In essence, the two hands are divided in three roles:ġ) Left hand plays Root + 7th or Root + 3rd/10thĢ) Fifth finger of right hand plays melodyģ) Fingers 1 & 2 of right hand plays chord tones This arrangement is great for intermediate level jazz pianists or non-piano instrumentalists who are looking for a way to play tunes using more open voicings. Check out the sheet music and the youTube video to hear it played measure by measure. What I've done for you here at the Shed is to write one of those arrangements to get you started. Now you'll have something new up your sleeve when you flip to a random page in the Real Book and try to "improvise" a new arrangement. But write them in a similar way, in a way that is new to you. That is, write an arrangement of a tune for solo piano. Take a lesson from Bill Evans and plan ahead. I'm hear to tell you that you don't have to just "know" how to do everything all at once. Jazz is a lot more pre-planned than many of us believe. But my Bill Evans discovery changed my thinking - I don't have to know how to improvise solo piano arrangements in that way - Instead, I can PLAN AHEAD and PRACTICE these techniques. I thought, like many of us do, I could NEVER do that. What they were creating was so innovative and mysterious to me that it seemed like they were just pulling it out of thin air. I tell you this because like many jazz pianists, I've always been intimidated by playing solo piano - how do I play the melody/chord/bassline/rhythmic pulse all at once? How do I make the harmony sound as open as Bill Evans? How do I create rhythms as hip as Monk? And so on. (In a similar way, Thelonious Monk was said to plan improvisations for various songs - as he put it, he would plan what his "story" would be) They were the product of practice and careful planning. This made me realize that his creation of beautiful solo piano arrangements was much more intentional than pure improvisation. That is, it was a stroke of pure genius created in a single moment of time, something someone only with the musical mastery of Bill Evans could achieve.īut years later, my thinking changed while I was listening to the Bill Evans solo piano record "Alone." I made an interesting discovery: Take 1 of one song sounds an awful lot like Take 2 - in fact, his statement of the melody was almost the same note-for-note! I was convinced that his work was the purest form of improvisation. He had this way of deconstructing (and then reconstructing) jazz standards in a way that I just loved. As a young student of jazz, I was always mesmerized by the solo piano work of Bill Evans.
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