Jazz Piano Lesson: Jazz Piano Lick 008

Eighth in Frank’s HUGE collection of bread and butter jazz piano licks to add to your bag… by ear, intellect, eye, and muscle…

Table of Contents

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Lesson Goals

To deeply internalize the sound, feeling, and function of the three Tonic Minor Triad Chord Tones (Do, Me, So) and the passing tones that connect them with each other.

Don’t underestimate the value of this seemingly simple study. The knowledge and skills presented here are fundamental to how an enormous amount of music works… and elevate your capacity to hear, read, feel, perform, compose, and improvise in every kind of musical genre.

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Special Note about the Design of these Studies

An extremely effective way to internalize any new lick and to simultaneously develop your comping and soloing chops is to play it “in context”: within an established form over a set of standard chord changes. In this lesson the context is a Minor 1-6-2-5 (i-viø7-iiø7-V7) turnaround chord progression in a 16 bar form in the key of C Minor (a commonly used jazz key).

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Jazz Piano Lick 008 (Etude #1)

Primary chord tones and passing tones, ascending, played over chord roots. Notice that each primary chord tone (Do, Me, So) falls on a strong beat, while each passing tone (the scale tone that connects them) falls on a weak beat…

Don’t try to force fit each and every note into the meter. Hear, think, see, and move your body like as if each three-note set “Do-Re-Me”, “Me-Fa-So”, and “So-Ti-Do” is a musical word, each cycle through the four chords is a musical sentence, and each 16-bar form is a musical paragraph.

Listen to Frank demonstrate one way to play this at 120 beats per minute…

Functional Ear Training: Don’t try to hear strings of intervals. Simply recognize the unique sound-feeling of each three-note “chord tone-passing tone-chord tone” cell and connect that experience to your knowledge of music theory, your visuospatial awareness of the keyboard, and the physical gestures you use to express these sound-feelings.

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Jazz Piano Lick 008 (Etude #2)

Played over four-note block chords in the middle register, connected using voice-leading. Here’s where knowing your minor scales really pays dividends…

Listen to Frank demonstrate one way to play this at 104 beats per minute…

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Jazz Piano Lick 008 (Your Homework)

Use what you know about form, meter, scales, chords, chord progressions, chord voicings, and left hand patterns to play these etudes in other keys you expect to play in and see what you discover.

Special Note from Frank: If there’s interest, I’d be happy to write this out in a few other keys.

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Study & Practice Reminders

1. You’re singing the Solfege or scatting aloud in order to internalize the sound-feelings, right?
2. You practice with a metronome or rhythm track in order to instill good time, right?
3. You record yourself, listen to the playback immediately, self evaluate, and respond accordingly, right?

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