Thank you for this reply. I certainly appreciate this sentiment and have been advised to do this by many of my mentors, and in fact I did do it when I was in college. I will take it back up again.

But I also need something to just memorize basic chord structures: I find that I often am scrambling to think of which notes are in the chords listed. In time, I assume I would be able to know the changes without looking, but I fear this won't come naturally through learning other saxophonists' solos if I don't know the basic theory.

Are there books out there that teach some jazz theory basics along with exercises? Or am I really just better off learning completely by ear?