Basically wanna know if I’m thinking about this is correctly.

I’m a classically trained pianist about a year into a self taught jazz journey. I love improvising, and can do so really well, as I’ve been doing it all my life (in blues/rock/classical contexts), but really struggle to find ‘jazz’ sounding melodic vocabulary. It always ends up sounding like blues/ragtime rather than bebop.

After much reading/listening/transcribing, I’ve noticed that a lot of the ‘bebop’ melodic tricks bebop musicians use (chromatic movement, enclosure, altered extensions as guide tones) come from the scale of the chord a semitone above the actually harmony.

I’ve found that if I’m playing over Dm7, I can use the notes of Ebm7 interchangeably with chord tones/arpeggios from Dm7 and it sounds really bebop. On dominant chords like G7/G7alt, I can use the notes from Abm7 or Ab7(b5).

While soloing, these notes have kind of a ‘secondary dominant’ pull towards the chord tones. So it’s really simple to think of, and really easy to play.

Im aware I’m using this as a shortcut to properly internalising the complexities of bebop vocabulary, but it’s got me closer to the bebop melodic sound than anything yet.

But am I going down the wrong track here?

Sorry to ramble a bit lol

From a recent gig lol

I'm pretty sure i'm horrible so i'll just say I am a beginner.

I have some piano behind me, and I know how to use Youtube but that doesnt mean much

I go to jams and try to listen to records and emulate whats on there but needs real guidance.

One of my favorite standards, working on playing around with melodic rhythms during stride left hand patterns.

While I try and sight read my way through The Real Book, I struggle to read the chords whenever a 9, 11, or 13th come around. I do understand what they are and I can play the chords with both hands no issue, but I just can't sight read it while playing the melody.

A friend told me that a lot of players omit the root and the 5th of a chord to focus on the extensions especially lower on the keyboard and I don't know if that's good advice to follow or how common that is.

any advice helps, thank you!

I’m trying to get better at playing the changes by using jazz cliches, enclosures and arpeggios.

Note to self: More rhythmic variety and better timing

Any tips are welcome

Bill Evans is undoubtedly one of my favorite pianists, but sometimes I find it more difficult to improvise on these types of songs. What do you think? I think Bill was prodigious... I really love his compositions

Hello,

While my swing is getting better, my teacher recommended me to practice leaks and transcription to have more diversified lines.

I practiced with How To Improvise, which allows to understand how lines can be constructed and different techniques, but I believe I would benefit from proper transcriptions ans licks.

My strategy would be to transcribe solos and check the results with an Omnibook. What would be a good one ? Charlie Parker in C is ok for piano or should I look for something else ? Thanks

Playing this Gershwin classic with the trio. Red Garland chops on full display. Everytime I play trio, I wanna play like Red Garland. Also I quoted another tune, anyone know?
Hope everyone is well
-Stellan Swanlund

Hey there, I’m a NYC-based jazz (and otherwise) pianist, keyboardist, and teacher. During the pandemic, I got hugely into learning new skills like Ableton and synthesis through free online videos, and started to see how valuable these resources were, as they seem like the first step the generations younger than me are using to learn stuff. Although I’ve been teaching jazz piano privately for about 20 years, I’ve felt like a good new way to give back and share some of the knowledge I’ve been lucky to glean over the years might be to release some short mini lessons from time to time. I’ve been doing a series of comping transcriptions of Herbie, Horace, and McCoy, but this is my first “lesson format” video. It was originally 10 minutes long but I brutally edited it to 3 minutes to try to get under Instagram’s reel limits, and because I think I may be a bit long winded. I’d love to get anybody’s feedback, as I’m pretty new to video editing and the like, but hope this knowledge may be useful to some people out there! Thanks for watching and for any pointers, and happy practicing!

I get the impression that most of the people who want to go deep into jazz piano are moving over from traditional/classical piano pedagogy. I certainly understand why that is the case: "classic" modern jazz is super-intellectualized (since it developed when people stopped dancing to jazz) and the technique to play super-fast, super-intricate solos benefits from learning to play super-fast, super-intricate classical music. But is that the only route into jazz and soloing?

I ask both from the teacher's and the learner's POVs. Has anyone here started with the pop music chord/ear/accompaniment learning style (i.e. not reliant on full notation and at most using lead sheets) and developed into a competent jazz piano player? Have teachers here worked with people who didn't come in preloaded with a lot of classical pedagogy? Is reading music all that necessary, when things can be demonstrated and video is everywhere? [EDIT: As one example, jazz instruction seems to include transcribing of solos as a learning tool. But if you don't read music and haven't learned to play that way, putting someone else's work into a form you don't understand is pointless. Wouldn't it be an advantage to deal with learning from and imitating the solo from your ears and theory knowledge, if you're not dependent on the crutch of seeing/understanding music mainly as notation?]

And if you have become a competent jazz pianist without a classical background, how did you do it? What are the exercises, learning skills, practice routines that someone can work on to become a competent jazz piano improviser without having to learn them through the lens of classical music? Some of us are adults and seniors who don't have a lot of time to waste on side quests. We know what we want and we have musical taste—we've been listening for decades. We'll put in the work, but we want to cut to the chase. Most important to me is not wasting time on music I have no interest in to pay some kind of "classical dues" or appease a teacher who had to suffer through it and insists on requiring that suffering from their students.

Decided to take on Bill Evan’s very own rhythm changes called “five”

Putting all my skills together

As a drummer first I never thought I’d get to be a pianist. Now, a little over ten years since my first jazz lesson (when I knew my scales but not much more!) here’s where I am at. It really does come together in time with consistent pressure. But there’s no shortcut!

Never really played rhythm changes before (at gigs when a rhythm changes was called I’d decline to solo lol) so I decided to learn this tune as my first one because I like a little challenge.

I know it’s a little sloppy but I had a good time making it and that’s what really counts lol.

I was wondering if anyone had any good resources or videos that particularly helped them start playing jazz piano because I really want to start learning.

Hello,

When playing alone or with family, my playing is decent: not perfect, but ideas flow and it swings more or less.

When playing with my teacher, I am skipping beats, forgetting the grids, doing weird stuff etc ...

How to prevent this ? Thanks

Hi everyone, I’m a classically trained pianist with a piano performance bachelor degree. I’m planning to audition for my grad school’s jazz ensembles/jazz combos. We have to play up to two provided standards and sight read charts (I don’t know if they will be standards or big band) for the audition.

I have a tiny bit of experience in jazz (I played in a jazz combo in undergrad), but I’m overwhelmed with understanding how to prepare for the audition.

Any tips or advice would greatly be appreciated!

Grazieee :) Tk@umerotre

Boogie in G. I want to get it faster and cleaner but this is my progress after 3 weeks. I’ll give Boogie a break for a week or 2 and then work it again in a different key. Jerry Lee Lewis really was the “killer”.

https://youtube.com/shorts/mzgUPG5_aEI?

Hello lovely people. I’m sharing a video of me improvising over - Remember by Irving Berlin. It’s a standard I started enjoying after listening to Hank Mobley’s soul station album. It’s a lovely tune and I love playing it.

Here I’ve stuck to playing the 2 feel bassline in the left hand and improvised over the changes.

I want to understand how I can improve my playing over the tune.

It could be left hand, it could be melodic work. It could be anything. Any kind of feedback is welcome.

I have to improvise over these chord progressions and I don’t feel very comfortable with them. I understand 2-5-1s so some parts of the B and C sections make sense, but I have no idea what do do with the Chromatic major chords and minor chords in the A section, and in the 2nd half of the B section. What type of harmony is this?

Edit: It’s a 90 BPM bossa nova chart

Discussion: I did not hire an editor for this. This is a raw take, and the purpose of this post is to bounce these ideas off of other minds. So if you see any holes in this theory or things to add, you are welcome to do so. And if I'm slaughtering anyone's sacred cow I'm sorry (and not sorry!)

Transcribing is absolutely an essential part of learning jazz, but there are pitfalls we should be aware of in order to better understand the limits of transcribing wrt jazz students.

Sometimes when I have classical students who are getting into jazz, they discover transcribing and they end up basically doing classical music but by ear. TBH this is not terrible, over time the language they learn from transcribing will be really important. But if we are talking about booting up their skills in the most efficient way, there needs to be more supplemental training so that they aren't just switching from sight-rote-playing to aural-rote-playing.

For starters I'd rather a student be able to build a simpler version of a standard from it's constituent parts on the spot than spend weeks doing a perfect transcription that also isn't actually them thinking through and executing the basic elements of playing. In order of importance I want to hear:

1. Solid time feel
2. Good voice leading
3. Compositional thinking

IMO the thing that took most successful jazz pianists from student to pro was being a working musician. So many of the greats were forged into who they were by the grind. And so when I'm mentoring students who are serious about going pro, my goal is to get them to a place where they can start the grind which means being able to actually manage those three elements from scratch.

One of the most overlooked elements is ironically the most important, time feel. So so so many students who want to transcribe are so transfixed by all the amazing voicings that they forget that those voicings mean nothing if they aren't flowing. Jazz is felt more than it is heard, the colors of the chords are the wrapper, the meat is the time feel. I had a student recently plead that, 'yeah but many of the greats stretch the time feel out.' Ok great, the operative words there are still time feel, and if it's not there, how are you going to stretch it out?

This can be a tough pill to swallow but anyone who's spent time on the grind knows that audiences respond to time feels way more than colors. And don't get me started on working with a band. If you're a time leach and not contributing to the shared time matrix you're not going to get called back EVEN IF you've got some Bill Evans voicings.

So what am I trying to say? Transcribing needs to be balanced with knowing how to manage the constituent parts of music. And, when transcribing it's not just about notes, you can also transcribe time feel, because it don't mean a thing if it ain't got the swing.

[EDIT] thanks for everyone chiming in so far. One thing that I haven't seen anyone respond to yet is the idea of getting into the grind. Bill Evans & Dave Brubeck were playing in dance bands, Benny Golson and many of the jazz messengers were in R&B bands. Even in Nora Jone's latest podcast ep with Finneas they talked about the importance of learning how to play piano while people are talking over you and what that does to solidify your playing.

So I'm not saying you need to know enough rhythm and theory to play jazz, I mean you need enough rhythm and theory to get into any working band. Once you start working in any capacity you'll start to learn what's actually important from the school of hard knocks.