I am still making progress memorizing the first 25 songs in my list of over 100 tunes that I consider standard enough for jams. Before I started memorizing I heard from many people that they thought the secret was associating some songs with other songs and recognizing similar patterns that repeat in each of them. While I don’t feel that this is “the” personal secret to memory, I do catch my memory using this trick quite often and here are some that I noticed so far:
The rhythm part to “Jive Bomber” and “Heavy Artillary” is similar. I think when Grappelli put “Jive Bomber” together, he borrowed from the latter song. “Nuages” and “Out Of Nowhere” have a similar chromatic run in them as well as both being in the key of G. “After You’ve Gone” and “All Of Me” are in the same key and share similarities in chord progression and voicings. Even “J’Attendrai” reminds me of certain parts of “All Of Me”. “Minor Swing” and “Minor Blues” are literally interchangeable and you can lay either progression on the other as long as you match the key. Also, just like “Minor Blues”, “Douce Ambience” can have a similar walking progression which sounds nice. “HoneySuckle Rose” and “Sweet Sue”, although in different keys, have a similar first few bars.
Some of these things I notice are things other people probably don’t notice and I probably have not noticed even more things which could help but as I continue memorizing hopefully some of these become more apparent.

On this day 50 years ago, May 16, 1953, Django died of a stroke after returning from an afternoon of fishing along the Seine. At age 43 it was certainly too soon but it is believed that he left us with over 700 recordings. With 2000+ minutes of material it would take you almost 2.5 days to listen to all of it.

After about another 15 hours of practice I have managed to lightly memorize the first 24 songs on my April 11th list. I don’t necessarily have them well memorized though and so I am going to sit on my current list for about 2 weeks and drill them further into my thoughts. I also plan on playing around with the arpeggios in the Cruishank book and also the Horowitz picking book and I will try to apply what I learn to my current song list.
Since I started memorizing songs one whole month ago, I have made more progress that I made in the whole last year. I would recommend this kind of learning approach to everyone. For 2 years I “thrashed” around and fiddled with every song I could get a hold of and as a result I could never remember anything. I developed pretty good technical ability in the process but I was handicapped by having to tote around a book of sheet music. It was even more difficult when I got together with people to jam, especially at night when I could not see my sheet music. Hopefully, now things will get easier for me.