All The Things You Are

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 Here’s the full 2-part etude based on All The Things You Are. First, the basic outline using different polyphonic patterns: allthethings.pdf And now with some melodic activity added: allthethings2.pdf And here’s a rather clumsy rendition of it: [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Of course, the idea is to use that as a foundation and to play around with [...]

The Chord-Tone System

Thursday, April 10th, 2008 I just wanted to share my approach to learning to play over changes.  What has worked for me is to stick to playing the basic chord-tones: 1-3-5-7.  I take whatever tune I’m working on, and improvise at a very slow tempo, only with chord tones. The objective is to really get inside the changes, to really [...]

Polyphonic Patterns Applied

Sunday, March 30th, 2008 I started messing around with applying patterns to some standards.  Here is one I came up with for All The Things You Are: Because of the constant movement in fourths, it pretty easy to apply a repetitive pattern like this.  Other progressions require a little more creativity. Here’s the same pattern with some added melodic movement: [...]

Three-part Counterpoint: Revisited

Monday, February 18th, 2008 As promised, here is a recording of the etude I posted not too long ago. I learned it as is, and then slowly started to improvise with it…mostly just playing with rhythmic anticipations and adding a little motion to the bass line. I still need to work on it a bit, but I [...]

Cantus Firmus Blues

Friday, December 28th, 2007 In an effort to add contrapuntal textures to my playing, I’ve been messing around with species counterpoint and trying to apply it to jazz tunes. Here is my first attempt, a cantus firmus for the blues in Bb: So first, I started playing it and improvising a line on top of it in first species.  This proved [...]

A Basic 2-part Study for Standards

Sunday, November 25th, 2007 Here’s a simple excercise to start applying some counterpoint to standards. I got the idea from Neil Olmstead’s book Solo Jazz Piano: The Linear Approach. It consists of playing the melody of the tune along with a simple bass line: the root and 5th of each chord in half-notes. Simple! But it can [...]