Autumn Leaves

"Autumn Leaves" began as the French song "Les Feuilles mortes", with music by Joseph Kosma and words by Jacques Prévert, and became a jazz standard with an English lyric by Johnny Mercer. This page has the Autumn Leaves chords and a swing backing track you can transpose and re-style.

Who wrote "Autumn Leaves"

Joseph Kosma wrote the music and Jacques Prévert the French lyric. The song was written in 1945 and sung by Yves Montand in the film Les Portes de la nuit (1946). Johnny Mercer wrote the English lyric in 1947, and the song became a standard in the 1950s.

Recordings that made it a standard

• Roger Williams (1955) — a piano instrumental that reached number one in the United States.
• Nat King Cole (1955) — a vocal version that made the English lyric widely known.
• Cannonball Adderley, Somethin' Else (1958) — with Miles Davis on trumpet, a long, slow-burning version with a vamp introduction.
• Bill Evans Trio, Portrait in Jazz (1959) — a trio reading with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, the bass playing freely against the piano.

The changes

This chart is 32 bars in two related keys, G major and E minor, and is played as a medium swing at 125 bpm. The form is AABC: two eight-bar A sections and a 16-bar second half.

The A section is the textbook pair of cadences: a major ii-V-I, Am7 | D7 | GMaj7 | CMaj7, and its relative minor ii-V-i, F#m7b5 | B7 | Em. The CMaj7 links the two, so the bass moves in fourths throughout. Learning these eight bars teaches the major and minor cadences at once, which is why the tune is often one of the first a jazz student learns.

The second half starts with the minor cadence, F#m7b5 | B7 | Em, then the major one, Am7 | D7 | GMaj7, followed by E7b9, a dominant that points back to the minor ii. The ending runs F#m7b5 | B7b9 | Em Em/D | C#m7b5 CMaj7, with the bass walking down under E minor, and closes F#m7b5 | B7b9 | Em.

The song is most often played in G minor in jazz; E minor, as here, suits many singers and guitar players.