How to Play Jazz Piano
In this lesson I try to answer the questions of ‘How to Play Jazz Piano.’ This is quite a difficult question to answer because Jazz is a very fluid and broad genre. There is no ‘right’ way to play Jazz. Consequently, it’s often quite difficult to create a prescriptive series of steps which you must follow in order to be able to play Jazz. The whole point of Jazz is that the musician is just as involved in the composition of a song as the composer. This is why Jazz musicians generally use ‘lead sheets’ rather than ‘sheet music’. Lead sheets intentionally only give you the skeleton of the song (just the basic melody and chords) and force you to make up the rest. It’s up to the musician to take this basic information and turn it into a fully-fledged performance. Nevertheless, when you are just beginning to learn to play Jazz, you’re naturally looking for some guidance about what to play and how to play.
What to Play
First, let’s deal with what to play. I would recommend starting with a relatively simple, melodic, diatonic, slow Jazz ballad that use a lot of ii-V7-I’s (as this is the most commonly used chord progressions in Jazz). You should generally start with something slow and simple and pleasant sounding, before jumping to more fast and complex stuff like Bebop or Post-bop. Personally, I would recommend starting with songs like:
- Autumn Leaves
- Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise
- Fly Me to the Moon
- Blue Bossa
- Satin Doll
- How High the Moon
- What is this Thing Called Love
- All the Things You Are
- There will Never be Another You
- Georgia on my Mind
How to Play
As I’ve already stated, it’s neither possible nor desirable to give you a one size fits all approach to playing every song. Again, the whole point is that you create something yourself that is a reflection of your own personal taste and style. Nevertheless, when playing from a lead sheet, it’s best to think about the song in layers of complexity.
We start with the four elements of music – harmony, melody, rhythm and timbre – and we play each of them in a simplistic and basic manner, more or less as written on the lead sheet. Then, gradually, we begin adding layers of complexity to each of these elements. There’s a million things you can do, but as a few examples:
| Harmony | Melody | Rhythm | Timbre |
|---|---|---|---|
| 7th Chords | Basic melody | On the Beat | Plain |
| Chord Voicings | Fills | Syncopation | Add dynamics |
| LH techniques | Harmonise | Vary rhythm | Add articulation |
| Substitutions | Improvisation | Rubato | - |
Of course, each of these layers of complexity for each element needs to be learned and practiced separately and then added to your song. If you’ve never played rootless voicings before, you can’t just sit down and start sight-reading a brand new song using rootless voicings. You need to first work them out for that song, practice them separately and then add them to your performance. The analogy I like to use is that these different concepts or techniques are like the ingredients in a meal.
Playing from sheet music is like cooking from a detailed recipe. You are told exactly what ingredients to use, how to prepare them, the order in which to use them, how to cook them, and how long to cook them for, etc. To make a delicious meal you do not need to know a single thing about cooking, you simply need to follow the instructions line-by-line.
Playing from a lead sheet, on the other hand, is like getting a generic request like ‘Make me a cake.’ It is then up to you to decide what kind of cake you want to make – what ingredients to use, in what order to use those ingredients, how to cook the cake, for how long to cook it, etc. It’s entirely at your discretion. But in order to be able to do this you first need a basic understanding of what ingredients are available, how they taste, how they interact with each other, how they react to heat, how to combine them using various cooking techniques, and the different ways you can cook a cake, etc.
With a lead sheet you’re given the basic melody and chords, but it’s then up to you what you do with them, how you modify them, and what techniques and concepts you apply to them. You could take any song, put in a walking bassline, play the chords using rootless voicings, insert a tritone substitution, and improvise over it all using the wholetone scale. In this way, you will have spontaneously created a ‘Jazz Performance’. But in order to do this you need to know the basic ingredients of Jazz Piano. I discuss many of them in my lesson on the ‘Minimum Requirements for Jazz Piano‘.
In Practice
So to answer the question of ‘How to Play Jazz Piano’ I would say the following: learn to play the the song in a simplistic manner, then slowly add layers of complexity to each of the four musical elements. I demonstrate this in the below video. I take section A of Autumn Leaves, play it as a complete beginner might, and then slowly start adding more and more complexity until we have something resembling a Jazz Piano performance.
Now, in order to get an interesting and full sounding song you typically need a bottom, middle and top part. Missing one of those registers will cause the song to sound a bit hollow – like it’s missing something. If you’re playing with a bass player, great they’re covering the bottom part. But if you’re playing solo piano you’ll want to include some kind of bassline at the bottom, the chords in the middle register, and the melody on top.
Below is a table of how I would approach learning Autumns Leaves, and how I would gradually add complexity to it until it sounded like a Jazz performance.
At first the song will sound really boring and simplistic, but that’s the point, that’s how we learn. Then towards the bottom it’ll begin to sound a bit more like a real Jazz piece. It’s all about just adding more and more layers of complexity on top of your basic song. We started with 7th chords and the melody, then gradually added more interesting chord voicings and left hand techniques (such as a walking bassline), and varied the rhythm to make it a bit more interesting. And all the while we tried to have a lower, middle and upper part so as to create a full and complete sounding arrangement.
And this is just the beginning. We’re only really discussing chord voicings and left hand techniques here. We haven’t talked about adding passing chords, or chord substitution, or articulation, or phrasing, or dynamics, or voice leading, or side-slipping, or using exotic scales, or motivic development, or changing the meter to 5/4 time, or playing with a Latin rhythm, and so on. There are countless things we can do to continue adding more and more layers of complexity. But that, in a nutshell, is how you play Jazz piano.