Jazz Piano Lesson: Jazz Piano Lick 028

Twenty-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 commonly used enclosures for the tonic chord tones in a major key.

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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 G Major Triad played for four bars.

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Jazz Piano Lick 028 (Etude #1)

The pattern is simple: Play each tonic major triad chord tone (Do, Mi, So) on a strong beat and approach it by playing an “enclosure” on the weak beat just before it. This enclosure, played in swing 1/8th notes consists of the diatonic scale tone just above the chord tone and the minor 2nd just below the chord tone…

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

Functional Ear Training: Each “target note + enclosure” set can thought about, heard, and felt as a musical word where the enclosure (played on a weak beat) creates harmonic tension and establishes an expectation while the target note (played on a strong beat) resolves that harmonic tension and satisfies the expectation. As you play, use associative listening to quickly internalize each set: Re-Ti-Do, Fa-Ri-Mi, La-Fi-So,… by ear, intellect, eye, and muscle.

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Jazz Piano Lick 028 (Etude #2)

The pattern is simple: Play each tonic major triad chord tone (Do, Mi, So) on a strong beat and approach it by playing an “enclosure” on the weak beat just before it. This enclosure, played in swing 1/8th notes consists of the minor 2nd just below the chord tone and the diatonic scale tone just above the chord tone…

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

Functional Ear Training: Each “target note + enclosure” set can thought about, heard, and felt as a musical word where the enclosure (played on a weak beat) creates harmonic tension and establishes an expectation while the target note (played on a strong beat) resolves that harmonic tension and satisfies that expectation. As you play, use associative listening to quickly internalize each set: Ti-Re-Do, Fi-La-So, Ri-Fa-Mi… by ear, intellect, eye, and muscle.

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Jazz Piano Lick 028 (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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