Block Chord Piano Lesson

This is a video clip from Dick Hyman’s excellent series of jazz piano instructions. He outlines several useful patterns for playing block chord across the diatonic scale including mixing in a ‘drop 2′ voicing used widely by Barry Harris, Bill Evans and OP. Drop 2 on piano is a port of an orchestration technique for opening up a closed voicing for a horn section where the second note is dropped down an octave. On piano, it is often played with LH on bottom note and RH handling top 3. Hyman explains that the sweet zone for these types of block chords is middle octaves where the instrument is resonant but they can sometimes work high as well for certain melodies.