Girl From Ipanema

Let's do a deep dive on this jazz standard and work out both the chords and the melody.

It's been played so many ways over the years that it's tricky to find the "authentic" version of the song, but we'll cover a pretty standard version of the piece here.

This piece has just two sections, and A part and a B part. Let's examine the A part.

It repeats twice before moving on. 

Examining this progression Diatonically, it's pretty baffling, so we can't rely on our traditional intuition here.

Notice that the Gm7-F#7-Fmaj7 movement is a Tritone Substitution on a 2-5-1 progression, though!

The B section cycles through many chords, but they boil down to 4 chord shapes (Maj7, Min7, 9, and 7b9), so you can do it!

Lastly, we return to the A section, but we end with a vamp on the Fmaj7 and F#7(#11) chords.

Now, let's go over the melody too! Here is the melody for the A section.

This is the way that I like to play it, but since jazz is all about improvisation, I encourage you to play it however you like!

The notes don't fall cleanly along with the chords, and a lot of interesting rhythms come out when both are played together.

Onto the B section.

Learning the melody helped me to appreciate the flow of the song better. You can see here how the melody repeats through modulations, treating the sections of the B part as different keys.

And the return to the A section.

The melody repeats it's last line along with the vamp in the chords.

If you're having a difficult time imagining the chords and melody together, you can listen to them both together right here.

Try playing along with the chords, and then try it again with the melody. Can you get both parts down?

Lastly, I'd like to look at a fingerstyle rendition that allows us to play both parts simultaneously.

Naturally, this version is significantly more difficult than anything else on this page!

There are some changes here, to simplify the melody for a single player, and also to add some unique flair. If you can get this rendition down, you'll have a very strong understanding of the song!

As before, we'll go through each part individually. First, the A part:

The B Part:

And the return to A along with the ending vamp:

I hope this study on Girl From Ipanema was insightful for you.

If you're interested in going further, I invite you to examine the chord progression structure in-depth, and then try to understand how the melody overtop relates to each chord being played.

Jazz is a difficult genre, and a good start for anyone interested in the genre is to learn and study as many standards as possible.

If you enjoyed working through this track with me, keep going and learn as many as you can!