Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Jazz Study Group: Autumn Leaves, ATTYA, etc.

hey jazzwee,

i just got into this thread a few days ago--at the end. but today i went back to the beginning to see how it stated. what a great project! kudos to you for getting it all going!

anyway, haven't gotten a chance to read all the posts up to this point. but can you bring me up to speed a little bit as far as what we are working on now, because i'd love to get more involved with this.

are we still working with "autumn leaves" mainly? i'm going to do some youtube videos really soon so i'd love to post a recorded version of the tune.

dave, you're obviously a professional so you can skip all the lessons and teach as a few things as well.

But the thread has kind of expanded into other things. Sharing. Exchanging ideas. Posting music. So please post a version of autumn leaves. We have posted other tunes here too like ATTYA. There's no limit. Anything jazz is great! We're mostly amateurs here so a posting from a pro is always appreciated.

So there's no real topic now. The thread was quiet for awhile and then some new people like TLT started to follow the lessons again and then we resurrected the whole thing again.

Aside from the usual topics in the lessons, certainly Swing is often discussed here. You don't have to go too far back before it's back in the picture. Certainly input on that is always appreciated since swing isn't the easiest thing to explain in words.

But it's more fun when we post things of general interest since most of the old participants have graduated from Autumn Leaves

Hi All,

I am one of the older thread participants here. A few posts above, I wrote about how happy I am with the Baerman Jazz book. I thought I would share a written solo from the book. It is a Bill Evans style solo.

You will hear some arpeggiated chord tones and just a very simple, clean line. I am trying to accent those off beats.

The left hand chords are made up of shell voicings and rootless voicings. The metronome in the background is clicking on beats 2 and 4. On the CD, it is played much faster.

http://www.box.net/shared/qmqppb7p2p

Barb

jazzwee,

thanks! i will definitely post a version of "autumn leaves" and some other stuff as well.

just wasn't sure if there was any particular voicing style that we were doing, but now that i know it's pretty much all open i'll mix it up and do some different stuff in my version.

Very Nice Barb! Just love the full sound of the Bill Evans style.

Dave, I think the only versions of AL I've posted stuck to standard changes and consistent voicings but even I play AL reharmonized too so I just did it plain here for educational reasons. But the 'mixing it up' is the best way to do it. It will reinforce that point that I made a long time ago that the lessons show the multiple ways to approach a tune.

it's nice to have a place where pianists can go to bounce ideas off of each other.

when i was very young i would occasionally get the chance to sub on a trio gig in utica ny. it was a steady gig, every friday, at a nice little restaurant, that's unfortunately long gone now. but my favorite part of the night was after the gig. because there were a couple of older piano players who would usually come by and sit in. and after the gig--when the staff was cleaning up and all the customers were gone--we would have a little informal piano session. i can remember playing "like someone in love," and then one of the other guys would sit down and play a little bit of it...and so on. we'd talk about voicings, and reharm techniques and other stuff. it was really great! i learned a lot from those guys!

i do miss that kind of thing. so it's nice to be able to create that here.

Thanks Jazzwee. Maybe someday it would be nice to chat about the different swing styles that differentiate the pros. I like Evans because I understand his playing. His ability to create melodies is amazing. I love his left hand jabbing chord style.

Dave --- this is your new home away from home. I am thrilled you found us.

Barb

Well maybe we can create that atmosphere. That would be helpful especially for me. I started jazz only 5 years ago so I don't have any experiences of piano when I was younger

We've had some other pros stick in here in the past so if this thread stays up where it's visible, maybe the old timers will come back and join the fray.

Just to start it off, here's my friend playing Windows. I've been trying to emulate his feel and I think I'm getting there.
http://www.box.net/shared/dxm4ukgij6

Up to page 30 and counting, altho' I have taken to reading backwards from the 180's pages, and will eventually meet in the middle.
Some advanced concepts which I bookmark to read next time through, the index is very helpful, I have to force myself to stop reading, so I can actually play!

thanks so much! this will be really good for me too!

i'll try to get my "autumn leaves" video up in the next few days.

Question, I'm still at the beginning stages here. So I'm still holding the 1/7 in the LH, but adding one extra note to the 3 in the RH. I thought for fun I'd add the 5 to the 3 in the RH, so starting with the Am I put the 5/3 then for the D7 I did 3/5...is that a good thing to practice?

It seems like kind of nice voice leading because the right hand goes from more open to more closed sounds.

I realize now that the reason the 3 is so "right" in the RH is that on each chord that's where the melody rests, every other chord. It goes up stepwise from the root of one chord then ends up on the 3 of the next chord. I think.

Nikalette, you are very astute here. You can go ahead and read the latter lessons on 3 + 2 voicings. The answer is yes, you add more notes on the RH. Typically you would choose to add the 9th. The 5th can go in between 1 and 7 (1/5/7) if you're in high enough register.

But note that the upper note has to be the melody note. So if you're playing the head you will be typically playing 3 notes on the left and 2 notes on the right plus a melody note. That's what I call a 3 + 2 voicing. When you are comping a solo, the LH cannot play all these notes so that's when more varied styles are used.

The typical LH combinations are:

1. Occasional Root (like once 1 bar) + Rootless voicing
2. Shell 1/7 or 1/5/7
3. 1/5
4. 1/3 (at higher registers)
5. Tenth voicing (1/10) same notes as 1/3 but spread out.
6. 5/1

BTW - I show these left hand voicing examples and then you will find as you listen to some jazz masters that it may not sound like any of the above.

The reason is that advanced jazz involves reharmonization. This means that you actually play a different chord than the one stated in the lead sheets. A knowledgeable player is able to reharmonize on the fly and change the stated chord. So it's not as simple as it looks.

Thanks for the 2 posts. I do know about reharmonization and it's something I try to do, but haven't really learned how, although I did it by ear for the guitar piece I did for our final in our summer guitar class (my daughter and I)...I sang and played Nobody Knows You because it has some fun chords for blues and they substitute nicely. I sang it in G and for one C# dim I sub. F# major or minor, I forget which, but it sounded good. Then on my way down to an E7, I did a G, F# major, then E, kind of a chordal walking bass. I love walking basses. I also sub a dimin. chord of some kind for a D7 by sliding the D7 up a fret or 2. See what I mean? There's no rhyme or reason to it, but I know enough theory and enough chords to play around. Altho' I think piano is a better instrument (sorry guitarists) and more logical, it's easier to fake stuff on guitar, altho' I can't tell you why. Just like it's easier to sing a song with lots of improvized notes thrown in without knowing what they are or why they sound good. I wish I could play piano by ear.

Nikalette, guess what? I'm a guitar player. Been playing for 40 years But I defected...

Cool! (backpedaling furiously) I don't know for sure which is harder to play, but the piano is a lot easier on the body. I played folk guitar way back when, just 1st position chords and finger-picking so I could accompany myself singing. During our summer class, we did so much...an excellent teacher, my fingertips on both hands ached constantly. So I learned to play riffs, and play up the neck, and use a pick, all in 6 weeks. Do you still play? I was worried that if I get callouses again on my left hand, it would affect my piano playing...and the 2 songs I practiced the most had picking...on my new guitar with steel strings, it hurt like heck. My RH's back to normal, but I still have callouses.

Barb, I really like that...now I'm going to go ahead and buy the beginning book, I was trying to decide between that and the intermediate book....

Nikalette - Guess what -- At first I bought the Intermediate book. I did a few pages and knew right away that Baerman was assuming a lot of previous knowledge. So, I then ordered the Beginners book. My Intermediate book will be used ---- someday

What I am doing, though, during my daily exercise walk, is listening to the CD from both books. I am immersing myself in that swing feel.

Barb

Barb, you asked about Swing style and I can give you my observations of Bill Evan's swing style. One of my tasks long ago was to copy his swing style. When he plays medium tempo to fast, he swings very hard. Close to triplet feel (2:1). If you slowed it down it would sound corny. But he plays it with such precision when he does it fast. Bill is one of the 'hard' swing players. But he he's playing slow, he will straighten out the swing. Usually it's the opposite. The faster you play the less the swing.

I would say he swings harder than the typical modern player. If you have a program that can slow the music down like Transcribe, you can hear the swing that is more extreme than most. Also, he and Wynton Kelly can swing hard uptempo.

Just so you know, my teacher had me learn Bill's swing style, and then after learning it told me to tone it down for normal playing (straighten it out and focus more on accents). It is very hard to play with that extreme swing and maintain time. We can't all do it as precisely as Evans. But it was a great exercise in understanding how some of the masters swing.

Nikalette, no need for backpedaling. I've lost interest in guitar frankly. And I don't like the callouses that limit my finger sensitivity on my LH. But what I did like about guitar was that I liked improvising on it. Now that instrument has been taken over by my son who plays very loudly daily! (Metal).

But it is portable...