Inflames, so far as easy standards go. I suggest you go with the ones with fewer chord changes to begin with. Most of the tunes listed on this thread so far are among the easier kind of tunes.
It does depend on what you mean by easy too. Tunes like Autumn leaves or Blue Bossa are simple in that they have very straight forward melodies and the chord changes are relatively basic.
Something like Giant Steps has a rather complex set of changes but the melody is super easy.
Or Scrapple from the Apple, which has a more difficult melody but the chord changes are a bit more basic.
For me, I class the complexity of a tune by the complexity of the changes really.
So something like Autumn leaves, which has a very diatonic chord progression would be in my ‘beginner’ category because when improvising you only need like 2 or 3 scales to sound nice. Then you can get a tune like Just Friends which has some more interesting changes. Then at the other end are your Giant Steps and your Jordu’s , Well you Needn’t ect.. which takes you into the more contemporary jazz tunes.
dede; I would recommend you spend a lot of time listening to these tunes played by other people.
Improvisation is not as ‘improvised’ as many people think, in jazz. Most players have a general idea of how they like to solo over particular tunes. They might have 4 or 5 roughly written solos for any tune, from which they draw upon when ‘improvising’.
The best argument for this would be a Miles Davis collection I came in contact with, where there are about 15 live recordings of him playing ‘So What’ on separate occasions. On At least half of them he played the same solo, give or take a lick here or there.
So having said that. Listen to other guys take solos over the tunes your learning. See if you can pickup just 2 bars of what they did. Then see if you can come up with a few bars yourself.
Don’t push yourself to improvise everything at once. Write simple melodies then do variations on them. Over time you will have enough ideas to really start improvising. Generally speaking though, try and hang onto the sounds you come up with. If you dig a particular lick, use it over and over, make it part of who you are. This is more about ‘finding your sound’ but still important to building a vocabulary for improvisation.
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