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… Read more »
Posts Tagged: chord voicing
Sounds and Scores – Mancini
This is Henry Mancini’s famous book on orchestration. Every musician should own a copy. It has been around for many years in many formats but exists now as a book with accompanying CD. Sometimes I just like listening to the example CD and reading trough the score like it is a very cool story album…. Read more »
Red Garland Block Chords
Red Garland’s block chords are arguably his most famous stylistic contribution to jazz piano. While overuse tends to make you sound a bit on the loungy side of things and can make you sound like a Garland wannabe (for better or worse), judicious use of this trick can come in handy in a number of… Read more »
4-note 3/7 rootless voicings
Voicing will go a long way toward defining your sound as a pianist much like a sax player gets known for a certain tone or a vocalist has a certain quality. The 3/7 4-note rootless voicings are an essential mainstay and go a long way in achieving a framework for basic improvisation and other more… Read more »
Chords 101
People often ask me how to begin to learn to play jazz piano. Unfortunately, even if you are (or were once) a fairly skilled classical player there is no one semester class or latenight video infomercial lesson series that is going to work for this. You need to become somewhat obsessed – listening to a… Read more »
