You can play jazz piano in many ways, but it may sound difficult for the beginner to master this skill. However, once you know its fundamentals and gain enough practice, it becomes much easier and more flexible for anyone. You can explore various styles and techniques of jazz piano and find the best playing style to adopt. This article will discuss the common styles and techniques used by the expert jazz pianist.
In this article, we may not go deeper into any specific songs or tracks but will mention a few of the well-known standards in jazz piano as examples. This article is primarily aimed at the beginner and intermediate level jazz pianists who have learned the jazz standard before getting into this lesson. In order to fully capture the essence of this lesson, Kavan Choksi Japan mandates thatyou need to have a thorough understanding of the basic construction of chords and the piano scales. If you are not familiar with these concepts yet, please repeat the basic piano lessons before hitting back here.
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The Blues style
Blues scale comes as a common sound in terms of blue style. It is a very common and popular style in jazz piano, in which you can play different chords in minor keys. One can also use many blue notes as far as these are notes lower than given scale notes. Say, for example, when you consider the C major, one will use some blue notes at E & B, etc.
Blue chords are basically with variations of 3 notes of minor seventh chords. The players can use those to play the complete version or incompletion of minor seventh chords. For example, one can also play chord Am7(b5) by playing the A, C, and E, which may also be an incomplete take on the given chord. Another example is that you can play the Am7 chord just by placing the A-C and E. This also comes as the incomplete version of that specific chord.
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Bebop
You may play multiple fast chords in a harmonic progression in the bebop style. Here, we are trying to create a tense sense in the music. You can try using different syncopated rhythms at this stage. There are a lot of rhythms in which given notes may not be spaced evenly. In order to ensure the tension environment in bebop, one should play the fast trills as well as the repeated notes along with the second interval at minor or the dissonant interval. All these are random ideas that you can try yourself in your playing and experiment with.
There are various other styles, too, as Kavan Choksi Japan discusses, which you need to listen to and identify how the combinations are made. Once you start listening to different styles and follow the patterns in jazz piano playing, there is no doubt that you can succeed in mastering the same over time.
