a 500-page volume of sheet music? The key’s in the standards. Jazz standards are a critical part of jazz musicians’ repertoire; they’re widely known and performed, and widely recognized by listeners. Even if you’re not a jazz aficionado you’re probably familiar with some of them if you’ve been to a jazz brunch or, like, a Starbucks. (A few examples: Blue Bossa, Take The A Train, Sing Sing Sing.) The idea is that, as a gigging jazz musician, you’re expected to have on-the-spot familiarity with a broad set of staple tunes.

The cool thing about jazz—even when it comes to seemingly, as implied by the name, rigid constructions like standard songs—is that the idea is to make it your own. Even the standards aren’t meant to be played in one standard way. They’re a starting place, from which you’re meant to explore and find your own interpretation. (See: April in Paris — Count Basie version, Charlie Parker version, Frank Sinatra version.)

Here’s where career comes in. I’m a fan of codifying principles and frameworks; I’ve over the years assembled a digital Mary Poppins bag of reference docs, models, and guidelines for how I think about things professionally. It serves as my “career Real Book,” a compilation of standards that reflect my own spin born of 15 years of learning and leading. The structure—the song’s sheet music—stays the same, but the details—the interpretation of the music in a live setting—morph as I evolve.

Some examples of what I’d consider my career “jazz standards”:

• Career case study log: personal learnings and high-level business results from every role I’ve held

• Leadership principles: consolidated thoughts on managing a team

• Monthly achievements: quick reference for monthly wins and progress against goals, useful for quarterly and annual performance reviews plus ad hoc reflection (when did I hire that person? when did we launch that campaign?)

• Skills plan: leadership and technical skills I’m comfortable with, and those I need to develop; I use the latter as fodder for quarterly leadership goal selection

• First impressions: whenever I join a new company or start a new role, I make a brain dump list of initial impressions so I can capture my gut reaction to things before I get subsumed (happily!) into the everyday business rhythm and can’t have an objective view

• Brand marketing principles: tenets I’ve crystallized for building and leading brand, through the lenses of strategy, structure, systems, and skills

P.S. Some jazz standard playlists, if you’re inclined: my favorites, female vocalists, trumpet-forward, no vocals, blues.