a little jazz exercise oscar peterson pdf writer

#A little jazz exercise oscar peterson pdf writer how to#
#A little jazz exercise oscar peterson pdf writer series#

There’s loads of dissonance, and the use of syncopation goes far beyond just making the music sound ‘cool’. As much as these books build technique and musical intelligence, audiences will appreciate these pieces performed with panache! Jazz-SolalĪ classic collection that every piano teacher should own and use! These pieces are sometimes resolutely within the jazz idiom, to the point where they don’t have that easy pop appeal that we often associated with the term ‘jazz’ in piano pedagogical writing. This book probably also qualifies for the next section of the resource file (Fake Jazz: written out improvisations) because much of the purpose of these studies is to introduce the vernacular of jazz piano improvising: the fluent use of scale and pattern to build witty melodic lines, for instance. You may even find the writing slightly conservative at times! Examination boards the world have recently embraced these exercises, and many a Grade 5 or 6 student will have learned at least one of these gems over the past five years. These exercises are fully notated and have no improvised element to them whatsoever. One of the giants of 20 th century jazz piano dedicated himself to creating classical-style jazz studies that could be used by piano teacher to introduce the style of jazz to their students. Jazz Exercises, Etudes, Minuets and Pieces by Oscar Peterson Great for students who really do want jazz piano skills. Even better, there are plenty of exercises with backing tracks and lots of recorded examples of the music on the page, so students can use this book for listening-learning as well as playing-learning.įinally, there are a number of chapters looking at specific strategies for comping in a range of performance contexts (with bass and drums, with a guitarist, comping your own solo) and solid suggestions for building skills toward performances. To master the art of comping pianists need to practice chord progressions and voicings, and this book lays out these exercises in a clear but concise method. In other words, this is a perfect book to follow on after Chord Play, by which stage students will feel sufficiently confident to delve into the more complex world of jazz piano comping.

#A little jazz exercise oscar peterson pdf writer series#

All the basics of chord chart notation are covered, but more as a reference than as a series of exercises.

#A little jazz exercise oscar peterson pdf writer how to#

This is a book dedicated to teaching you how to play jazz from a chord chart, but it does expect you know how to read a chord chart with some degree of fluency first. It’s all kept comparatively basic (note: I said ‘comparatively’!), and by the final page students will be able to learn jazz standards from a fake book and actually know (more or less) what they are doing. This way of approaching jazz skills is absolutely inspired, particularly when it comes to students who suddenly age 13 or 14 announce they want to ‘learn to play jazz’ the first section gets their hands doing the kinds of things jazz pianists do, and it’s only once this is becoming solid that we move to reading from lead sheets. The book is divided into Part 1: Jazz Hands, Part 2: Jazz Eyes, and Part 3: Basic Jazz Repertoire – The Standards. Hanon clearly has such a hold on the piano teaching community that his name is cheerfully invoked with regularity! And here’s another jazz-Hanon blend, but with some nice differences. There are backing tracks, too, so working through an exercise suddenly seems like a reward. I would suggest getting students to practice the right hand part in both hands, and then the left hand part in both hands, as well as working through each exercise as written. With a written out ‘assignment’ you have the work literally spelled out for your students.

It’s the kind of practice you want to assign simply by saying “now play it in every key” but you know your students will do two or three transpositions and then give up. Jazz harmonies are turned into Hanon-style arpeggiated figures and repeated in every one of the twelve chromatic positions over a 2 octave stretch, first ascending then descending.

This book is kind of ugly, and kind of unbalanced (all the exercises have busy right hand, static left hand), and the reference to Hanon is a loose association at best, but if and once you can get past these objections there’s a lot to like about this volume.