Hacker News Reader

Comment by iainctduncan | Hacker News Reader

If you are interested in jazz piano comping on a deep level, the best books are the Jeb Patton books, "An approach to comping" Vol 1 and 2. Nothing else comes close in its thoroughness.

Also, the online course site openstudiojazz.com has first rate courses.

View on HN

Thanks for that OS jazz link, will investigate. These days i play maybe a couple days a week, Oscar Peterson's Minuets and Etudes and a pile of guitar books by Mimi Fox, Doug Munro and others.

My top-down approach is to work books as best i can, i need to incorporate "bottom up" which is listen (50x if necessary) and transcribe.

(and i have another TODO for Barry Harris' books/vids etc)

BTW, there are very good videos on open studios on the Barry Harris approach too. One of the teachers is really into it.

Open Studio is one of the best things to happen to jazz piano in a long time. Peter Martin is one of the few “old” jazz piano masters still active.

He is a highly practical player who (self-admittedly) doesn’t doesn’t know theory that well, which is the perfect antidote to the more theoretical Berklee-method educators (e.g. Adam Neely) that dominate the scene.

The theory-heavy approach has seemed stranger to me the older I've gotten. Watching a lot of improvisational players in jazz and jazz-adjacent genres, a lot of their playing seems to be "structural" (based on physically where certain notes are, and the direction they're moving in) rather than theory-based. Think "just hold the octave while walking this triad down chromatically" vs. a reasoned series of extended chord resolutions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com