Hey Improvisers, I recently came across a headline in an online newspaper that promised to help the reader build good habits. Basically, it was about how to keep New Year’s resolutions. While I did expect the article to speak about healthy eating, exercise, and such, I was shocked to see “practicing piano” listed as the most difficult habit to form. Practicing piano as a “difficult” habit? How could that be? After all, nobody ever had to tell me to practice piano. As a child, I would simply sit down and play piano whenever I felt like it, and as a teenager, I dedicated myself to three hours of ..read more

Hey Improvisers, Thanks to everyone who has asked me about my Journey Through The Real Book video series, which I’ve now resumed. Here’s the backstory: When you live in a New York City apartment, it can be tricky to move a piece of furniture across your living room, especially a grand piano. I found this out in a big way over the past year, when I decided to move my piano a mere 8 feet across the room in order to give my videos a new “look.” Well, those 8 feet might as well have been 80 feet, since one challenge after another presented itself. First, I had to finish painting the walls of my li ..read more

Hey Improvisers, Do you ever play with other musicians? If you do, you know the joys of shared music-making. One player inspires another, and everyone benefits. But if you haven’t yet made that leap, it may feel terrifying. We receive many benefits from jamming with our musical peers, and they go way beyond what I’ve hinted at above. And they may be different for each of us. One thing is for sure: if you find the right person or people to make music with, you’ll have fun, improve much more than you otherwise would, and become part of a cultural lineage that goes back thousands of years. It’s d ..read more

Hey Improvisers, Perhaps my favorite line from my book, The Inner World of Piano Improvisation, is: “Everybody wants to sound like Miles Davis, but no one wants to play fewer notes.” I love that line, because it’s so true. Whether we play rock, jazz, pop, blues, or classical improv styles, we’ll sound much better if we simply play fewer notes. However… playing less notes is usually the last thing many pianists want to do. Why? Because they don’t trust it. It feels more trustworthy to string together all the licks they’ve been practicing, or to ramble on and on with run-on musical sentences. Mi ..read more

Hey Improvisers, I’d like to share a very special video I made, when I sat down and interviewed the wonderful pianist Tedd Firth. I’ve known Tedd for a few decades and it’s been a pleasure to see him go from “young new pianist on the NYC scene” to “accompanist to the stars.” Tedd is a fabulous musician as well as a nice person, and I had a lot of fun interviewing him for this video. Since there is usually only one pianist in the room at a time, it’s a real treat to get to hang out with a pianistic colleague and “talk shop” like Tedd and I did here. The conversation was based on the topic of my ..read more

Hey Improvisers, Have you ever noticed how some musical techniques span multiple genres? I’m always fascinated when I discover how, say, a particular arpeggiated pattern might appear in both a Mozart sonata and a folk song. Walking bass lines are like this, too. Although primarily associated with jazz, walking bass lines are also found rock styles. (Classical too – check out J. S. Bach’s Prelude in Bm from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Vol. 1.) The Beatles’ Paul McCartney enjoyed playing walking bass lines, especially in the band’s early days. A good example of this is on their song “All My Lovin ..read more

Hey Improvisers, Should we use ChatGPT to learn about music? It’s a fair enough question, and the first answer that perhaps comes to mind is, “Sure, why not? Any learning tool is good if used in the right way.” Again, fair enough. But let’s look at one aspect of ChatGPT in depth, and weigh the pros and cons. This aspect is the fast speed in which ChatGPT spits out information. We can begin by asking ourselves, “Is a quick answer better than a slow answer?” Here, I’m not so sure, since ChatGPT, at this early stage, often gives quick but incorrect answers. In a previous blog post, https://keyboa ..read more

With the recent introduction of ChatGPT, we humans find ourselves at a crossroads of human history; a crossroads at which the forces of technological “progress” are pushing us down one particular road without giving any of us individuals any real decision about which path we’d prefer to take. Simply put, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay and will affect every one of us, whether we like it or not. Although no one can predict exactly where AI will take us, the business word, for example, is already touting AI as a way to speedily write blog posts and even emails. With this in mind, I ..read more

Hey Improvisers, There’s no better feeling in the whole world than playing a jazz ballad. For me, it’s pure bliss: complete relaxation combined with the most beautiful harmonies imaginable. When the wonderful vocalist Juliet Ewing and I went into the recording studio to made a video of George Gershwin’s classic ballad “I’ve Got A Crush On You,” I had the chance to renew the jazz ballad accompanying experience for me personally, and I thought I’d take this as an opportunity to share a few tips on how to do it yourself. First, check out the video Juliet and I made: I’ve Got A Crush On You Notic ..read more

Hey Improvisers, One of my Zoom piano students, who is taking a jazz ensemble class, recently listened to Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five recordings for the first time. These are groundbreaking recordings from the 1920s and a wonderful example of joyous New Orleans jazz. When I asked her what she thought of the performances, she replied, “Wow! It sounds like they were having so much fun!” She then told me that she wished the musicians in her jazz class would have more fun, instead of being so worried about playing wrong notes. With this in mind, I then asked another of my students, who is taking a ..read more