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New jazz students often take a chat like this a very well-known jazz standard fly me to the moon and they play the song literally. So when on their right hand they’ll play this melody exactly as it’s written almost like a classical piece. It will sound like this, and while that’s a good starting place, if you keep doing that over months and over years you’ll find that there is no real improvisation into your playing and you'll find things become very repetitive, very predictable and we obviously would like to avoid that.
Then the next step they go through is they’ll say well my playing is quite predictable because I'm playing all these notes literally as they are shown there must be some magic scales or there must be some magic notes I can put in to make it sound better. Sure, there are really cool G chords instead of playing a G like this; I could play a G like this which is much nicer. However they are hard to learn. The first step is let’s not try to do some fancy chords. Let’s learn to play these notes but shift the location of when they play it so that they sound a little bit cooler.
Now the only way to really get a feel of that is listen to as many jazz pieces as you can. Notice where the jazz piano player place their notes and how they modify existing melodies to create something a lot more fluid and then you try to replicate that with the song. So for example in this first line here, I might go and there’s a little syncopation there, there are a couple of accents there and a few variations there. Now in that last one you’ll even notice that I didn’t go straight down from—I turned it around. Now, how do I do that? Well that’s very straightforward and it’s based on a little of theory.
So when I see an Am for example I'm thinking what’s a cool note for Am? What are the good notes to aim for? So when I see Am I'm thinking B. B is the second or the 9th by the same note. That’s a good one to start off on. Another number 7, that’s great! So you can hear the accents. It starts of on the 9th and the accents on the 7. I will put the E in and it’s just a five, but E happens to be the 9th or the 2nd of the Dm that I'm leading to. Also notice that the E has passed the F. So instead of going down, I've turned it around from the B going up, going down pass the F and then back to the F.
By doing that I create a little bit more shape to the melody than the current version. So putting a simple left hand to that and by simple I mean just a single not it will sound like this. I could fill in the left hand while using the left hand voicing and those of you who have done a little bit of jazz will know what I'm talking about. It’s basically playing the chords in the left hand. Now we can play some really fancy chords. But for now we’ll just keep them really, really simple. Am7 is just Am with a G with it. Dm7 is D-F-A, Dm with a C. G7, now G7 is G-B-D with F. I'm just playing a subset on that. CM7 s just that.
Notice how I keep the left hand softer than the right hand because I really want the right hand melody to shine. Like I said, what I've just shown you is just a very simple way to take an existing line of music and to make it more your own. Don’t play it literally but use these notes definitely as a guide as starting point but change the locations and way they play it. Put some left hand voicing in, keep the left hand really subdued and let that right hand melody shine.
Once you’ve mastered that out then you're in the position to play more accidentals and putting fancy stuffs in but for now just take that as a starting point.
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