Jazz Piano Progress

In preparation for my looming attendance at the Jazzwise Summer School in July (2008) as a piano student, I’ve begun work on my jazz piano playing. And boy, did it need work!

In the late 80s I was fortunate enough to have piano lessons with Lionel Grigson (d 1994) - former jazz professor at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Lionel taught me lots about jazz harmony and got me started on jazz impro.

So I decided to find a good jazz piano teacher again to help me with some useful approaches to practising and developing my skills and confidence. I had my first jazz piano lesson yesterday - excellent! I got all kinds of things from it. Whereas I’ve been focusing almost entirely on cementing my chord-scale knowledge in the past few years, we did almost none of that in my lesson. Instead we looked at how to develop interest and momentum from a simple thematic idea. This was brilliant and, for the first time, I really felt I was making some headway as a jazz pianist.

Lots to work to do in the next few weeks, putting into practice the ideas we covered yesterday. Pieces I’m currently working on include ‘My Foolish Heart’ (à la Bill Evans) and McCoy Tyner’s ‘Island Birdie’.

This entry was posted on 29/03/2008 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Education, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.