Jazz
About Jazz assessments
We offer a range of assessments for learners playing jazz piano, flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn, and trombone. These include Performance Grades and Practical Grades at Grades 1 to 5, Performance Assessment and Ensemble exams.
Jazz Performance Grades are digital exams and are available worldwide from January 2024.
Face-to-face Jazz exams (Practical Grades, Performance Assessment and Ensembles) are only available in Australia, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore and the UK.
Please note, fully written-out piano scores are not currently available for some tunes in the Jazz Horns syllabus. We’ll provide an update when they’re available again.
Read on to find out more about Jazz exams.
To find a syllabus, use the instrument selector below. Choose from Jazz Piano, Jazz Flute, Jazz Clarinet, Jazz Sax, Jazz Trumpet or Jazz Trombone.
There are four sections to a Jazz Practical Grade, giving you the opportunity to demonstrate your skills through prepared work and musicianship tests.
- Three tunes – a blues, a standard and a contemporary tune, all including improvisation
- Scales, arpeggios and broken chords – common patterns found in jazz
- Quick study - play at sight or reproduce by ear a short phrase and improvise a response.
- Aural tests – testing all-round aural awareness and musicianship skills
The tunes cover a wide range of styles - from New Orleans and swing through to modal, jazz-rock and Latin jazz. Each arrangement contains a fully notated head and at least one section for improvisation, with a simple chord sequence and set of guideline pitches.
Scales are organised progressively to develop technical control, flexibility and knowledge of the instrument needed for improvisation. They'll also familiarise you with the common patterns, roots and key centres found in jazz. You'll play patterns like pentatonic and blues scales and various modes, and over the grades you'll build up a variety of these patterns on common roots.
Aural and musicianship skills are a fundamental part of jazz performance and improvisation. In solo work jazz musicians must hear in their heads the rhythmic and harmonic context in which they are working. In jazz ensemble playing musicians must make choices about their role within the overall texture and the notes or rhythms that are most appropriate to play. The aural tests are designed to help you to listen to music in this way and to foster working by ear. The aural tests can be extended into exercises for developing improvisation and other jazz skills.
Jazz is an aural tradition, and the ability to learn new material quickly and recreate it by ear as well as from notation is vital. The quick studies help you develop these skills through recreating short phrases and improvising an 'answer' to them. In the exam you can choose whether you do the quick study by ear or at sight.
Downloads
Performance Grades for Jazz Piano, Flute, Clarinet, Saxophone, Trumpet and Trombone will be available worldwide from January 2024.
These are digital exams assessed from a video recording by a specialist examiner. There are no booking periods or exam sessions so you can choose when to book, record and submit your exam.
Jazz Performance Grades are available at Grades 1 to 5. They have a strong focus on performance, including:
- interpretation and embellishment of material
- solo and improvisation
- playing with characteristic jazz tonal colour
- sustaining an idiomatic groove in a way that reflects the realities of jazz performance.
For the exam you perform a programme of four pieces. All pieces must be chosen from the syllabus, with at least one from each list: Blues, Standards and Contemporary Jazz. Each piece contains a fully notated head and at least one section for improvisation with a simple chord sequence and set of guideline pitches.
Unlike other Performance Grades, there is no own-choice piece. Choosing pieces from the syllabus ensures that candidates include an element of improvisation in each item of their programme.
Jazz Performance Grades and Jazz Practical Grades have the same repertoire lists and the pieces are available in the following books:
- Jazz Piano Pieces (Grades 1 to 5)
- Jazz Tunes (Grades 1 to 3) and The AB Real Book (covering Grades 4 and 5) - for Jazz Flute, Clarinet, Saxophone, Trumpet and Trombone
You can find full details in the qualification specification and syllabuses, available to download on this page. You should also read our Performance Grade guidance which includes important information about recording and submitting your exam video. Follow the link below to find out more.
Downloads
Download PDFs of the Jazz Performance Grades Qualification Specification and the Jazz Piano and Jazz Horns syllabuses.
