Knowing a Tune vs. Owning One

When you run a jam session, you have to be ready for anything. Someone walks up and calls a tune. it could be a standard you've played a hundred times or something you haven't touched in years. Could be something you only kind of know and have to fake your way through until your ears catch up. That's part of the deal. You say yes, count it off, and figure it out.

Over time, you build a list. For a while, I thought that list was the whole point. Know more tunes. Be ready for more situations. Cover more ground. And there's a lot of importance there.

But there's a difference in knowing a tune and owning one. Once you hear it, you can't unhear it.

There's a version of every tune you can play through cleanly. The changes are right, the melody lands where it's supposed to, and the form makes sense. From the outside, it probably sounds fine. But you know something is missing, and it's hard to name because it's not a wrong note or a missed change.
It's like reading a poem out loud without knowing what it means. You can read every word correctly. Pronunciation, rhythm, punctuation. All of it is technically right. Someone listening might even nod along. But you're not inside the poem. You don't feel the turn in the third stanza or why that one word lands harder than the others. You're delivering it, not saying it. That's what it sounds like when a musician plays a tune they know but don't own. The notes are correct. The poetry isn't there.

At the last Moody's jam, I asked a musician who was sitting in what tune they wanted to play. They listed off a few of the usual standards. Wave. Take the A Train. Then the bassist said "How about Alone Together?"
For a long time, I knew Alone Together. Really knew it. I could call it on a gig, get through it, make something happen. But if I'm honest, I was navigating it more than playing it. Moving through the changes, hitting the melody, filling space. There was no surprise in it for me, which meant there wasn't much life in it either.

That changed because of an afternoon that wasn't supposed to be anything.

My band mate and brother-in-law Brandon Dorris and I stumbled into a recording session together on short notice. Brandon and I go way back to college. We started our jazz journey at about the same time, learned alongside each other and figured it out as we went. We also spent years running a jam session together where we grew from just a couple of students looking for a place to play into mentors helping other musicians find their footing. Somewhere in all of that, we built a shared musical vocabulary that I don't fully have with anyone else. Nothing formal that afternoon. We just wanted to put a few standards down raw. A quick demo to have something to send out when we were chasing gigs. No plan, no rehearsal, just roll tape and see what happens.

We landed on Alone Together and started without thinking too much about it. No bass. No drums. Just two saxes. And something happened in that first A section that I wasn't expecting.
Without the rhythm section underneath us, we had nowhere to go but toward each other. We started trading the melody back and forth, not soloing, just passing the tune between us like a conversation. A phrase. A response. Space. Another phrase. And in that space, I actually heard the tune for maybe the first time. The melody has weight to it. The tension just sits there if you let it. The release feels earned when you don't rush toward it. We weren't just playing the melody to get through the song. It was all right there in the simplest, most stripped-down version of itself. Two horns and the tune. Nothing else. When the rhythm section came in, it felt like home. After that, I owned it.

I don’t think there’s a shortcut to that. You can’t manufacture the moment. I think what happened that afternoon is that the conditions were right for the tune to speak to me. No crutches. No rhythm section filling the gaps. Just the melody and what it actually says if you stop playing over it and start playing with it.

Knowing a tune is information. Form, changes, melody. You need all of it. But owning one is something else. It’s the tune becoming part of how you think musically rather than something you’re executing from memory.

Most of us have a few tunes we truly own and a much longer list we’ve learned. That’s fine. I think it’s honest. The real question is whether you know which is which. Because there’s a difference in how those tunes feel on the bandstand, and the people listening can hear it even if they can’t say why.

What I’ve started doing is paying attention to where that gap lives. Not to feel bad about it, but to stay curious about it. Some tunes need more time. Some need a different entry point, a recording you sit with, singing it away from the horn, a stripped-down moment like that afternoon with Brandon. Some tunes need you to get out of your own way.

Alone Together taught me that owning something isn’t about knowing it more thoroughly. It’s about letting it become familiar enough that it starts to feel like yours. Like you’re not playing someone else’s tune anymore. You’re just saying something.