The jazz piano book

What Hacker News says

1. klimperfixAug 2024
   If you want to go in the jazz direction, the Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine [1] is great! It has everything a jazz player needs to know, from II - V - I voicings to scales, upper structures, etc.

   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jazz_Piano_Book

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2. seanhunterMar 2023
   The first thing I would say is that music theory is a very broad topic. You're going to have much better results if you study aspects of theory that you then practically apply in your musical life. So if you tend to play a certain style of music, learn the theory that applies to that first.

   Eg say you play rock/blues piano (or generally play pop music). You might want to start with learning pentatonic and blues scales, first in the keys of the pieces you play a lot, then in all keys.

   Say you like a certain player, you may want to look at a song they wrote/played, try to figure it out, try to understand how it works. So you could for example take apart the chord progression. Try to understand it harmonically, say there's a bit of the song that you like. Try to find other songs with a similiar progression. Then look at the voicings they use. Try to put those voicings into practise in your playing. Look at places you can use similar voicings for different chords.

   Since you go to a class make yourself an exercise between classes to find in your normal music examples of the things you did in class.

   There are very specific times when things like flashcards are going to be useful. For example, I made myself a deck of flashcards with different one-crotchet rhythmic snippets on them and used to deal myself out random bars of rhythms and then tap them out to improve my rhythm recognition for sight reading.

   For theory in the mainstream/classical tradition, I would highly recommend getting the ABRSM guide to music theory by Eric Taylor. It comes in two books, and you can get "workbooks" of examples to just go through. It's a pretty solid intro to the basics and by the time you have done both books you are at the standard of "grade 8" in music theory.

   From there, the traditional way to progress is to work on analyzing Bach Chorales (ie get that book which is just all the chorales) and then analyzing other major works from subsequent periods. Studying the chorales is a really excellent intro to most of the harmony that you will encounter until you get to the romantic period, and what I personally did is just work on Jazz harmony after that given that covers Romantic style harmony as well as the things that later 20/21C music does (eg if you can understand Miles you can understand Hindemith pretty much). For Jazz there are two books I would recommend, which are the Jazz Piano book and the Jazz Theory book both by Mark Levine.

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3. makesetJan 2023
   You are looking for The Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine.

   https://www.amazon.com/dp/0961470151

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4. dietketchupSep 2022
   Wow, never expected The Jazz Theory Book or Effortless Mastery to show up on HN. I'll add The Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine and Jamey Abersold vol. 1 How To Play Jazz and Improvise
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5. objclxtOct 2021
   If you are classically trained I highly recommend Mark Levine’s book[1]. It digs into the theory of jazz, alongside improvisation. It does assume a working knowledge of basic theory, so not so great for those starting from scratch.

   [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Piano-Book-Mark-Levine/dp/096147...

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6. resource0xDec 2020
   1) Roland FP 2) Don't play classical music. Learn music theory (The Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine) and play by ear, initially transposing everything to the same key (e.g. Fmaj).

   (I'm a retired programmer, playing piano for 50+ years. If you'd like to discuss, my email is tatumizer at gmail)

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