Just Friends, Improvisation

Dr. Bob Lawrence  0:20  
welcome to jazz piano skills. I'm Dr. Bob Lawrence, it's time to discover, learn and play jazz piano. Well, today is part three of our three week exploration of the jazz standard. Just friends week one, two weeks ago, we took a deep dive into the harmonic foundation of the tune. We followed it up last week, dissecting the melody and phrases of the tune, right, our melodic analysis, and today, we take a challenging look at various ways to utilize just friends to help us develop our improvisational skills. You know what's great about our three tier approach that we use every single month when learning a tune, our three tier approach, harmony, Melody, improvisation, right? This approach quickly reveals, I think you would attest to the fact. It quickly reveals our strengths and weaknesses regarding the various essential jazz piano skills that we need to have a command of you know, and how important? How important is it that we have an accurate understanding, an accurate picture of our strengths and weaknesses? Now the bottom line is, there's no way to improve our plane without having an accurate understanding, an accurate assessment of our skills, of our playing. You know the last couple podcast episode lessons in today's lesson, well, you know what they do that they do exactly that. They give us a very accurate report card. We find out pretty quickly right where we stand with our ability to play critical jazz piano skills. You know, I made a point to mention several times, several times since the start of the year, that there is sequential order to learning how to play jazz piano, which, again, it shouldn't surprise you, right? Because there's not a single high level skill that you can successfully develop without having a strategic game plan. And I can confidently guarantee it that if you use a scattered shot approach a YouTube approach to trying to learn how to play jazz piano, get ready for frustration. Get ready for confusion. And you know what? Get ready to raise the white flag. It's just the it's the facts. So my goal from day one with jazz piano skills has been to not only introduce you to the essential jazz piano skills to discover right, but to also provide you with a way to successfully study the skills, to learn the skills, and certainly a process for developing a physical command of the skills, play, discover, learn play. You know, I also mentioned several times, you know, I mentioned a lot of things several times, but I mentioned several, several times since the start of the year that that if you've been a faithful jazz piano skills listener or the past five years, then you've become intimately familiar with the jazz piano skills, the essential jazz piano skills that that are needed in order to truly begin tune study. And I've also mentioned that if you haven't been grinding along with this over the past, over the past five years, well, it's no big deal, no worries, right? This is a great time. Better late than never, right? It's great time to jump on board and begin developing, begin enhancing your jazz piano skills. Now, the tune study that we do every month will actually help you sift through and prioritize the last four years of podcast episodes so that you can begin to maximize your jazz piano skills right now, immediately. So as I always say, if you're a jazz piano skills, vet, fantastic. If you're a jazz piano skills, rookie, fantastic. You are in the right place at the right time to begin a jazz piano journey that will have a profound impact on your understanding of music music, and of course, will have a profound impact on your jazz piano playing as well. So today, we are going to discover an improvisation approach for just friends, and we're. Going to learn about intentional and formulaic formats to use for developing our jazz improvisation skills, and we're going to play quarter eighth silence sequences to the form. We're going to apply the quarter, eighth silence sequences to the form and changes of just friends to help us develop our time and our harmonic what I like to call harmonic vision. And why is this so important? This harmonic vision, right? I'll tell you why. Because improvisation is the melodic representation of harmony. That's what it is. That's what melody is, right? It's the it's melodic representation of harmony. So if our harmonic vision is poor, guess what? So will our improvisation be poor? It's actually a pretty straightforward cause and effect. Poor harmonic vision equals poor improvisation. 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're a seasoned and experienced Pro, you're gonna find this jazz piano skills podcast lesson exploring just friends to be very beneficial. But before we get started, I want to, as I always do, I want to welcome first time listeners to jazz piano skills. And if you're a new listener to the jazz panel skills podcast, if you're new to jazz piano skills, I want to invite you to become a jazz piano skills member, your membership has a lot of perks, has a lot of little privileges that you're going to want to take advantage of. For instance, as a jazz panel skills member, you have access to premium content for this podcast episode, for every weekly podcast episode, and the premium content will help you thoroughly and correctly discover, learn and play the jazz standard, just friends that we are currently exploring and so much more. For example, as a jazz panel skills member, you have access to the past, current and future educational weekly podcast packets. These are the illustrations, the lead sheets, the backing tracks for the play alongs that I design and develop for every weekly podcast episode to help you get the most out of the lesson. Now you also have access on top of that, you have access to the self paced and sequential jazz panel curriculum, which is loaded with comprehensive courses, all of the courses containing educational talks. There's interactive learning media to help you digest the jazz concept. Conceptually, there are video demonstrations of the concepts in all 12 keys and so much more. As a jazz panel skills member, you also have a reserved seat in my online weekly master class, which is held every Thursday evening. But if you can't attend, it's no problem, because the master classes are recorded, and you can watch and rewatch the class, the video of the class whenever and as often as you wish. You also have access as a member. You have access to the online interactive fake book, which contains must know jazz standards, all of them with excellent chord changes and chord scale relationships, harmonic function analysis, listening suggestions, and there's historical insights as well as a jazz panel skills. Member, you can hang out with some old friends, make some new jazz friends in the online private jazz panel skills community. These are this community hosts a variety of engaging forums that are fabulous to dive into and also to contribute to. And finally, your jazz panel skills membership grants you unlimited private, personal and professional educational support whenever and as often as you need it. All of these amazing privileges, all of these amazing perks, are waiting to help you discover, learn and play jazz piano. So when you have a second, check it all out at jazz piano skills.com and, of course, become a member. Now if you get to the site and you have some questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. I'm always happy to spend some time with you, answer any of your questions and help you in any way that I can.

Okay, so on to the question of the week. This week's question comes from Johnson. Ramsey Johnson, living in Portland, Portland, Oregon. And Johnson writes, I am new to improvisation and chord scale relationships, but from what I can tell, if I stick to using chord tones, roots, thirds, fifths and sevenths, I should be able to improvise. Over any set of chord changes, over any tune. I know you have spoken about this many times in your podcast episodes, but I wanted to make sure that I'm that I am correct in my understanding. I'm enjoying your teaching, and I look forward to my journey. Oh, wow. Johnson, great question, incredibly important question. You're right. I think I've dealt with this many times, but it never hurts to repeat, right? It's a very important question that is not stated honestly. It's not stated often enough, and it's certainly not addressed enough by jazz educators. But to answer your question, yes, yes, you're correct. If you stick to core tones, you're in good shape. That's all you need, bro, it's all you need chord tones. So let's talk about this a little bit. Let's talk about the importance of chord tones. The very first thing I want to say that if you did an in depth study of jazz transcriptions, I don't know, grab 1000 transcriptions, 500 transcriptions, 100 transcriptions, I don't right if you regardless of the number, numbers are relevant, because you're going to find the same results regardless of how many transcriptions you look at. But if you took all the jazz transcriptions in the world and you went through and you said, You know what, I'm going to go through and I'm going to circle all the chord tones that are used during the solo, the chord tones right that coincide with the changes. And if you went through and you circled all those chord tones, you would find that once you have completed this, this task of circling all the core tones in every transcription on the face of planet Earth, you would find that the core tones overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly. Am I saying that right? Overwhelmingly? Yes, you would find that the core tones win. They win big time. There will be more chord tones played in those transcriptions than scale tones. There will be more chord tones played in those transcriptions than non scale tones. This is a musical fact. So if we looked at these transcriptions and the chord tones win in a big way, then, don't you think it would be important for us as students of jazz to imitate that if we want to sound like a jazz musician? Don't you think it'd be important for us to imitate jazz musicians, and if jazz musicians use primarily chord tones, then don't you think we should then use primarily chord tones? The answer, again, is yes. The answer is yes, yes, yes. So Johnson, you're correct, right? If you stuck the chord tones you're in, you're in great shapes. In fact, if, if you stuck to the root third, fifth and seventh of every chord and and, let's say you, you were unable to create anything melodic with the root, third, fifth and seventh, you, you come up with nothing. You're just it's blank. I would say to you, then, well, Johnson, it doesn't make much much sense for us to be concerned about the three additional scale tones, and it certainly doesn't make much sense for us to be concerned about the five non scale tones and tones that fall outside of the harmony, if we can't do anything with the four why? Why do you think adding the three additional scale tones or the five non scale tones? Why do you think adding those to the mix would somehow make it easier? It doesn't. It doesn't. So yes, sticking to the chord tones, incredibly important. Another thought, I have mentioned this several times on this podcast too, that as jazz pianist, or even as an instrumentalist, right, one of the very first things that you should be doing with your instrument is being able to play these basic block shapes, the root, third, fifth and seventh of every primary Sound of Music, the major sounds, the dominant sounds, the minor sounds, half diminished and diminished sounds, right? The 12 notes in music, those five sounds, that's how we come up with the 60 the 60 chord. Chords that we that exist in music, right? Those 12 notes, those five sounds. So we as jazz musicians, as pianists or instrumentalists, we should be able to play those five sounds, right, those 60 chords, the root, third, fifth and seventh of each one of them. I mean, that's like, that's like, task number one, we should be able to do that and and to take it a step further, we should be able to play in inverted shapes as well, right? First inversion, second inversion, third inversion. It's the shapes that are presented to us through these block chords, these primary structures of root, third, five and seven is these shapes that that we hold on to when improvising, we have to be able to see these shapes in order to create a melody. Right? So for jazz musician, melodic. Melody flows from harmonic shapes. Without a harmonic shape, we're going to have a very difficult time improvising. I always use the analogy that you know, if we ask an artist to paint a tree, not a problem unless, of course, the artist has never seen a tree. So if the artist doesn't know what a tree looks like, how in the world could the artist paint a tree? Because there's no image of a tree, the artist has no image to work from to create something that represents the tree. So no image for an artist means blank canvas, no shape. Harmonic shape for a musician means no improvisation. So Johnson, yes, these chord tones and understanding these chord tones incredibly, incredibly important. You know, today is the perfect this question is actually perfect for today's podcast episode, because we're going to be doing a lot of chord tone work here today in our improvisation work coming up. And so your question ties into it beautifully, and the importance of of being able to play these chord tones. So okay, so going back to your question, yes, if you stick to using the core tones route, third, five and seven, you should be able to improvise over any set of chord changes. Yes, 100% the transcriptions bear that out. They prove that to us. And so your understanding, again, your question, your understanding is correct, and I wouldn't even be concerned with the scale tones, the modes, chord scale relationships, all of that theory stuff. I wouldn't even be concerned with that until I had a command of the basic primary chord tones of the primary sounds of music, Major, dominant, minor, half diminished and diminished. So as I mentioned earlier, it's an incredibly important question, always a question that's worth revisiting time and time again and stating the obvious time and time again. And as I said earlier, the question is not asked enough, and it certainly is not dressed enough by jazz educators. Oh, how what I would have given when I was young trying to learn how to play, if someone, if some jazz teacher, if some jazz educator, would have said to me, Bob, just stick to the chord tones. Create something with the chord tones. Oh, that would have saved me a lot of time. That would have saved me a lot of time of running down blind alleys and trying to come up with something fancy schmancy to play. I wish somebody, someone would have told me to stick with the chord tones. So Johnson, great question, of course, if, if further clarification is needed, or you want to talk about this in more detail, by all means, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to spend some time with you and explore this all important question and topic in more detail. Okay, so let's discover learn and play jazz panel, let's discover learn and play just friends. Part Three. It's an improvisation approach. I do it every week. Going to do it again today. I

want to present my outline for the studying and learning of any tune. And here it goes. When learning a tune genre makes no difference, right? Jazz, rock, pop, country, folk, r&b makes no difference. Very first thing we do always, we listen. I like to listen to various artists, not just jazz musicians, by the way, either. So if there's a pop musician doing just friends, a. Reggae musician doing just friends. I don't care what the genre is. I want to check it out so I listen to various artists. I like to listen to vocalists. I like to listen to instrumentalists, and, of course, I like to listen to pianist number two with every tune, Form, Form, Form, I need to know the form of the tune. What is the framework in which this tune is is functioning? Is it an A, a B, a form? A b, a b form? There are several forms. Every tune has a form. I need to know what that is. Number three, I guess, because I'm a pianist, I like to check out the chords. I'm always listening to the harmony. I'm look listening for common harmonic movement that exists in music, like 2251, or 145, or 1625, all this common harmonic movement that exists from tune to tune to tune. I'm honing in on that right away. After I know my my chords, I like to play with voicings, right? So learn my changes, learn my voicings. Then number four, I like to turn my attention to melody and very various treatments of that melody, right, like a ballad treatment or Basa or swing. And then finally, number five, I like to explore improvisation. I like to use that tune and explore improvisation. So my five step approach, I listen, I determine form, I check out the harmony and the voicings, I check out the melody and the treatments, and then I do my improvisation work like we're going to do today. But that's it, right? Nothing more, nothing less. Right? Now, two weeks ago, right? We focused on gaining a harmonic familiarity with just friends. We wanted to get a command of the form the chord changes, the harmonic function, the voicings for just friends. Last week, what did we what did we do? We focused on the melodic analysis of just friends. We checked out the guide tones and phrases and target notes, interpretation and, of course, fingerings today, improvisation, but regardless, right? Regardless whether it's our harmonic analysis, our melodic analysis, or our improvisation. You know, our goal is to always keep things what clean and tidy. All right. We want our approach to be clean and tidy, our conceptual understanding of what we do musically must be structured, must be simple, so that we can replicate it day in and day out, over and over and over again. And you all can attest to the fact that I've said it many times over the past five years, that if your conceptual understanding of music or any musical skill is not structured, it's not simple, then it's unorganized and confusing. And if it's unorganized and confusing conceptually upstairs, then guess what? You have absolutely no shot zero. Shot zero of executing it in your hands downstairs, on the piano or any instrument for that matter. Therefore we must keep our study our tune study approach, very structured, very organized, very simple and very replicatable, and that's why we do the same thing every month. New tune, same process. New tune, same process. It's liberating, and it expedites the learning process. Okay, so the educational agenda for today is as follows. Number one, we're going to begin part three, our improvisation approach the discover, learn and play just friends. Number two, we're going to listen, of course, to a definitive recording of just friends. Number three, we will discuss, as always, the importance of establishing intentional and formulaic approach for developing improvisation. And number four, we will stress, again, the importance of gaining a command of harmony from which, of course, Melody flows right, no harmonic shape, no melody. It's that simple. Number five, we will explore how to use the form and the chord changes of just friends to practice improvisation. Number six, we will focus on establishing intentional sequences that utilize silence space to use, along with just friends, to develop our improvisational skills. And finally, I will be playing all the demonstrations today at a temple of 121 20, just a traditional swing group. So as always, we have a ton to get through today. So if you are a jazz piano skills member, I want you to take a few minutes right now, and I want you to pause button. I want you to download and print your podcast packets. These are the illustrations that I mentioned earlier, the lead sheets the back. Tracks to play alongs. And again, your membership grants you access to the premium content, not only for this podcast episode, but for every weekly podcast episode, which, of course, includes all of the educational podcast packets. You know, I mention it every week that you should have these packets in your hands when listening to the episodes so you get the most out of it. And of course, you should have these packets sitting on the piano when practicing or on your music stand when practicing as well. So if you're listening to this podcast, podcast on any of the popular podcast directories, such as Apple or Google, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon, Pandora, the list literally goes on and on. Then I would to make it simple. Just go directly to jazz piano skills podcast.com jazz piano skills podcast.com and you'll find an active download links for each of the packets, each of the podcast packets, in the show notes. Or you can log into jazz panel skills into your 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. Okay, so now that you have your podcast packets, I want you to grab, as always, I want you to grab your lead sheets. And you should have eight lead sheets in your packet. Let's go through them quickly. Lead sheet, one skill, one, you'll see it's titled up in the left hand corner. It's a quarter note, plus silence sequence, quarter silence sequence. So you see, there, you see these hash marks in measures one, measures three, measures five, measure seven, and so on. Right. Those represent quarter notes. Quarter notes, of course, the rest the measures with the whole rest represent what silence. Okay, so you can see how our we're producing sound and silence, alternating sound and silence. And when we get to these lead sheets in the lesson, I'll explain how we're going to utilize this format, this formulaic, this intentional structure. And then if you look at lead sheet two, you'll see that it's just the opposite, right? So instead of having a series of quarter notes followed by quarter rest, we flip it. We have quarter rest followed by quarter notes. If you look at lead sheet three, we now change our rhythmic value from quarter notes to eighth notes, again, though very formulaic, and that we have this sound and silence type approach that's going through the entire form of just friends. And if you look at lead sheet four, it flips this format. It flips this sequence where we have now the silence on the front end and the eighth notes on the back end. Okay. Now if you look at lead sheet five, we have a sequence that is silence. We have our eighth notes, silence. I mean, I'm sorry, quarter notes, silence and eighth notes. So that's our our format, our sequence, right? Quarter silence, eighths, and you'll see that it follows this sequence all the way through the form of just friends. You know what's coming lead sheet six. We're going to flip it. We're going to literally flip it, and now we're going with eighth notes followed by silence, followed by quarter notes. Okay, that's lead sheets five and six, and then seven and eight.

We We now flip it to where we have silence, quarter silence, eighths and then lead sheet eight. Guess what? We flip it again to where now you're going to have silence, eighth notes, silence followed by quarter notes. So the lead sheets, like I said, I'm going to model these for you. How I want you to utilize these to practice improvisation. But this is the what I was speaking of earlier, this is the intentional and formulaic structure that we are going to be using over the form and chord changes of just friends to help us develop our improvisational skills and also to illuminate any weaknesses that we have with regards to our sense of time, our harmonic vision that I mentioned earlier as well, right? And, of course, our feel and our articulation too. So this is going to be a lot of fun today, and we're going to learn a lot about ourselves. We're going to learn a lot about our plane and our skills and our abilities working through these lead sheets. So no question. About it, right? We have a lot to get through. We have some invaluable tools here that you're going to discover, learn and play. So let's get busy. Let's, let's do this. What is the very first thing we do always, every week, we listen. Guess what we're going to do today? We're going to listen. And you know, we did it last week. We did it the week before. We did it the month before, right? We listen, and I stress it every week that listening to various renditions of tune is not only the first, but I think, honestly, I think it's the most important step. Again, I can't even imagine attempting to learn a tune before spending a lot of time listening to it and becoming familiar with it, absorbing it, right? And I mentioned earlier too that, you know, I typically listen to vocal renditions first, which we did, you know, a couple weeks ago we checked out Tony Bennett singing Just friends. I always like to follow it up with instrumentalists, which we did last week, we listened to the great Sonny Stitt performing just friends. And today, guess what? Today we get a twofer. It's not often we get a twofer, but today we get a twofer. What am I talking about? I'm talking about the great Marion McPartland and the great George Shearing playing just friends as a duet. It's so stinking good. And this is from Mary mcpartland's album. It's the 1919 98 I believe it's an album called, wait for it, just friends. The album is called just friends. And Marion McPartland is playing duets with a lot of great jazz pianists. But this cut, this cut is with George. Sharing, you can't get any better than Mary McPartland and George. Sharing, spending some time together and playing just friends. So as I always say, you know, grab your favorite beverage, sit back, relax and get ready to enjoy Marion McPartland, George, sharing, just Friends. Check This out. You.

Oh, that is so stinking good, wow. So listen, check out that album right again, 1998 I believe it's Concord's label. Mary McPartland, just friends. We just listened to her playing, just friends with George Shearing. But the pianist on this album are ridiculous. We had like Tommy Flanagan, Dave Brubeck, I believe is on there. Gene Harris, so if you haven't, if you haven't listened to it, you're in for a real treat. Check it out. Maren McPartland, just friends. Okay, so now let's dive into those lead sheets. I want you to grab lead sheet one, and let's discover how to properly begin developing our improvisational skills using the form and chord changes of just friends. 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.