This lesson aims to answer a simple question: ‘What are the minimum number of things I need to learn to be a somewhat competent Jazz Pianist’? Obviously there is no objective answer to this question, but here I will give my personal list of my Jazz Piano Minimum Requirements or a kind of ‘Jazz Piano Starter Pack’ or ‘Jazz Piano Core Competencies’.
Ingredients
Whenever I am learning a new song, I learn it using the following techniques:
| Left Hand | Right Hand | Both Hands |
|---|---|---|
| Bass Walking bassline Stride Root notes Chords (‘comp) Rootless Quartal Shell/Powell | Chords (‘comp) Rootless Quartal Shell Melody Melody Base scale Improvisation Licks/Fills | Chords (‘comp) Two handed voicings Spread Quartal |
Combining Ingredients
Think of these as your ‘ingredients’ for Jazz Piano. It’s them up to you to combine these ingredients into a full song (meal). You have to be able to combine any two of these techniques:
- Walking Bass-line + Rootless Chords
- Walking Bass-line + Quartal Chords
- Stride + Melody
- Rootless Chords + Improvisation
- Root Notes + Two Handed Quartal Voicings
And keep in mind that this is just the minimum requirements for Jazz Piano. It’s enough to make you appear like a competent Jazz Pianist and like you know what you’re doing. You can then start combining these technique to create some interesting variations. For example, you could combine stride piano using rootless voicings and intersperse it with walking bass-lines. And there are countless other voicings and techniques and scales you can learn. Right, we haven’t even talked about upper structures, using chord substitutions, adding passing chords, using the wholetone scale to improvise, etc.
But for each new song, as a bare minimum, I learn to play it using all the techniques listed above. In a sense, this is my quick ‘to do’ list for each new song. Now, obviously this is entirely subjective, so feel free to add or remove other items to make your own customised list.
