Can Jazz Piano Lessons Really Teach You to Play Jazz?By Tony Dunne
If you want to learn to play jazz, you might be asking yourself whether, given the improvisational nature of the music, taking jazz piano lessons can actually teach you to play the music at all. After all, isn't the purpose of jazz to play as you feel? Well, the way jazz is played may be difficult to pin down, but this article contains a 7 point action plan to get your career as a jazz musician started.
After reading the article, you'll be equipped with an outline of the best path for most beginners to take in learning the rudiments of jazz and translating that learning into playing jazz on the piano.
Here is the 7 point action plan to get you off to a flying start:
1. Familiarise yourself with some of the basics of written music and learn to recognise the staves, notes, time signatures, etc.
2. Familiarise yourself with basic chord tabs. You can buy charts illustrating all the main chord positions in both major and minor keys.
3. Learn the major and minor scales to the point where you can play them all, preferably with both left and right hands together. Scales are particularly important when it comes to establishing one of the chief basic building blocks of jazz, or of any style of music.
4. Learn all the basic chords, including the root position, 1st. and 2nd. inversion of every major and minor scale.
5. Learn all the major and minor 7th. chords.
6. Buy a book of your favorite tunes. Make sure the arrangements are commensurate with your ability to play, i.e. don't be afraid to use very simple arrangements if you're a complete novice. You won't be paying too much attention to the notes themselves, but they might help as reference points should they be needed. Make sure the book has the chord symbols marked at the top of each stave.
7. Pick a tune from the songbook. Ignore the notes on the stave. Now, play the chords with the left hand and the melody with the right. Create a steady rhythmic pattern with the left hand and make sure the notes you play with the right fit into this time signature.
Yes, it will sound awful. Even after quite a lot of practicing, it may still sound awful. But keep practicing anyway and feel free to use the written score as a prompt.
Of course, even to reach this point you've had to work pretty hard. You've studied written music, practiced scales and chords... and you're very slowly learning to improvise. But you have managed to arrive at a point where you can play your own arrangement of a song. So the answer to the question posed in the title of this article is a most definite yes...jazz piano lessons really can teach you to play jazz.
And there's never been a better time to start. Conventional music lessons still predominate, but the development of multimedia and the internet has made possible entirely new ways of learning to play a musical instrument, especially the piano. Indeed, there is one jazz teacher currently advertising lessons on the internet who provides students with 1-to-1 lessons in his studio AND 1-to-1 lessons via webcam in the student's own home. And these lessons work.
Obviously, the 7 point action plan described above is a very rough outline of a much more detailed program of learning you will have to undergo. You will have to give careful consideration to the kind of lessons you sign up to. If you can afford to, you might benefit the most from a personal tutor, either in the tutor's home or in your own. But, whatever kind of jazz piano lessons you're thinking of exploring, you will find them on the internet. In the meantime, why not start putting this 7 point plan into action. And good luck.
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