Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Chord data for jazz standards

I recently started playing jazz on bass guitar. So naturally, I also recently started writing software for facilitating jazz practice.

As a basis for a number of my projects, I needed access to chord data from a corpus of jazz standards. The best source I found was the database of user-submitted scores for the IReal mobile app: https://www.irealpro.com/main-playlists

I've been converting these to an easy-to parse json format. The current database of songs can be found here:


Here is an example score:   
  
{ "Title": "Alone Together", "Composer": "Schwartz Arthur", "Key": "D-", "Rhythm": "Medium Swing", "Sections": [ { "Label": "A", "MainSegment": { "Chords": "Dm6|Em7b5,A7b9|Dm6|Em7b5,A7b9|Dm6|Am7b5,D7b9|Gm7|Gm7|Bm7,E7|Gm7,C7|Fmaj7|Em7b5,A7b9" }, "Endings": [ { "Chords": "Dmaj7|D(Em7b5),(A7b9)" }, { "Chords": "Dmaj7|Dmaj7" } ] }, { "Label": "B", "MainSegment": { "Chords": "Am7b5|D7b9|Gm6|Gm6|Gm7b5|C7b9|Fmaj7|Em7b5,A7b9" }, "Endings": [] }, { "Label": "A", "MainSegment": { "Chords": "Dm6|Em7b5,A7b9|Dm6|Em7b5,A7b9|Dm6,Bm7b5|Bb7,A7b9|Dm6|Em7b5,A7b9" }, "Endings": [] } ] }