Angel Eyes, Improvisation

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Bob, welcome to jazz piano skills. I'm Dr. Bob Lawrence, it's time to discover, learn and play jazz piano well. Today's part three of our three week exploration of the jazz standard Angel Eyes. Week One, a couple weeks ago, we took a deep dive into the harmonic foundation of the tune, followed by last week's dissecting of the melody and phrases to be followed up, of course, with today's challenging look at various ways to use Angel Eyes for developing our improvisational skills. It's fun, just fun, right? What's great about you know, our three tier approach to learning tunes, right? Harmony, Melly improvisation, is that it quickly reveals our strengths and weaknesses. Right? Our strengths and weaknesses regarding the various essential jazz piano skills that we need to have a command of and how important is it that we actually have an accurate understanding of our strengths and weaknesses? I'll tell you how important it is. There's no way to improve our play and without having an accurate understanding, simply impossible. You know, the last couple podcast episode lessons in today's lesson, when you put it all together, all three of them, you get a pretty good understanding, pretty good report card, accurate report card, as I like to say, of just exactly where you stand. We know pretty quickly, right with our ability, our abilities to play the critical jazz panel skills that are needed in order to play tunes. Now I made a point to mention several times, I think maybe every episode since the start of the year, that there is indeed a sequential order to learning how to play jazz piano, which you know, which shouldn't surprise you, right? I mean, after all, I can't think of any high level skill and learn how to play jazz panel is definitely a high level skill. I can't think of any high level skill that you can have success with without developing a strategic game plan for developing that skill. And I can guarantee you that a scattershot approach, as I or as I always call it, a YouTube approach to trying to learn how to play jazz piano will only cause frustration and confusion. Now, there's good stuff out there, right, but when you try to cut and paste and put things together and try to figure it out based on the the limit, limitless number of videos that are out there, well, good luck, right? Good luck. You know, my goal from day one with jazz piano skills has always been to not only introduce you to the essential jazz piano skills, what I call Discover, but to provide you with a way to successfully study those skills, to learn them, and a process for developing a physical command of those skills. In other words, play them, right? Discover, learn play. I've also mentioned several times since the start of the year that you know, if you've been a faithful jazz panel skills listener over the past four plus years, you're, you're in a great spot, right? You've, you've become intimately familiar with the jazz panel skills needed to successfully begin tune study. You know, I've mentioned it that if you haven't been grinding along as well, right? That you know it's no big deal, right? Those podcast episodes are still out there for you to sift through. So no worries, this is a great time to jump on board to begin developing and enhancing, enhancing your skills. And the tune study that we we do every single month, right the tune study that we do will help you actually do that, sift through the and prioritize the last four years of podcast episodes so that you can maximize your jazz piano skills growth right now, immediately. So as I like to say, if you're a jazz piano skills vet, fantastic. If you're a rookie, jazz piano skills rookie, that's fantastic too. You're in the right place at the right time to begin a jazz journey that will have a very profound impact on your understanding of me. Music, and, of course, on your jazz piano playing as well. So today you are going to discover an improvisation approach for Angel Eyes. You're going to learn how to practice regional improvisation, what I call regional improvisation. And you're going to play and focus on various harmonic and melodic phrases from Angel Eyes to develop and enhance your improvisational approach and skills. So as I always like to say, regardless of where you are in your jazz journey, a beginner, an intermediate player, an advanced player, or even if you consider yourself a seasoned and experienced professional, you're gonna find this jazz piano skills podcast lesson exploring Angel Eyes to be very beneficial. But before we get started, before we jump in, I want to, as I always do, welcome first time listeners to jazz piano skills. And if you are new, new to jazz piano skills, and you're new to the jazz piano skills podcast. Well, welcome. I want to invite you to become a jazz piano skills member. Your membership will grant you access to premium content for this podcast episode and for every weekly podcast episode, and the premium content will help you thoroughly and correctly discover, learn and play the jazz standard that we are currently exploring, Angel Eyes and so much more. You know, for example, as a jazz panel skills member, you have access to the past, current and future educational weekly podcast packets. Now, these are the illustrations, the lead sheets and the play alongs or backing tracks that I design and develop to help you get the most out of every weekly podcast episode. You also, as a jazz panel skills member, have access to a self paced and sequential jazz panel curriculum, online curriculum, which is loaded with comprehensive courses containing all the courses containing educational talks. There's interactive media learning media to help you digest conceptually the jazz panel skill being taught. There's video demonstrations and all 12 keys of the skills and so much more. You also, as a jazz panel skills member, have a reserved seat in my online weekly masterclass, which is held every Thursday evening, and if you can't attend, it's no big deal, no problem, because the master classes are recorded, and you can watch and re watch the class whenever and as often as you wish. Now you also have access to an online interactive fake book that contains must know, jazz standards. You know the standards have great chord changes. Core skill relationships are mapped out. The harmonic function analysis is there for you as well, listening suggestions, historical insights and so much more. And as a jazz panel skills member, you have access to the online, private jazz panel skills community, where you can hang out with some old jazz buddies and make some new jazz friends as well. So great forums to to dive into each and every week. And finally, your jazz piano skills membership grants you unlimited private, personal and professional educational support whenever and as often as you need it now, all of these amazing privileges are waiting to help you discover, learn and play jazz piano. So check it all out at jazzpanel skills.com and, of course, become a member to begin enjoying premium podcast content and all of the other privileges that I just mentioned. Of course, if you have any questions once, once you get to the site and poke around a little bit, don't hesitate to contact me. I'm happy to spend some time with you and answer any questions that you may have and help you in any way that I can. Okay, so on to the question of the week. And this week's question comes from Nina Fowler, living in Buffalo, New York. And Nina writes as an aspiring jazz pianist, I was wondering if you might be willing to put together a list of the things we should not be doing when studying or practicing this challenging art form. I ask because I noticed that jazz teachers are always pontificating. Yes, we are always pontificating about the things we need to be doing, but no one ever talks about the things we shouldn't be doing. I think a list of do nots would be very helpful. Thanks. Huh? Well, I gotta be honest, Nina, I'm feeling a little convicted right now. Are you, are you talking about me? Is this pointed directly at me? I bet it is. But okay, all right, even if it is, that's fine, right? So it's a great question. Nina. Yeah, and I must admit, I must admit, you are 100 100% spot on. We jazz teachers love and I mean, we love to talk about all the things you need to do, all the things that you should be doing. And we touch upon the do nots, as you stated, rarely, if ever so

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you ask and you receive. So here is my top 10 list, my top 10 list of the do nots, the do nots when studying and practicing jazz, specifically jazz piano. Now I'm going to go, I'm going to count backwards from 10 down to number one, all right, from 10 down to number one. So here we go. My Top 10 do nots when studying and practicing Jazz, Jazz Piano. Number 10, do not establish unrealistic expectations. In other words, this is a lifelong journey, right? This is not something that like I I say, you know, it's not like putting together a model airplane. You sit down, you get all the pieces out, glue them together in a matter of hours. You have, you have a model airplane. This is not it. So this is a lifelong journey, and it's a fabulous lifelong journey because you are constantly in the state of learning and improving and getting better, and too often, too often, students will come and, you know, question I get asked often is, you know, how long will it be before, you know, I'm really, really playing jazz piano. How long will that be? The answer is, a long time. It's going to be a long time, because I could ask that question, how long is it going to be until I actually really play? Right? So we're always in a state of wanting to get better, always in a state of wanting to improve, always in a state of not really being happy with our our plane and wanting to play at a much higher level. So you know, number 10 just do not establish unrealistic expectations. Again. This is a lifelong journey. Number nine. Number nine is a biggie. Do not forget about posture. In fact, I don't even I don't even know if I've ever talked about that, maybe in the beginning, in early podcast episodes. But you know what posture? It's everything. And I cannot tell you if I had 10 students come in here, into my office and sit down at the piano, I can guarantee you probably nine out of 10, if not 10 out of 10, are going to sit at the piano incorrectly. The bench is going to be too close to the piano. Their butt's going to be too back, far back on the bench, they're going to be slouched over like Bill Evans, which, by the way, had horrible posture. I know he played great, right? But no piano teacher is going to teach that, just not going to teach that. So, you know, the elbows get back behind you. You look like you got chicken wings. It's just right posture. It's no different than if you were signing up to take golf lessons with a golf pro. The very first thing they would talk about is how to properly stand, hold the club, and how to swing right, and how important it is to start with the right mechanics. Otherwise you're you're in an uphill battle that you'll never win, and piano is no different posture, making sure that you're sitting in such a way that you're toward the front of the bench. The bench is far enough back that when you place your hands on the piano, I should be able to take a yardstick and basically slide that yardstick in between your stomach and your elbows right that hope you can kind of get that imagery right. So posture, find out what good posture is, and start to be consciously aware of how you are sitting at the instrument number eight. Do not get the cart ahead of the horse. In other words, songs before skills big and I mean, big mistake, right? How in the world you're going to play songs if you don't have the skills to play the song? I just, I just don't get that. If you can't get around on your instrument with the. Essential Skills. How in the world are you going to play a song so you can't just dive in and start playing songs and expect to get better? In fact, there's never been a song ever written with a student in mind. In fact, songs are not designed to help you get better. They're just not now, I'm not saying you shouldn't play songs. I'm just saying don't get the card ahead of the horse. Don't think the songs is going to produce the results, right? Practice the skills. Hence the title of the podcast, jazz piano skills. Okay? That was number eight. Do not get the card ahead of the horse. Songs before skills. Big mistake number seven, do not practice skills without identifying them, first and foremost, as sound and then properly labeling them. I am practicing major sounds today. I am practicing minor sounds today. Today, I'm going to focus on dominant sounds, right? In other words, music is the production of sound. Be aware, that is what you're doing, right? So your ears can lock in and start to digest, oh, this is what minor we're living in, minor today, right? Everything starts with understanding the sound that you're producing and properly labeling them. So do not practice skills without identifying them as sound and properly labeling them. Number six, do not practice skills. This is huge. This is big. Do not practice skills as exercises. You know why? Because they're not exercises. They're music. They're music. A scale is music, an arpeggio is music. Voicings are music, right? The skills are music. So approach them and play them like music because they're music. If you approach them as exercises, your mental, your mindset, is wrong, right from the get go, and the results will be poor. Okay, just that simple. So do not practice skills as exercises. They're not they're music. So make music Okay, number five. Do not make speed a musical goal. If you do, it will produce devastating results. And what I mean by that is when students start to intentionally practice speed, quite often, a lot of stuff flies out the window. First and foremost, articulation, the sound that they're producing on the instrument, the cleanliness of their plane. There's so many things that go south when you try to practice speed and you're not ready for speed, right? Speed is a product of familiarity, right familiarity, so let speed start to organically develop right. Practice those skills as music. Right. Focus on being musical, and I promise you, as you become familiar and comfortable with skills, your speed will naturally increase, okay. Number four, do not make the mistake of thinking. And this is a big one too. Do not make the mistake of thinking long practice sessions are better than short ones because, you know why? Because they're not. In fact, I could argue the opposite. Short practice sessions are much better than long practice sessions. Do not be thinking, I have to have two hours or three hours at a pop to sit down at the piano. In fact, that there's going to become a point with long practice sessions, honestly, there's going to become a point of diminishing returns, where you're sitting there going through motions, but really nothing sticking. You might be doing all the right hand movements or whatever, you know, but there's nothing sticking. So, you know this is, this always reminds me of like in college, right? Remember, we had the three hour night class. Whoever came up with that idea, I don't know this horrible, right? A three hour night class, and even when it's a subject that you love, even when I had a three hour night class in college, and it was a music night class for three hours, I promise you 20 minutes in, we were all looking at our watches going like, hey, when's the first break, you know, man, this we already feel like we've been here an hour, right? So I think if you can adapt, adopt a mindset of short practice sessions, I'm talking 20 to 30 minutes at tops, you're going to be much more productive. Okay? So do not make the mistake that long practice sessions are somehow better than short. Number three, do not make make the mistake of thinking all jazz skills. Listen to this. This is really important. Do not make the mistake of thinking all jazz skills must be part of your musical arsenal, right? For instance,

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I challenge you to try to find recordings of Oscar Peterson playing pentatonic scales. Good luck, right? Not every jazz skill needs to be part of your musical arsenal, so don't be spending a lot of energy, time and effort trying to cover everything right. There are going to be some skills that you may elect not to have part of your arsenal, and that's okay as you develop your jazz approach, your jazz sound. So do not make the mistake of thinking that all jazz skills must be part of your musical arsenal, because that mentally, psychologically, that's a bummer. That's a downer, because that's all there are a lot of different jazz skills, and I don't utilize all the various jazz piano skills when I play, and they're not all part of my arsenal. I've made some conscious decisions about what skills I decided to to adopt and to focus on and work on as being part of my vocabulary. Okay. Number two, do not try to accomplish more than one thing with each practice session, right? So every single practice session should have a single practice objective. What happens is, if you sit down at the piano bench and you haven't even decided or determined what your objective is, before you sit down, it's too late. It's too late. You're going to be doodling, you're going to be doing a lot of different things during that practice session, and have a very low return on your investment, if any return at all, very low return on your investment. So before you even sit down at the piano, I would consciously make a decision on what it is that I am going to be focusing on today, what it is, what sound, what skill, right, and how are you going to practice it? Right? One single practice session equals one single practice objective so important. And number one, drumroll, please. Okay, no drum. But you get the idea here. Number one, no, do not, do not, under any circumstances, neglect paper practice. It's the practice that you put in away from your instrument that is going to produce enormous results. The time that you spend mapping a concept out, spelling scales, spelling cores, mapping out inverted shapes, mapping out voicings, mapping out progressions, doing harmonic analysis. I could go on and on and on and on. It's the paper practice the time away from the instrument that preps you to have an incredible return on your investment when you do get to the instrument right so do not neglect practicing away from the instrument, what I like to call paper practice. Okay, that's my that's my top 10 list. Nina, so take that right there. I just talked a whole lot about do nots, right? And these are some pretty important do nots that honestly, honestly, need a great question, because I think we need to talk about these do nots more frequently. So I thank you for your question. It's great idea, and I hope that my top 10 list is helpful, and if you want to discuss the list in more detail, or if there are some points that need further clarification, then do not hesitate to let me know. Contact me, right? I'm happy to help you and kick this. Kick these. Do nots around a little bit and help you get a even a greater understanding. So let me know. Okay, so let's discover, learn and play jazz piano. Let's discover, learn and play Angel Eyes. This is part three, right? Our improvisation approach. Okay, I present my outline for studying and learning in tune every time, every week, right? Because it's important and I want to review it again. And. We're going to do this again next month and the month after that as well. But you know, when learning a tune, as I have mentioned, genre makes no difference. I don't care whether it's a jazz tune or rock tune, R, B, folk, country, pop, I don't it makes no difference. I have a five step process. I go through number one, I listen, I listen a lot. I check out various artists from various genres, vocalist, instrumentalist, and, of course, pianist number two, I'm always initially have to determine form. I want to know the form of the tune. Is it A, ABA, form, A, B, A, B, so forth, right? Every tune, every tune, has some kind of form. What is it? Right after I have the form as a pianist, I kind of lock into the chord changes. I want to listen for common harmonic movement progressions, like 2511451625, so on. So I I tack the chords. And then, of course, along with the chords, uh, voicings, okay, then number three, number four, after I kind of have a handle on the harmonic Foundation, I'll turn my attention to learning the melody, and, of course, always what by ear. And then after I have the chords and melody, right, I I'll explore that melody using various treatments, all right, like ballads, bosses, swing so forth, and then finally, number five, after I have all that, I'd like to have a little fun and explore improvisation approaches. And I do that in a variety of ways. We're going to look at some of that today. But you've all heard me talk about various zones, harmonic zones, and patterns and motifs and tension, all of that's important, right to understand and then to utilize or to implement when improvising. But that's it, right? Nothing more, nothing less, those five, that little checklist of five. So, you know, two weeks ago, we focused on gaining harmonic familiarity and command of Angel Eyes. So we listened, you know, we determined the form. We explored the chord changes, harmonic function and voicings. And last week, we did our melodic analysis of Angel Eyes. So we looked at the guide tones and phrases, target notes, interpretation, fingerings, right? Our goal has been and will always be, whether it's our harmonic analysis or melodic analysis, or even the improv, right? Our goal is always to keep things really kind of clean and tidy with our approach as much as possible, whether it's a scale study or tune study. Why? Because our conceptual understanding paper practice, our conceptual understanding of all that we do musically must be structured, must be simple so that, so that we can execute it right, we can replicate it and execute it over and over and over again. And you all can attest to the fact that I have said it many times over the past four plus years, that if your conceptual understanding of music, or of any musical skill, is not structured and simple, then it must mean that it is unorganized, complicated and confusing. And if it's unorganized, organized and complicated and confusing, conceptually,

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you're in trouble. If it's unorganized and confusing, complicated conceptually, upstairs, then you have no shot at executing it in your hands, downstairs on the piano. Therefore, it's absolutely critical. It's essential that we keep our tune study very structured, very simple and very replicatable, as we do month after month after month. So the educational agenda for today is as follows. Number one, we are going to be in part three to discover, learn and play Angel Eyes improvisationally. Number two, we are going to listen, of course, listen to a definitive recording of Angel Eyes. Number three, we will discuss, discuss some essential ways to develop improvisational skills. Number four, we will stress understanding, of course, court scale relationships and a regional approach to improvising. And number five, we will explore how to use the changes of Angel Eyes to practice improvisation. That's that regional improvisation I'm talking about. And number six, I will be playing demonstrations today at a nice, comfortable ballad tempo of 70. So as always, we have a ton to get done today, no doubt about it. So if you are a jazz piano skills member, I want you to take just a few minutes right now. I want you to download and print your podcast packets. These are the illustrations and the lead sheets and the play alongs. And again, your membership grants you access to these. These, this material, the premium content, right, not only for this podcast episode, but for every weekly podcast episode, past, current and future. Yeah, right. And as I mentioned every week, right? You should have this material, these podcast packets, in your hands when listening to the episode, to get the most out of it. And of course, you should have them sitting on the piano when practicing as well. Now, if you are listening to any of the popular podcast directories, such as Apple or Google, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon, Pandora, on and on and on. Then I would go directly to jazzpanel skills podcast.com that's jazz piano skills podcast.com and you will find the active download links for each of the podcast packets in the show notes. Or if you prefer, you can log into your jazz piano skills account and from your Dashboard, navigate to this episode, where you will find one convenient link to download all three podcast packets in one convenient bundle. So okay, so now that you have your podcast packets, I want you to grab your lead sheets as always, right? And you should have five lead sheets in your packet this week, five lead sheets. I want to just quickly walk through them. Lead sheet, one you should have. It's titled C minor Root Entry, and you will see that starting with measure one, that C minor, I'm starting on the note C and and I'm modeling for you here what I call regional improvisation practice, right? So I have a pattern mapped out in the A section and a pattern mapped out in the B section. Now, if you look at lead sheet, two, same deal, C, minor, third entry. So if you look at that first measure, I'm starting on that E flat, and again, I have pattern, a melodic pattern, launching from that E flat through the A section. And then I do the same type of deal in the bridge as well. And then lead sheet three. Guess what? You could probably already predict it. I'm going to start my regional improvisation practice now. Starting launching from the fifth of the C minor sound the fifth. And you'll see my pattern there for the A section, and then again, for the bridge. And then finally, lead sheet 4c, minor seventh entry. So you look at measure one, and I am beginning my improvisation regional practice right, launching from the seventh of that C minor sound, or the note B flat. And then finally, on lead sheet five, chord scale relationships. We're going to talk about this as we get into the lesson today, the blues pattern being used over Angel Eyes in the A section, and then the chord scale relationships that exist in the bridge. Okay, so there are our five lead sheets that we will be tackling today. So what is the very first thing that we do when studying any tune and any facet of any tune, whether it's a harmonic analysis, melodic analysis or improvisation? We did it two weeks ago. We did it last week, and again, we're going to do it again today, right? It's we listen and we listen to various renditions of a tune, and today, well, I typically listen to vocal renditions, which we did a couple weeks ago, followed by instrumental rendition that we did last week with the modern jazz quartet. Fabulous. And now I like to turn my attention to pianist right? So today we're going to check out the King of Kings when it comes to jazz piano, right? We're going to check out Oscar Peterson performing Angel Eyes. This is a 1954 recording with the great Ray Brown on bass and the great herb Ella song guitar, the Oscar Peterson trio. So I want you to, as always, grab your favorite beverage, and I want you to sit back, relax, and let's check out. Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown her Bellis Performing Angel Eyes. Here we go. You.

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So beautiful. You know, a legitimate argument can easily be made that Oscar Peterson, without question, is the best jazz pianist of all time. You know, every time I listen to him, I shake my head in disbelief with regard to what I'm what I'm hearing always tasteful, technically perfect and musically moving and inspiring. If I was ever in a situation where I had to pick, literally, if I had to pick only one jazz pianist to listen to for the rest of my life. I think it would have to be, it would be a difficult decision, but I think it would have to be Oscar Peterson, so now let's explore those lead sheets. So I want you to grab lead sheet one. Let's discover how to properly begin developing our improvisational skills using Thank you for listening to jazz piano skills. The remaining premium content of this episode is available to jazz piano skills members at jazz piano skills podcast.com Visit jazzpanelskills.com to learn more about membership privileges and become a jazz piano skills member. Thank you.