Jazz Piano School

Simple 15-20 minute routine to get 4th chords under your fingers! In this podcast, we walk you through a simple practice routine to get the powerful diatonic 4th chords ingrained into your musical concept. With consistent practice of these exercises, your fingers will naturally start falling into beautiful shapes based on 4ths. If you have questions or suggestions for a podcast lesson you would like us to do, please leave them in the comments down below.

What is the Power of the "And?" In this podcast, we show you one of the best kept secrets of swing: the "and." With these 3 exercises, you can take your swing feel to the next level. Follow along to harness the Power of the "And!" If you have questions or suggestions for a podcast lesson you would like us to do, please leave them in the comments down below.

Lots of people dive into all sorts of voicings. Myself included. What are 3 note voicings? What do they do? Why are they important? When should you learn them? How do you integrate them and use them? I'll answer all these questions in this podcast to give you all the necessary information you need.

This week I, Brenden Lowe, owner and founder of Jazz Piano School make a statement about how we as a company stand for #BLM. We also are gathering blues tributes from as many people as possible in honor of George Floyd, BLM, jazz, the blues, and the resilience, fortitude, oppression, suffering, courage and bravery the African American people went through to deliver the great music of jazz. If you have questions or suggestions for a podcast lesson you would like us to do, please leave them in the comments down below.

This week we continue our analysis of Bud Powells solo over Anthropology. We also learn about WHY taking small, bite sized, improv lego building blocks from transcriptions and solos is MUCH more beneficial than just learning the enter solo from the get go. After we analyzed the individual parts, THEN we can learn the entire solo. But if we fail to understand what is happening, then the only thing that happens is we copy what someone else has done when we're improvising instead of spontaneously improvising from our own soul. Which would you rather do?

You know what can really take things to the next level? A good old-fashioned shout chorus! The best pianists such as Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, and Nat King Cole utilized shout choruses in their trios. Sometimes they took sections and ripped them straight from their favorite jazz big band arrangments! Check out some of our favorite shout choruses in this week's podcast.

Bud Powell was clearly and innovator of his time and greatly contributed to the language of jazz we all use today. In this podcast episode I'm going to analyze Bud Powell's solo over "Anthropology" but at the same time teach you HOW to deconstruct improvisation solos into what I call "Lego Building Blocks". This strategy will not only help you be able to use the ideas quicker, but will allow you to combine them with others in order to create your own solos more effectively. I absolutely love helping students with this because I use to learn licks and lines and simply plop them right into my solo. And guess what? It was CLEAR that what I had just played was NOT spontaneously improvised by myself. It sounded fake! So this "Lego Building Block" strategy is sure to help you with that problem.

If you've been looking for a way to spice up your chord progressions, try this fun harmonization exercise! This podcast will show you how to take the simplest melodies and give them a more interesting underlying chord structure. Your harmonizations won't be the same after this!

A pedal point is when you keep the same note in the bass while changing the chords on top. Doing this for a series of measures creates a sense of both connection and tension. Using pedal points builds energy so that when the bass note finally changes, the harmonies of the tune seem to burst forth like a waterfall breaking through a dam. This lesson explores how to incorporate pedal points into your own playing.

This jazz piano podcast tutorial series will show you how to mix things up and keep your left hand voicings sounding fresh. In this episode, we discuss chords you can use with structures made from fourths and clusters. After this video, you will have the sounds of McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans in the palm of your (left) hand!