An introduction to cocktail piano by Bill Hilton
Copyright © 2015 Bill Hilton All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced (save for the exception described below) distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Reproduction exception Purchasers of this book are allowed to print one (1) hard copy for their own personal use. Once printed, the conditions and exclusions above shall also apply to that hard copy. Educational use Bona fide educators will generally be permitted to print multiple copies for use with students in full-time education. However, this permission should not be assumed. Please address all requests for exceptions under this clause to the following email address:
[email protected] Thanks to Christina Hilton, Roosmari Croeser, Stephan Mattelaer, Stefan Ciccotti and all of those YouTubers who have encouraged and chivvied me into writing this thing, and subsequently offered suggestions and corrections. Any error or inconsistency that remains is my fault, not theirs. This ebook is dedicated to George Hilton, who was born in the middle of p32.
Anti-piracy notice I’ve worked hard to produce this ebook. If you’re using a copy that you’ve picked up for free somewhere online, I’d be grateful if you could head over to this URL and pay the going rate for it: www.billspianopages.com/cocktail The vast majority of my readers are honest people who pay their way. I, my bank manager, mortgage provider, wife, son and dog would appreciate it if you were one of them. Thank-you.
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Contents Introduction 4 Useful stuff to know 5 1. The basic ideas: chords, tempo, melody 6 2. The distinctive sound of cocktail: chord extensions
22
3. Mixing it up: elaborating on melody 36 4. Making it up: chordal and melodic improvisation
46
5. Additional resources 61
3
Introduction I first added a video about cocktail piano to my YouTube channel in 2010, and I was surprised how popular it was. When I started the channel, its main purpose was to promote my book, How To Really Play The Piano, which covers various music theory and piano improvisation basics, but only mentions cocktail in passing. But it seems cocktail is a style a lot of people want to learn! Every cocktail tutorial I’ve posted has been popular, and it wasn’t long before comments started appearing asking for a book on the subject. So here it is. What you’ll find in here is a bunch of tools and ideas that you can use to start developing your own cocktail style. The key words in that sentence are ‘developing your own’. Cocktail is an improvisatory style, and like other such piano styles, although there are certain common sounds and techniques, one of the cool things about it is that it allows each player to develop his or her own unique, individual approach. So take the stuff you’ll find in the following pages, sit down at the keyboard and play around with it. Explore, experiment, have fun, and remember that while you’re practising you’re free to pursue all sorts of crazy ideas and new approaches. The great beauty of cocktail is that it’s so free and easy that it positively encourages exploration.
My main target audience here is the relative beginner - someone who’s just starting to look at the piano keyboard with an improviser’s eye, or at any rate isn’t very far along the road when it comes to learning the skills I’m talking about. Experts will find some omissions and oversimplifications, especially in the chapter on improvisation. Why? Because I want to get the average reader off to a strong start without bogging him or her down in the huge amount of technical information that could be included. Better, I reckon, to get learners sat at the keyboard and actually playing rather than trying to make sense of huge amounts of technical information. One final thing: cocktail piano often gets written off as ‘easy listening’ or ‘elevator music’ or ‘muzak’ or (if the critics are feeling charitable) ‘background music’. To which I say: who cares? A cocktail version of They Can’t Take That Away From Me or Yesterday may not be great art (though I guess it depends how well you play it...) but it certainly is great fun to play. That’s the number one rule of this book: have fun. Bill Hilton April 2015
In fact, if you’re ever going to play any cocktail professionally (there’s a huge demand for good wedding pianists...) you’ll find that an ability to take chord progressions and songs off in new and interesting directions is an advantage, because it fills time and means you don’t run out of things to play. I’ve sat at a piano for six hours at a time when I’ve been hired to play at weddings and similar events, spinning out endless different versions of standard cocktail songs like Misty and Blue Moon.
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Useful stuff to know Resources You can find an accompanying video for this book at this address: I said this in all the promotional materials and videos, so you’ve probably figured it out by now, but I’m assuming that if you’re reading this you have a decent knowledge of basic piano chords and improvisation, maybe as a result of reading you’ve my previous book, How To Really Play the Piano. I’m also assuming you can read piano music to a reasonable level. You don’t have to be an outstanding sightreader, but some of the scoring in this guide is reasonably advanced. All the really tricky bits are played through in the accompanying videos, and there are some extra resources you might find useful if your reading is a bit shaky. If you feel the need to brush up on any theory basics, head for my YouTube channel and check out some of the playlists I’ve put together. You’ll find ‘Really Basic Harmony’ useful, as well as the playlist of blues tutorials, which mirror some of the improvisation methods I cover in chapter 4 of this book.
www.billspianopages.com/cocktail-video That page includes shortcuts to the different chapter sections of the video. I may update the video itself from time to time to answer questions that come in from readers, so it’s important to bookmark the above address (which is permanent) rather than the YouTube.com address of the video itself (which may change). If you have a technical problem accessing the video, or believe you have found a mistake, dead link or problem with the book itself, I’d be very grateful to hear about it - please drop me an email at this address. If you have a general question about the book’s contents, I’ve created some threads on my website for discussion. You’ll find them indexed at: www.billspianopages.com/cocktail-discussion-home
If you don’t have a copy of How To Really... you might find it supports your learning, especially if you’re a bit rusty on things like chords. You can buy it by visiting my website, Bill’s Piano Pages.
If I or someone else hasn’t answered your question already, please feel free to post it - I plan to check it a couple of times a week at least, and probably more often in the few weeks following publication.
As in How To Really..., I’ve used the British/European versions of musical terms rather than the US version, so if you’re used to the latter you need to remember that a bar is a measure, a semibreve is a whole note, a minim a half note, a crotchet a quarter note, a quaver an eighth note and a semiquaver a sixteenth note.
Printing Finally, if you’re wondering why I’ve set this guide in landscape format, it’s because it makes it easier for me to add annotations to scores while keeping everything at a reasonable size, especially for people using iPads and other tablet devices. Because I know some readers like to make hard copies of their ebooks, I’ve designed this one so that it prints on to standard international A4 paper, with a 13mm (half inch) margin on all sides so nothing should get lost or cut off.
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Chapter 1 The basic ideas: chords, tempo, melody
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What is cocktail? In this chapter we’re going to take an overview of how cocktail piano works in theory. The first thing we need to do is define what cocktail piano - sometimes also called ‘lounge piano’ - actually is. That’s not as easy as it sounds, as it’s hardly a formal discipline, and different people use the term in different ways. Search around YouTube and you’ll find people playing everything from Scott Joplin rags to Beatles songs to Pachelbel’s Canon in D and calling it ‘cocktail’. In this book, for the sake of keeping things manageable, I’m sticking to a fairly traditional view of cocktail that takes much of its thinking from jazz, and mostly uses the Great American Songbook as repertoire - that is, classic pop, jazz and show tunes from approximately the period 19201960. You’ll hear plenty of cocktail pianists playing more modern material in more contemporary styles, but for what I’m trying to achieve here I’m going to stick to that relatively tight definition, not least because it’s the kind of cocktail that I play. If you wanted a label for it, you’d do worse than ‘traditional cocktail’. As we’ll see, the traditional cocktail style has three main components: Distinctive chord voicings Cocktail, like jazz, often uses chord extensions to add a richer sound to harmonies. So, for example, an F chord in the basic progression of a song might become an F major seventh (Fmaj7), an F major ninth (Fmaj9) or even an eleventh or thirteenth. The major seventh, in particular, with its chilled-out sound, is one of the most common chords in cocktail.
Free, relaxed tempo Cocktail generally avoids rigid meter, and permits a kind of free and easy playing. This is one of the things that makes it so popular with pianists at events: its loose approach to tempo is forgiving (and great for covering up mistakes!). As we’ll see, an important idea in cocktail tempo is rubato - a method borrowed from classical music. Embellished melody Cocktail pianists do several things with melody, including removing it and replacing it with an improvised replacement, as in jazz. Cocktail melodic playing tends to be loose, and heavily embellished: chunks of melody will be broken up with runs up and down the keyboard, sections of chord-only playing and other features. Melody is often played heavily rubato. Over the next few pages we’re going to take a look at what a cocktail adaptation of a few bars of a standard song might look like. If you’re only a moderately competent reader of music, you might think that the cocktail arrangement looks terrifyingly complicated. Don’t worry - I’m not asking you to play it, and playing cocktail piano doesn’t involve having to read scores like this! It’s just an illustration of what a cocktail-style improvisation might look like. (By the way, you won’t find the song I’m using here familiar. For copyright reasons, I can’t use examples from famous songs, so I’ve written all the examples from scratch.)
Cocktail makes less use of edgy and bluesy harmonies than jazz does, though they’re by no means absent.
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A standard cocktail song The chord symbols are simplified. It would be more precise to call this chord Cm9, and the previous Fm7 is really an Fm7sus4.
Here are the first few bars of a typical song that you could play in cocktail style. I’ve written it in the ‘piano-vocal’ format that you’ll recognise if you own any sheet music.
Arrangements like this usually include chord symbols for the benefit of pianists who have a basic familiarity with them, and for guitarists who might be playing along. However, arrangers tend to keep them simple - a minor seventh or the odd diminished chord is as complicated as it usually gets. Sometimes they’re only an approximation of the actual harmony (as is the case here) and sometimes they’re just plain wrong!
The important thing to understand about arrangements like this is that they’ve been specially written to sell to large numbers of amateur pianists. As such, they’re usually heavily simplified. To turn a song in this format into a cocktail piano solo, we have to break it down and adapt it.
Standard Cocktail Song Bill The arranger has straightened out the rhythm here to make it easier to read. It’s a jazzy tune and in professional performance it would 3 sound more like this...
c œ œ3œ œ œ œœœ j œ œ œ
...or this:
3
Hilton
b4 j œ j j ∑ & b b 4∑ œ œ œ∑ œJ œ ™ ∑ œJ œ œ∑ œ ‰ ∑œ œ œ∑ œJ J œ∑ œ œ œ œ œ œ™ ‰ ∑ ∑ This is ∑a stan dard∑ cock tail ∑song ∑ It's ea ∑sy, it's chee ∑sy, you can sing a - long E¨
C‹7
F‹7
B¨7
bb 4 œ œ œj œ ™ œj œ j b ∑ & ∑ 4 œœÓ ∑ ˙˙ ∑ œ ∑œ œ ‰∑ œj œ ˙ j ? bb 44 ˙˙ ˙ ˙ œ œ™ b ˙
{
The piano part follows the tune exactly. This gives it away as an arrangement created for amateurs - a professional accompanist would never play the same melody as the singer is singing.
G‹
j œ œj œœ ∑ œ ˙˙
C‹7
F‹7
B¨7
‰ œ˙j œ∑ œ œ œ œ ˙ Óœœœ œ œ™ œœ ™ ‰ ™ ˙ ˙ ˙ œ™ ‰ ˙
∑ ∑ ∑
The left hand is fairly easy, and the whole thing doesn’t often stray beyond the middle two octaves of the keyboard. There’s a reason for that: the arranger knows that amateur players like to keep their hands close together.
8
First step: strip out the junk If you’re going to take commercial piano-vocal score like the one on the previous page and turn it into a decent cocktail solo, the first thing you need to do is to strip out the information you don’t need. You don’t need the lyrics or the simplified piano part (although it might be worth a glance to see if the arranger has had any good ideas that you can use). That leaves you with the melody line and the chords. Together, they form what’s known as a lead sheet, which looks like this
b4 & b b 4 œ œ œ œJ œ E¨
C‹7
œ œ œj œ ‰ œj œj œ œ œJ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ J J
F‹7
B¨7
G‹
C‹7
F‹7
B¨7
∑
If you read my previous book, How To Really Play The Piano, you’ll know all about lead sheets (I cover how to work with them on pp69-75 of that book). Briefly, though, you can use a lead sheet to create an improvised piano arrangement of a song. At its simplest, that could mean playing the melody in the right and filling in simple chords in the left, like this
b4 & b b 4 œ œ œ œJ œ ™ ˙˙˙ ? bb 44 ˙˙˙ ˙ b E¨
{
C‹7
œ œ œj œ ‰ œj œj œ œ œJ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ™ ‰ J J ˙˙˙ ˙˙˙ ˙˙˙ ˙˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙˙ ˙ ˙˙ ˙
F‹7
B¨7
G‹
C‹7
F‹7
B¨7
∑
∑
∑
∑
...but that would sound pretty bland. (Also, playing those full chords in the left would result in a very “muddy” sound - the low ones, like the G minor I’ve circled, would sound especially bad. We’ll look at how to deal with the issue of left-hand chord voicing in Chapter 2.)
9
Building an arrangement from a lead sheet Instead of just adding those dull chords, what you need to do is turn the lead sheet into a distinctive cocktail arrangement. Below is an example of what one might look like. If you’re not a confident sightreader and it doesn’t make immediate sense to you, listen to me play it in the walkthrough videoLINK. However, it might be a good idea to work out how to play it for yourself, or, failing that, just pick through the right and left hands separately and work out what’s going on.
{
∏∏∏∏∏∏
bb 4 œ™œœ b & 4‰œ ˙ ? bb 44 ˙ b
œœ ‰
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œ œ œ œj œj œœœ œj œœœ Œ Ó œ ˙ œ ˙ œœ œ
Ϫ
#œj
œœœ. œœ œ œ œ œ œ J œ œœ J J œ ™ œnœb˙˙ œ™
œœœœ
∏∏∏∏∏
œ˙j ˙˙
Freely, with a swing
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œœ œ œ œJ
œœ ™™ ‰ œ™ œ™ ‰ œ™
I’ve crammed quite a few cocktail piano techniques into these four bars. Over the next few pages I’m going to really take them apart and look, in order, at the melody, the articulation and embellishments, the chords, the left hand, the tempo, the pedalling, fill-ins and other possible interpretations and approaches. (By the way, I’m not suggesting that every time you turn a lead sheet into a cocktail performance you write it down; mostly you’ll be doing it on the fly, in an improvised or semi-improvised way. I’ve scored out this particular arrangement purely so we can look at some of the important techniques.)
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Melody (1) Although cocktail piano uses a lot of improvisation, a cocktail version of a song will usually start and end with a play-through of the melody. If you compare the cocktail arrangement to the piano-vocal score on p8 above, you’ll see the melody is still there... but changed. You’ll see I’ve altered it a bit and set it an octave higher.
{
? bb 44 b
∏∏∏∏∏∏
b4 & b b4
œ™œ œ ‰œ ˙ ˙
œœ ‰
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œ œ œ œj œj œœœ œj œœ œ Ó Œ œ œ ˙ ˙ œœ œ
Ϫ
#œj
. œ œ œJ œœœœ œœœœ œ œ J J œ ™ œnœb˙˙ œ™
œœœœ
∏∏∏∏∏
œ˙j ˙˙
Freely, with a swing
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œœ œ œ œJ
œœ ™™ ‰ œ™ œ™ ‰ œ™
First, why have I moved it up? For a couple of reasons: - It gives me more space on the keyboard. I can now use the middle octave for fill-ins and to allow a bit more freedom to the left hand. - The melody sings out clearly at the higher pitch. If you play cocktail piano professionally, you’ll often do it in noisy environments (restaurants, parties and so on). In those conditions, a higher melody line carries better. That’s not to say you should always play melody lines high in cocktail piano. It’s just a simple trick that can make your job easier and your playing more effective.
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Melody (2) I’ve also thickened out the melody in several places by adding notes from the chord directly under the main melody note. This sort of thickening is idiomatic (i.e., the usual way of doing things) for the piano, and the right-hand part in the original piano-vocal score (p8) does it to some extent. However, I’m adding rather more thickness, and using chords that are a little more complex and interesting.
{
? bb 44 b
∏∏∏∏∏∏
b4 & b b4
œ™œ œ ‰œ ˙ ˙
œœ ‰
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œ œ œ œj œj œœœ œj œœœ Œ Ó œ œ ˙ ˙ œ œ œ
Ϫ
However, I haven’t done that on every note of the melody, for two reasons: - It’s hard to use smooth (or, at least, smooth-ish) fingering when the right hand is playing block chords all the time - the actual tune ends up getting carried by the 5th finger (pinkie), which leads to mistakes and a disjointed sound. It’s something else that’s fine to do every now and then, but you shouldn’t make a habit of it. - If the right hand gets too chunky, it can make it harder for listeners to pick out the tune. When you’re playing melody-driven cocktail (which isn’t the only sort, as we’ll see below) it’s important that the melody is clear.
#œj
œ. œ œ œJ œœœ œœœœ œ œ J J b˙ œ™ œ ™ œnœ ˙
œœœœ
∏∏∏∏∏
œ˙j ˙˙
Freely, with a swing
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œœ œ œ œJ
œœ ™™ ‰ œ™ œ™ ‰ œ™
Thinking about fingers Cocktail players don’t usually need to worry about precise fingering in the same way classical pianists do - most times if things go wrong you can stick a melody line together with the sustain pedal. However, it’s useful to give at least a little thought to some of the tricks and techniques you can use to get around the piano keyboard. As a topic, that’s beyond the scope of this book, but I sometimes talk about it on my YouTube channel, especially in this tutorial.
12
Articulations and embellishments As I said above, the melody in my arrangement is basically the same as the melody in the original piano-vocal score, but with some changes.
This is a grace note, sometimes called a crush note. In cocktail, as in jazz and blues, grace notes are usually a semitone (half tone) below the main note, and are played very quickly, often using the same finger to slide (‘crush’) from the grace note to the main note. Grace notes are an easy way to add a bit of variety and character to a melody line - just don’t overuse them!
This wiggly line marks an ‘arpeggiation’ rather than playing all the notes of the chord at once, I’m putting my fingers down in order, from the bottom note until the top, until all the notes of the chord are sounding. You need to do it quite quickly so the top (melody) note lands on, or just very slightly after, the beat.
{
∏∏∏∏∏∏
bb 4 œ™œœ b & 4‰œ ˙ ? bb 44 ˙ b
œœ ‰
Ϫ Ϫ
Here, instead of playing just the Bb of the original melody, I play a little trill consisting of the original note, the note above in the scale of Eb, and a return to the original note. In classical music this is known as a ‘mordent’, and is sometimes indicated by a squiggle above the main note, like this
œ œ œ œ œj œj œœœ œj œœ œ Ó Œ œ œ ˙ ˙ œœ œ
Ϫ
#œj
œœœ. œœ œ œ œ œ œ J œ œœ J J b˙ œ™ œ ™ œnœ ˙
œœœœ
∏∏∏∏∏
œ˙j ˙˙
Freely, with a swing
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œœ œ
œœ ™™ ‰ œ™
œ œJ
œ™ ‰ œ™
A good trick for giving a melody line a bit of life is to include the occasional staccato (bounce) note. They can work especially well at the the highest point of a phrase, like this.
m œ J Œ Ó
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
13
Harmony I haven’t done too much to enrich the harmony at this stage, but one thing I have done is turn the basic Eb chord of the original into an Ebmaj7. That’s simply a case of dropping a D natural note into the chord, which I’ve done twice - once in the half-beat delayed fill-in in the right, and also as the upper note of the shell chord in the left (more on fill-ins and shells below). I’ve circled both in the score.
{
∏∏∏∏∏∏
bb 4 œ™œœ b & 4‰œ ˙ ? bb 44 ˙ b
œœ ‰
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œ œ œ œj œj œœœ œj œœœ Œ Ó œ œ ˙ ˙ œ œ œ
Ϫ
Why does that matter? Well, the major seventh (along with its extensions, the major ninth and major eleventh) it’s probably the most distinctive sound in cocktail piano. It’s also a staple chord in jazz. In major-key songs, the major seventh has most effect when it’s played on the tonic (I) or fourth (IV) chord of the key - so that’s the chords of Eb and Ab in they key of Eb flat major. You generally need to avoid playing it on the fifth (V) chord of the key (Bb in Eb major), as that demands a minor/ flat seventh to resolve properly back to the tonic.
#œj
œœœ. œœ œ œ œ œ œ J œ œœ J J œ ™ œnœb˙˙ œ™
œœœœ
∏∏∏∏∏
œ˙j ˙˙
Freely, with a swing
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œœ œ œ œJ
œœ ™™ ‰ œ™ œ™ ‰ œ™
Harmony questions? If you’re finding this harmonic terminology a bit confusing, check out my series of YouTube videos on really basic harmony.
The seventh of either the I or the IV will work pretty much anywhere in the chord, but you should generally avoid using it as the lowest bass note.
14
The left hand (1) A common problem beginners have in all types of piano improvisation is that they try to do too much in the left hand. You can actually get away with a very minimal left hand, even for relatively fast pieces played solo. There are three basic priorities: - Fill in the harmonic structure - Provide a decent bass sound (which doesn’t have to be constant) to ‘ground’ the solo and give it a feeling of balance - Support the rhythm of the song
œœ ‰
{
∏∏∏∏∏∏
bb 4 œ™œœ b & 4‰œ ˙ ? bb 44 ˙ Ebmaj7 œœ™™ b
œ œ œ œ œj œj œœœ œj œœœ Œ Ó œ ˙ Fm7 œ ˙ œœ œ
Ϫ
You can often look after the harmonic side of things in cocktail piano just by playing so-called ‘shell’ chords. Borrowed from jazz, shell chords consist of the root of the chord and the seventh note of the scale above it. Depending on the song’s key, that might be a major seventh or a minor (flat) seventh. Less often, a shell is formed from the root plus the major or minor third above it. So, for example, the first chord I’ve circled in the left hand part above is Ebmaj7 because the root of the chord is the note Eb, and the seventh above it is a D, which is natural in the song’s key, Eb major. The second chord is Fm7: the seventh note above an F in the key of Eb is the note Eb. (Both chords have some of their notes are missing, but given the context the implication of what they are is quite strong in each case.)
#œj
œœœ. œœ œ œ œ œ œ J œ œœ J J œ ™ œnœb˙˙ œ™
œœœœ
∏∏∏∏∏
œ˙j ˙˙
Freely, with a swing
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œœ œ œ œJ
œœ ™™ ‰ œ™ œ™ ‰ œ™
Why use shell chords? There are two reasons: Shell chords based on sevenths naturally give a cool, jazzy sound. Playing full chords in the octaves below middle C can result in a ‘muddy’ sound - the notes that far down have so many audible overtones that if you play too many at once, the ear really struggles to pick out the individual notes, and it sounds like a mess. You’re generally safe with sevenths. Be careful with shell sixths (because major chords can end up sounding minor, and vice versa) and open fourths and fifths (which are colourless, and hard to identify as minor or major).
15
The left hand (2) The second thing you need to think about in your left hand is the bass balance - in other words, the way the bass part contributes to the overall sound, and its balance against the higher, right-hand parts. Getting the bass balance right is important, and something you’ll generally learn to do instinctively as you practise. Below, you’ll see that I’ve drawn a red line marking the C below middle C. I’m balancing the left hand so that maybe two thirds of it is happening above the line. Notes in that octave have a rich, mellow sound, but are still quite clear.
{
∏∏∏∏∏∏
bb 4 œ™œœ b & 4‰œ ˙ ? bb 44 ˙ b
œœ ‰
Ϫ Ϫ
If you don’t use enough bass the whole mix can end up sounding thin; too much and it’ll sound thick and muddy. A good cocktail arrangement has some deep bass notes to add depth and flavour, and balances them with richer, warmer tones from the middle of the piano. The one third/two thirds balance should help you get it about right - it’s not something you need to stick to slavishly, but it’s a good rule of thumb.
œ œ œ œ œj œj œœœ œj œœœ Œ Ó œ œ ˙ ˙ œ œ œ
Ϫ
#œj
œœœ. œœ œ œ œ œ œ J œ œœ J J b˙ œ™ œ ™ œnœ ˙
œœœœ
∏∏∏∏∏
œ˙j ˙˙
Freely, with a swing
The remaining third is in the octave below it (and could go even deeper), where the piano has a deeper sound with more ‘bite’. This helps to give the arrangement a feeling of depth and groundedness.
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œœ œ œ œJ
œœ ™™ ‰ œ™ œ™ ‰ œ™
As you start to practise your cocktail skills you’ll probably keep your left hand fairly simple, maybe just playing simple shell chords (see previous page). Shells, with an upper note and a lower note nearly an octave apart, tend to give a naturally good bass balance. By the way, you’ll notice that creating this balanced kind of left hand can cause quite a few jumps. So, for example, at the end of the first bar there’s a jump down of a whole octave. The easiest way to smooth this out is with the sustain pedal, which we’ll look at shortly.
16
The left hand (3) Finally, the left hand has a role to play in defining the piece’s rhythm. This is where beginners tend to go overboard. Complicated patterned bass lines, strides and all the rest can be great, but you usually don’t need them - in fact, you can get away with surprisingly little. It’s often enough to hint at rhythmic drive, and your listeners will mentally fill in the rest.
If you want to create a little more movement, one way you can do it is to use a stride - that’s what I’m doing, briefly, here. Stride is simple: you play a low note (typically in the octave below the C below middle C) alternating with a chord or shell chord in the octave below middle C, or occasionally slightly above middle C, depending on key and what your right hand is doing. In a fourbeat bar, you play the low note on beats 1 and 3 and the higher chord on beats 2 and 4. It’s pretty straightforward, but if you want to know more you can find stride discussed in some detail on pp77-79 of How To Really Play The Piano.
The great thing about cocktail is that it’s usually played very rubato, so you don’t usually need to create a firm pulse. However, it’s good to keep things moving forward - here I’ve labelled three techniques for doing that.
{
∏∏∏∏∏∏
bb 4 œ™œœ b & 4‰œ ˙ ? bb 44 ˙ b
œœ ‰
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œ œ œ œj œj œœœ œj œœœ Œ Ó œ œ ˙ ˙ œ œ œ
Ϫ
I’m using these semiquavers (sixteenth notes) to create movement in the left when not much is happening in the right. Sharing movement between the hands (with maybe 80% in the right and 20% in the left) is a very common cocktail technique. You only need to do this every few bars - like I said above, you can achieve a lot by just hinting at the beat of a song. The listener’s mind can fill in a great deal from fairly sparse clues which saves you having to create a complex, constantly moving left hand.
#œj
œœœ. œœ œ œ œ œ œ J œ œœ J J b˙ œ™ œ ™ œnœ ˙
œœœœ
∏∏∏∏∏
œ˙j ˙˙
Freely, with a swing
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œœ œ œ œJ
œœ ™™ ‰ œ™ œ™ ‰ œ™
Here the left hand is mirroring the right hand and anticipating the beat - in other words, both hands are jumping to the new chord half a beat before it’s due. Anticipating the beat is a good way of creating forward movement and rhythmic interest.
17
Tempo As I’ve said, one of the great things about cocktail is that you can take many songs at a very free and easy tempo, with lots of rubato. The Italian word actually means ‘robbed’ (so tempo rubato is ‘robbed time’). Strictly speaking it means taking time from one note or group of notes to give to another. More broadly - and especially in the context of cocktail and jazz it means letting the feeling of the music govern the pace and timing of the music rather than the strict tempo as laid down in the time signature. I’ve highlighted some places in our sample score where you could use it.
{
∏∏∏∏∏∏
bb 4 œ™œœ b & 4‰œ ˙ ? bb 44 ˙ b
œœ ‰
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œ œ œ œj œj œœœ œj œœ œ Ó Œ œ œ ˙ ˙ œœ œ
Ϫ
I’ve written this as dotted crotchet (quarter note) followed by two semiquavers (sixteenth notes). However, I might pause on the crotchet and play the semiquavers slightly faster, almost as grace notes.
#œj
œœœ. œœ œ œ œ œ œ J œ œœ J J b˙ œ™ œ ™ œnœ ˙
œœœœ
∏∏∏∏∏
œ˙j ˙˙
Freely, with a swing
This is a very obvious rubato - as we saw above, I’ve effectively brought the third beat of the bar forward, ‘robbing’ time from the second beat.
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œœ œ œ œJ
œœ ™™ ‰ œ™ œ™ ‰ œ™
The end of one phrase and the start of a new one is often a good place for a pause. I might wait as much as 3-4 seconds here, to let the high notes of the fill-in (see below) sink in.
18
Pedalling Using the sustain (right) pedal is something that you mostly learn by instinct, so it pays to experiment. Broadly, good sustain pedalling will not only help you to smooth out a lot of runs and jumps, but will also give your cocktail playing a richer, more resonant sound. Look at the example below. Each “Ped.” sign is a depression of the sustain pedal. A star sign is the pedal coming off completely. When a “Ped.” is followed immediately by another “Ped.” it means I’m only lifting it for an instant before depressing it again.
{
°
∏∏∏∏∏∏
bb 4 œ™œœ b & 4‰œ ˙ ? bb 44 ˙∑ b
œœ ‰
Ϫ
∑ œ™ ∑ * °
œ œ œ œ œj œj œœœ œj #œj œ œ œœ J œ Ó Œ œ ˙ ™ ∑ ∑ œ∑ ∑ ∑ œ ∑ ∑˙∑∑ ∑∑ ∑∑∑ œœ∑™∑∑ œœ
Ϫ
*°
*°
The main thing to avoid is creating a “mushy” sound by pedalling across chords, or pedalling too much on very low notes and chords. If you play acoustic pianos you’ll find that every piano you play has a slightly different feel to its pedal, in the same way that each piano has its own unique “touch”. If you practise mostly on one acoustic, it’s worth playing other pianos occasionally so you don’t get too locked into an approach that only really works on your piano. Digital pianos are usually much more predictable. However, you’ll find that playing on a digital usually demands slightly heavier pedalling than playing an acoustic piano.
œ J
œœœ. œœ œ œ œ œœ J
œœœœ
∏∏∏∏∏
œ˙j ˙˙
Freely, with a swing
œ œœ œ
œœ ™™ ‰ œ™
b˙ œ œ™ ∑œ∑n∑œ ∑˙∑∑ ∑∑∑ ∑ ∑∑ ∑∑œœ∑™™ ∑ ∑∑ ∑∑œ∑ ∑ ∑∑œ∑™ ∑∑‰ ∑ ∑∑ ∑∑∑ ∑ ∑∑ ∑∑∑ ∑ ∑ ∑∑ J * ° ** * *° °*
Acoustic pianos (and good digitals) will also allow you to “half-pedal”. Half-pedalling is where you lift the sustain pedal slightly then depress it again, so the dampers inside the piano touch the strings briefly and kill most - but not all - of the sound coming out of them. Depending on the piano, half-pedalling can create an interesting sound. In the extract above, some of the lifts in the “Ped.”—>”Ped.” sections could be played as half-pedal, depending on the characteristics of the piano you’re playing. The left-hand (“soft”) pedal is very different. On digital pianos it will simply make things more quiet: on grand pianos and (especially) uprights it can change the whole character and touch of the piano. As with sustain, the trick is to learn the characteristics of the piano you’re working with.
19
Fill-ins As well as embellishing the melody (see above) the right hand also adds extra touches and flourishes to enrich the sound. These are sometimes called fill-ins. There are quite a few ways you can approach fill-ins - for example playing runs, chords and arpeggios separate from the melody. Both the fill-in sections here are based on simple chords.
{
∏∏∏∏∏∏
bb 4 œ™œœ b & 4‰œ ˙ ? bb 44 ˙ b
œœ ‰
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œ œ œ œj œj œœœ œj œœœ Œ Ó œ œ ˙ ˙ œ œ œ
Ϫ
This is probably the simplest type of fill-in I’ve held three notes of the first chord (Ebmaj7) back for half a beat. Playing them slightly after the first melody note gives the piece a bit of instant movement in place of what would otherwise have been a very static opening.
#œj
œœœ. œœ œ œ œ œ œ J œ œœ J J b˙ œ™ œ ™ œnœ ˙
œœœœ
∏∏∏∏∏
œ˙j ˙˙
Freely, with a swing
Ϫ Ϫ
œ œœ œ œ œJ
œœ ™™ ‰ œ™ œ™ ‰ œ™
This fill-in is a tiny bit more sophisticated, but not much. The chord changes halfway through the tied melody note. I fill in the notes of the new chord under the tie, then repeat them an octave higher - I could do the same again in higher octaves if I wanted to. A typical role fill-ins play is to add colour in octaves distant from the one you’re playing the melody in.
20
Chapter 1: summary In this chapter we’ve taken apart a snippet of cocktail playing to see how the style works. As we move onward to look at some of these ideas in more detail, there are a few key points it’s worth bearing in mind: 1. The word ‘cocktail’ is often used to cover lots of different styles and genres. We’re most interested in what I’ve chosen to call traditional cocktail - which takes its material from the Great American Songbook and its harmonic, thematic and melodic ideas - broadly speaking from jazz. 2. Cocktail has a distinctive harmonic sound, heavily influenced by some types of jazz (in particular post-WW2 cool jazz). It typically uses lots of major and minor seventh and ninth chords. 3. Tempo is almost always very flexible in cocktail playing - it’s more important to create an interesting, sophisticated sound than it is to stick to a strict time. One of the best things about cocktail from a beginner’s point of view is that this relaxed attitude towards timing makes it a relatively forgiving style of play, and one of the improvisatory styles that’s quickest to pick up. 4. Melody matters in cocktail, but is very rarely played exactly as written in commercial sheet music versions of songs. Rather, it’s embellished and elaborated upon. Next up: chords and harmony - the essential tools to make your cocktail playing really sound like cocktail playing.
21
Chapter 2 The distinctive sound of cocktail: chord extensions
22
Understanding extensions The relaxed, chilled-out cocktail piano sound is mostly created by chord extensions. Extending, developing and (sometimes) substituting chords is cocktail’s most obvious and direct borrowing from jazz. But how does it work? Let’s look again at the basic chord progression from our sample cocktail song, above. In our lead sheet (p9) these are the chords:
++MUSIC THEORY HEALTH WARNING++
Eb, Cm7 | Fm7, Bb7 | Gm, Cm7 | Fm7, Bb7…
In this section of the book - and to a certain extent in the sections that follow - I’m going to be touching on some slightly more advanced terms and concepts associated with music theory.
In some heavily simplified song arrangements it wouldn’t be unusual to find the sequence written at an even more basic level, with some of the sevenths stripped out, like this:
Written down, music theory can seem like insane rocket science, but most concepts are actually quite simple when they’re explained on the piano keyboard - it’s just in writing that they begin to sound difficult.
Eb, Cm | Fm, Bb7 | Gm, Cm | Fm, Bb7…
So, if at any point you think ‘oh my word, this sounds complicated’ - don’t panic. It’s not essential that you understand all this stuff, as failing to know the precise difference between the various possible extensions won’t harm your playing. It’s important to include it, though, so you have a resource to refer to when you’re developing your instinctive understanding of harmony.
In a cocktail improvisation, though, you’d typically extend the chords to give them a fuller, richer sound. In the examples in the previous chapter I didn’t extend the chords too much, in the interest of keeping the score reasonably readable. However, if you were making the improvisation richer (and maybe moving further from the melody for more flexibility) you could do that quite easily, and perhaps end up with a progression that looked like this: Ebmaj7, Cm9 | Fm9, Bb7, E7/Bb | Gm7, Cm11 | Fm9, Bb7 As you can see, that’s beginning to look a lot richer and more complex I’ve even added a whole extra chord in the second bar. Let’s write out the ‘before’ and ‘after’ progressions and look in detail at what’s going on.
So, read the chapter through and play the examples to get a flavour, then move on to chapter 3. If you’re completely new to theory, it might be a good idea to watch some of the theory videos on my YouTube channel and some of the sections on theory in How To Really Play The Piano - in appendices 1 and 2 of that book (pp.105-132) you’ll find information on things like intervals, and a full set of basic chord charts. There’s also a video tutorial about intervals on my YouTube channel - give it a look if you feel you need to refresh your knowledge of things like different types of major, minor and perfect intervals.
23
Extensions in practice Here are two realisations of the chord progression from our lead sheet on p9. The first is based on the very basic progression above, the second from the progression with the extended chords.
{
bb 4 ˙ b & 4 ˙˙ E¨
? bb 44 ˙ b
{
bb 4 b & 4
E¨Œ„Š7
˙˙˙ ˙
? bb 44 ˙ b
C‹
F‹
B¨7
G‹
C‹
F‹
B¨7
˙˙˙
˙˙ ˙
˙˙˙ ˙
˙˙ ˙
˙˙˙
˙˙ ˙
˙˙˙ ˙
˙ C‹9
˙˙˙ ˙ ˙
˙ F‹9
˙ B¨7
˙ E7/B¨ G‹7
˙
˙
˙ C‹9
˙˙˙ œœ #œ ˙ œœ nn œœœ b ˙˙˙ bn˙˙˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙
F‹9
B¨7
˙˙˙ ˙˙ ˙ ˙˙ ˙
˙
∑
∑
∑
∑
Basic chord progression
∑
∑
∑
∑
Realisation of basic chord progression
Progression with extended chords
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
Realisation of progression with extended chords
What’s a ‘realisation’? There are lots of different ways of playing any given chord progression on the piano keyboard. A ‘realisation’ of a chord progression represents one possible way of playing it. You can come up with other realisations by playing the chords in different inversions and/or voicings.
24
More on extensions Let’s have a look at those extended chords in a bit more detail. The best way to learn about them, of course, is to play around with them for yourself and get a sense of the sounds. However, there are one or two things that are useful to know.
Playing ninth chords in full usually needs two hands. Here, the root (C) is played in the left hand, and the third, fifth, seventh and ninth (Eb, G, Bb, D) in the right. You can play ninth chords one-handed, but it usually means missing out at least one note. An interesting thing to note here is that the right hand notes are the same as for the previous chord - it’s the root in the bass that changes. Sevenths and ninths are the essential chords of cocktail piano, and we’re going to look at them in more detail over the next few pages.
{
b4 & b b4
E¨Œ„Š7
˙˙˙ ˙
? b 44 ˙ bb
C‹9
˙˙˙ ˙ ˙
F‹9
B¨7
E7/B¨ G‹7
C‹9
˙˙˙ œœ #œ ˙ œœ nn œœœ b ˙˙˙ bn˙˙˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙
F‹9
B¨7
˙˙˙ ˙˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙
˙
This chord is formed using a ‘tritone substitution’ - a very common technique in jazz. Forming tritone subs is easy, but sounds complicated if you try to describe it in writing. I’ve spelled it out on p34, below, but probably the best way to make sense of it is to check out the section on this chapter in the walkthrough video or have a look at this video tutorial on the subject.
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
Notice the apparent clash between the D natural and the E flat here. On paper this might look as if it’s going to be jarring and discordant, but the chord sounds fine. This is a slightly jumpy, unnatural bassline. I’d normally try to play something that had a more obvious flow, but I’m playing the root note of each chord here to make the harmony fairly obvious.
Tightly clustered chords like this are fairly common in cocktail, and all part of the natural sound of the style.
25
Building seventh and ninth chords To understand how seventh and ninth chords are built, we need to revisit a bit of harmonic theory. You may know this already, but if you’re not sure, it’s explained in more detail in my previous book, How To Really Play The Piano. I’ve also already meantioned my YouTube playlist of really basic harmony tutorials which covers the same ground (and is free). Every key, major and minor, has chords that occur naturally in that key. So, for example, here’s the scale of C major
And here are its chords, each one in root position
As you can see, each of these chords is based on one note of the scale. They’re built by taking the root note, then adding the note a third above it in the scale, then the note another third up the scale. You don’t have to play these chords in these simple shapes, of course you can play all sorts of voicings and inversions on the piano keyboard using the notes of each chord. But by looking each chord in a simple root position like this, we can see how it’s built.
4 &4 ˙ 4 & 4 ˙˙˙ C
˙
˙
˙
˙
˙
˙
˙
∑
D‹
E‹
F
˙˙˙
A‹
˙˙ ˙
Bº
˙˙˙
˙˙˙
∑
˙˙˙
˙˙˙
˙˙˙
G
C
What’s a ‘third’? A ‘third’ is a type of interval. Intervals are a way of describing the distance between two notes. Check out the resources I mentioned on p23 for a detailed explanation if your knowledge is rusty. Briefly, though the important thing to remember is that intervals include the lower note in their numbering, so although the note E is two notes above the note C on the piano keyboard, we count C-D-E - three notes, therefore a third. Like some other types of interval, thirds come in major and minor varieties. We don’t have to worry about those here, as when we’re building basic chords like these it’s just a question of counting a third up the scale from each note of the chord. I’ll be mentioning several intervals (such as thirds, sevenths and ninths) over the next few pages, and although understanding them isn’t essential, it’s certainly useful - so have a look at the intervals video or pp105-132 of How To Really... if you’re not sure.
26
Building seventh chords To create the natural seventh chords of a key, all we do is add another note, a further third higher, to the top of each chord. In C major, that gives us these chords:
4 &4
CŒ„Š7
˙˙˙ ˙
Imaj7
D‹7
˙˙˙ ˙
iim7
E‹7
˙˙˙ ˙
˙˙˙ ˙
FŒ„Š7
iiim7 IVmaj7
˙˙ ˙˙
˙˙ ˙˙
˙˙ ˙˙
G7
A‹7
BØ7
V7
vim7
viiø7
˙˙˙ ˙
CŒ„Š7
Imaj7
There are four types of chord here: - The I and IV chords are major sevenths - simple major chords with an added note a major seventh above the root. - The ii, iii and vi chords are minor sevenths - simple minor chords with an added note a minor seventh above the root. - The V chord, which is a dominant seventh - a simple major chord with an added note a minor seventh above the root.
∑
∑
∑
∑
What are the Roman numerals under the stave? In this example I’ve put in numerical chord notation underneath the stave to make it easy to discuss each chord. Numerical notation is always written using roman numerals (I, ii, iii, IV, etc.) and is very useful, because it means you can talk about chord progressions without referring to a specific key. So, for example, a twelvebar blues progression uses the I, IV and V chords (usually pronounced ‘one’, ‘four’ and ‘five’ by pop and jazz musicians) in every key. In C major, that means the chords of C (I), F (IV) and G (V). In Eb major, it means the chords Eb (I), Ab (IV) and Bb (IV). It’s a convention that major chords are given upper case numerals (I, IV, V) and minor and diminished chords lower case ones (ii, iii, vi, vii).
If you know a bit of music theory, you’ll know that the V chord in any key has an important role in ‘resolving’ progressions, because it creates an expectation of a return to the I chord, the tonic. The V7 chord creates a particularly strong sense of anticipation. Sometimes it can sound a bit too neat and simple, and is replaced with a substituted chord (see below). As I said above, if this is all new to you, check out that YouTube playlist on really basic harmony. The vii chord is a half diminished seventh - the diminished chord with an added minor seventh. You’ll sometimes hear it called a ‘leading tone chord plus seventh’ or similar. Diminished chords are a bit complicated theory-wise, but we don’t need to go into them for the sake of what we’re doing here - I’ve just included the VII chord for completeness.
27
...and ninths Why no chord here?
Once you’ve worked out sevenths, ninths come next. Each one is the same as the equivalent seventh chord, but with another note added, a further third up the scale of the key.
A jazzer or music theory geek might call this a half diminished ninth, but in practice it would probably get labelled Dm7/B. I’ve just left it blank to save confusing things.
Here are the ninths as they occur naturally in C major:
4 &4
CŒ„Š9
˙˙˙ ˙˙
D‹9
˙˙˙ ˙˙
E‹9
#˙˙˙ ˙˙
˙˙˙ ˙˙
FŒ„Š9
˙˙˙˙ ˙ G9
˙˙˙ ˙˙
˙˙˙ ˙˙
A‹9
˙˙˙ ˙˙
CŒ„Š9
∑
∑
∑ Wait - F sharp ∑ in C major?
Strictly speaking, the extended note on an Em9 chord is F#, which doesn’t appear in the key of C major. This is the same for the third chord of any major key (or the second of any minor; see p30 below). This really is straying into hardcore theory, and do worry if you forget it in practice - I’ve never yet heard of a cocktailer being fired for improperly extending a single ninth chord.
They work pretty much the same as the seventh chords, but they have an even more way-out sound. You can continue the process by adding yet another note a third higher (to create an 11th chord), and even another (a 13th). Sevenths and ninths are the most common extended chords in cocktail piano, and in jazz, too. As always, it pays to familiarise yourself with the sound by experimenting with these chords. One of the most important parts of learning to improvise on the piano is simply sitting at the keyboard and messing around, seeing what effects you can create with which chords, and not worrying if it sounds good or bad. Remember that any chord extended further than a seventh usually needs to be split between two hands, at least if every note in the chord is played (it doesn’t always have to be). A common way of playing ninths is to play the root in the bass (left) and the rest of the chord in the right:
{
b4 & b b4
˙˙˙ ˙
? bb 44 ˙ b
˙˙˙ ˙ ˙
˙˙ ˙˙ ˙
˙˙˙ ˙ ˙
˙˙˙ ˙ ˙
˙˙˙ ˙ ˙
˙˙˙ ˙ ˙
˙˙ ˙˙ ˙
Voicings and inversions Sevenths, ninths and other extended chords also give you access to more voicings and inversions that simple chords do. That basically means more notes in the chord = more ways of playing the chord on the piano keyboard.
∑ ∑
One thing that’s worth bearing in mind is that you should always assume the root note of the chord is meant to be played as the lowest bass note, unless the chord symbol tells you otherwise with a ‘slash’.
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
So Cmaj7 means ‘C major seventh with a C in the bass’, but Cmaj7/E means ‘C major seventh chord with an E in the bass’.
28
Extended chords in minor keys Things are a bit more complicated in minor keys, but not much. The extra complication comes from the fact that there’s more than one minor scale. In fact, there are three of them (natural minor, harmonic minor and melodic minor). We’re going to concentrate on the chords based on the harmonic minor scale, because it’s the one that most minor key songs you’re likely to play in cocktail style are based on. Here’s the harmonic minor scale for the key of A minor:
4 &4
˙
˙
˙
˙
˙
˙
#˙
˙
∑
The important thing is the sharpened seventh - in the case of A minor, it’s a G#. This is the only difference between the harmonic and natural minor scales.
4 & 4 ˙˙ ˙ i
Bº
˙˙˙ ii
C
D‹
˙˙˙
˙˙˙
III
iv
E
F
G©º
˙˙ ˙
#˙˙˙
˙˙ ˙
#˙˙˙
A‹
V
VI
vii
i
∑
∑
The harmonic minor scale sharpens the seventh note of the natural minor to give the scale a ‘leading tone’ (i.e., a note that leads naturally up to the tonic) and so that the V chord has a strongly dominant feel, as it does in major keys. So, in A minor harmonic the V chord is E, which gives a much stronger pull back to the tonic chord, Am, than Em (the V chord in the natural A minor scale) would do.
And, as on p26 above, here are the natural chords based on that scale: A‹
∑
Why the harmonic minor?
The strength of that major V chord is really obvious in some minor key songs. Gershwin’s Summertime (a cocktail standard) is a good example, with its progression based around alternating Am and E7 chords.
∑
∑
∑
∑
However, you’ll find some songs using the minor V chord (sometimes as well as the major V chord), often as passing chords, and not just in sections (typically middle eights) where they switch to the relative major.
A critical thing to notice here is that although the G# turns up in the E and G# diminished chords (V and vii) a G natural is played in the C chord (III). Strictly speaking, this should be a C augmented chord (C - E - G#), but in actual songwriting practice the III major chord of a minor key would usually get used rather than the augmented chord.
29
Minor seventh and ninth chords The same thing happens as the chords are built up into sevenths and ninths: the V and vii chords use the sharpened seventh, but other chords don’t. Here are the sevenths in A minor: A‹7
4 & 4 ˙˙ ˙˙
BØ7
˙˙˙ ˙
CŒ„Š7
˙˙˙ ˙
D‹7
˙˙˙ ˙
E7
#˙˙˙˙
˙˙˙ ˙
FŒ„Š7
˙˙˙ ˙˙˙ #˙ ˙ G©º7
A‹7
∑
∑
∑See note on ∑p28
And here are the ninths:
A‹9
4 & 4 ˙˙˙ ˙˙
D‹7/B
˙˙˙ ˙˙
CŒ„Š9
˙˙˙ ˙˙
˙˙˙ ˙˙
D‹9
˙ #˙˙˙˙
E7(b9)
˙˙˙ ˙˙
FŒ„Š9
˙˙˙ ˙˙˙ A‹9 #˙˙ ˙˙
As you can see, things start getting a bit weird and wonderful once we start forcing some of these chords to further extensions. As with the ninths in major keys, it’s hard to play these with one hand unless you either omit notes or your hands are very big and bendy. Usually you’d play the root in the bass and the rest of the chord (or part of the rest of the chord) in the right, in whatever inversion suits the song you happen to be playing.
∑
∑
Another tough one to name - G# diminished seventh with an added ninth would be one solution. Again, not a chord you’ll come across very often (if at all) in cocktail, and here for the sake of completeness.
∑
∑
With this E chord, you could create an Emaj9 by adding a non-diatonic F#, similar to what we did with the iii chord in the C scale on p28. However, for a true maj9 you’d also need to sharpen the D, and the chord would lose much of it’s dominant effect. (Remember the health warning at the start of the chapter? This is the sort of stuff I mean...) A good option here is to retain the notes of the scale and create this interesting flat ninth chord. Flat ninths are a common sound in jazz and can be introduced into a variety of different chords. This video tutorial has more information.
30
Extending non-diatonic chords Many songs feature chords that don’t appear naturally in their songs’ keys. So, for example, The Lady is a Tramp by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart - something of a cocktail classic - is usually performed in the key of C major, and starts with a C major chord (usually extended to a Cmaj7 or Cmaj9). However, the second chord is Cm7, which - since it contains an Eb and a Bb, doesn’t appear naturally in the key of C.
{
C
4 &4 w w w ? 44 w
F
A¨
˙˙ bb˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ b˙
4 &4 w w w ? 44 w
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
As you can see, in the extended version the non-diatonic Ab chord takes an Bb note when it becomes Abmaj9, just as it would if it were in the key of Ab - there’s no Bb in the key of C. That’s not to say you couldn’t play a B natural - it would just be a slightly more unusual-sounding chord (which you’d probably label Abmaj7#9; here we’re getting into the territory of building unusual chords from modes; discussion of modes begins to take us off our cocktail patch and deep into jazz territory, but we’ll touch on them again in Chapter 4).
{
In that context, the Cm7 is what’s known as a non-diatonic chord. When it comes to extending non-diatonic chords, the secret is to imagine that C F A¨ they represent a temporary change of key, and extend them if they were in a natural home key, not the key of the song they’ve cropped up in. If that all sounds a bit technical, have a look at this before-and-after section from a progression in C major that includes a non-diatonic chord (Ab).
{
∑ 44 &
CŒ„Š7
w ∑ w w w
? ∑ 44 w ∑
˙˙ bb˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ b˙
FŒ„Š9
˙˙˙ ˙˙
A¨Œ„Š9
∑bb˙˙˙ ˙ b˙ ∑
4 4
4 4
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
Another interesting thing to note in the extended version of progression is the way that the notes in the right hand don’t change, and are in fact the same for the Cmaj7 and F11 chords - it’s changing the notes in the bass that changes the chord’s identity.
31
Extending diatonic chords non-diatonically This sounds madly complicated, but it’s actually a very simple thing, and one of the most basic harmonic techniques in jazz and blues. The most common way it happens is when a major chord that would normally have a major seventh extension is given a minor seventh.
{ {
10
Consider this progression, for example:
b4 ∑ ∑ & b b 4 ˙˙ ˙˙˙ ˙˙˙ ˙˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙˙ A¨Œ„Š7 B¨7 ? b 44 E¨˙ C‹7 ∑ ∑ ˙ bbbb 4 ˙ ˙ ∑ ∑ & b 4 ˙˙ ˙˙ ˙˙ ˙˙ ˙ things ˙˙ you˙˙ can ˙do˙ to extend these One of the most straightforward chords is turn the Abmaj7 into an Ab7, instantly creating a much more ? bb 44 ˙ ˙ bluesy sound: ∑ ∑ b ˙ ˙
{
E¨
b4 & b b 4 ˙˙ ˙ ? bb 44 ˙ b E¨
C‹7
C‹7
A¨Œ„Š7
A¨7
˙˙ b˙˙ ˙˙ ˙˙ ˙
˙
B¨7
B¨7
˙˙˙ ˙ ˙
∑ 44
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑ ∑
∑ ∑
∑ ∑
∑ ∑
∑ ∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑ 44
10
4 44 4
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
Turning a IV (or IVmaj7) chord into a IV7 is a very common and useful trick. That G flat doesn’t occur naturally in the major scale of Eb, but it does occur in the Eb blues scale (of which, more later) - which is what produces the very bluesy sound. You could make the sequence sound even more edgy and raw by making the tonic Eb chord an Eb7 - try it, and you’ll see what I mean.
32
Chord substitutions Something else that cocktail has borrowed from jazz is the habit of ‘substituting’ chords - that is, replacing one chord in a progression with another one that does the same, or a similar job. Chord subbing in jazz is such a rich and complex subject that I can’t go into it in huge detail here, but I do want to give examples of two types of substitution that are particularly useful for us cocktail pianists. The first is the dominant substitution, where a dominant chord - often a dominant seventh - is replaced with a different chord that has the same effect. Here’s the end of a typical progression in C, concluding with a iiV7-I resolution, which, in that key, gives Dm-G7-C:
4 &4
∑
D‹
˙˙˙
G7
˙˙˙ ˙
C
w w w w
∑
∑
More complex substitutions
∑
That’s a perfectly logical progression, but the G7 to C resolution sounds a bit too neat and tidy and not quite cool enough for the cocktail sound. A very common substitution is to replace the V7 chord with a iim7 over the fifth note of the scale played in the bass - which, in C, is a Dm7 chord with a G in the bass:
{
4 &4 ? 44
∑ ∑
D‹
˙˙˙ ˙
D‹7/G
˙˙ ˙˙ ˙
C
w w w w w
The art and science of chord substitution is virtually a lifetime’s study in itself - covering both the very basic substitutions I’ve discussed here out to the wild and whacky fringes of contemporary jazz, blues and funk.
∑
∑
∑
If you’re interested in subs one of the best things you can do is search the web or YouTube for training material that suits your level and way of playing. The subject very quickly starts to shade into outright jazz piano theory, and will take you well beyond the sort of harmonic knowledge you need to keep people entertained at a wedding or a party. Even so, it’s worth researching a little, just to get a sense of the possibilities.
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
33
Chord substitutions (cont.) You can do the same with ii-IVmaj9-I and ii-IVmaj7-I (because the IVmaj7 is like the iim9, but with the root missed out. It even works with a straight IV chord). In C, that gives Dm-Fmaj7/G-C:
{
4 &4 ? 44
∑ ∑
D‹
˙˙ ˙ ˙
˙˙˙ ˙
w w w w
˙
w
FŒ„Š7/G
C
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
The other type of common substitution that’s worth mentioning is the tritone substitution, which we first met on p25. It replaces a V7 chord with another dominant seventh chord a tritone (three whole tones) higher, but usually keeps the original V note in the bass. In C major, a tritone substitution for Dm-G7-C would be Dm-Db7/G-C:
{
4 &4 ? 44
˙˙ bb˙˙ ˙ b˙˙
∑
D‹
∑
˙
D¨7/G
˙
C
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
w
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
nw w nw w
A tritone sub can sometimes sound a bit cheesy and clichéd, but it’s one of the definitive sounds of cocktail piano, and worth experimenting with.
34
Chapter 2: summary In this chapter we’ve seen how particular chords are used to create the distinctive cocktail sound. Here are the key lessons: 1. The most important chords in cocktail are the major and minor sevenths and ninths. You create them by adding successive thirds to basic three-note chords. 2. We call the process of building these chords ‘extending’. A Cmaj9 chord is an ‘extension’ of a basic C chord. 3. When we come across non-diatonic chords we usually extend these using the scale of the key the chord is based on. 4. An important concept, borrowed from jazz, is chord substitution. The most common substitutions replace the V chord in V-I resolutions. Now that we know a bit more about chords, it’s time to return to the right hand, and think about how we can embellish and develop song melodies in the cocktail style.
35
Chapter 3 Mixing it up: elaborating on melody
36
Elaborating on melody A common technique in cocktail piano is elaborating on melody. This is different from pure melodic improvisation, where you keep a song’s chord progression but completely change the tune. Instead, it involves retaining the basic tune but making some changes and additions to it.
We’ve already seen elaboration in action in Chapter 1, where we took the basic melody of our made-up Standard Cocktail Song and made it richer and more interesting. Here’s a reminder of the original tune, as it might appear in commercial sheet music:
Standard Cocktail Song
ill Hilton
b4 & b b 4 œ œ œ œJ œ E¨
C‹7
œ œ œj œ ‰ œj œj œ œ œJ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ J J
F‹7
This is a stan dard
B¨7
cock tail song
G‹
It's
C‹7
B¨7
F‹7
∑
ea sy, it's chee sy, you can sing a - long
And here’s the elaborated version from our cocktail-style arrangement. I’ve stripped out the added chord notes and lowered it by an octave, so you can compare the two easily. I mentioned some of the techniques I’ve used here for elaborating and embellishing the melody on p13. On the following pages we’re going to look at how we could elaborate even further.
Freely, with a swing
b4 & b b 4 œ ™ œ œ œJ
{
Ϫ
. œœœ œ œj œj Œ œj #œj œj œ œ œJ œ œ œ J
œ
œnœ
œ™ ‰
∑
37
Another elaboration Of course, the example elaboration I’ve just given isn’t the only possible one, by far. For any given melody there are countless possible elaborations you can create. Here’s another example, slightly more complex than the last. I’ve annotated it so you can see what’s going on.
Good cocktail players create colour and richness by using the whole keyboard, rather than just the middle octaves. Here I’ve taken the melody, elaborated on it, and shifted up a whole octave. Notice that I’ve made the octave switch at a natural gap between phrases, and I’ve used a jump at the end of the previous phrase to make the transition smoother.
Here I’m playing around with notes in different octaves - it’s a simple way to elaborate on the melody and is harmonically safe. The obvious best way to finger this would be 5th—>thumb, but remember this is free-andeasy cocktail - so if your fingers aren’t in the right place on the approach to this you’re free to jump by moving your hand (stick everything together with the sustain pedal if you need to).
Freely, with a swing
bb 4 œJ œnœœnœœ b & 4 œ J
{
œ. b œj œ œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ#œ J J bœ ™ œnœœbœ œj™ R J ‰ J
This is a section of chromatic scale - a scale that uses all the notes of the keyboard, in order. Chromatic runs are very useful in cocktail: they add colour (that’s what ‘chromatic’ means), but you need to keep them relatively fast, or you risk lingering too long on notes that don’t work so well with the underlying chord.
#œj
œ
œnœnœ ™ ‰
∑
There’s another little touch of chromaticism just here. Turning the Eb into an E natural leads nicely up to the F (which forms part of the chord of Bb, the dominant chord of this key).
38
Elaboration vs improvisation As you’ll see from the examples above, elaboration is different from pure improvisation. When we elaborate on a tune we keep its bare bones, such as the beginnings and ends of phrases, its distinctive rhythms and other bits and pieces that make it a recognisable tune. When we improvise, on the other hand, we change the melody completely. In a single performance of a cocktail song you’ll probably mix elaboration and improvisation - perhaps playing an elaborated version of the melody on the first and last times through the progression, and improvising more in the middle of the performance. Developing elaborations Elaborations are useful for cocktail pianists because most of the time we’re playing for an audience of non-expert listeners. Most ordinary people tend to like music they can recognise, or at least make sense of. That means a structured melody, even if it’s a melody they don’t really know. So when you play cocktail in public it’s a good idea to make an effort to give your listeners tunes they can pick out, even if you mix those tunes up a bit with elaborations and bits of improvisation. That raises the question of how we elaborate on a melody while keeping it identifiable - how do we work out what those ‘bare bones’ are? If you practise you should find that you can work out how to do it pretty instinctively. All the same, it’s worth us taking time to look at a little of the theory.
39
The bare bones of a tune Here’s a really simple melody: the old spiritual When the Saints go Marchin’ In. I’ve included the words so you can follow it easily.
4 & 4 ‰ œj œ œ C
Oh when the
G7
& ˙
in,
-
saints C
‰ œj œ œ ˙ I want to
‰ j œ œ ˙ œ
˙
be
Go mar - chin'
in
‰ j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
j ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
C7
F
in that num ber,
C7
F‹
Oh when the
Oh when the saints C
go
G7
mar
chin'
C
œ œ œ œ ˙
saints go mar - chin'
in.
If you sat and played that at a wedding or party, probably ninety-nine percent of your listeners would recognise it straightaway. It’s so familiar you could probably take out a lot of the notes, and most people would still figure out what you were playing. Have a look at the example on the next page to see what I mean.
40
The Saints... stripped down The original (on the previous page) had a total of 32 notes, not including tied notes. In the version below I’ve stripped out 13 - nearly half. But if you sing the new version to yourself you’ll find it’s still very recognisable as When the Saints go Marchin’ In. Even if you didn’t sing the words, a listener would probably recognise what tune you were hinting at.
4 & 4 ‰ œj œ œ C
Oh when the
G7
& ˙
in,
Ó
C
˙
be
j Œ œ
‰
˙ saints
˙
Go
C7
Œ œ that
F
in F‹
œ œ œ Œ œj ‰ num ber,
There are a few reasons why a melody like this will remain recognisable, even with half its notes taken out. The biggest help is that I’ve kept the first few notes intact: if you were to play this to someone they would figure out the tune just from those notes and then mentally ‘fill in’ the gaps between the following notes. Of course, it helps if the notes that follow still at least outline the original tune - if they really went off at a tangent listeners could get confused, thinking they knew it at first but then losing faith in their initial judgment. The notes I’ve retained later in the melody tend to be at the starts and ends of phrases, and at natural pauses. Even if I’d missed out the second and third notes (‘…when the…’) there’s a pretty good chance someone who knew the tune would still recognise it from these key points.
when
‰
j Œ œ
Oh
Œ
œ G7
œ Œ œ Œ
saints
mar
œ
œ
mar - chin'
saints
C
C7
C
˙
in.
I’ve kept the original timing and rhythm. I could play around with it quite a bit - in particular I might want to add a swing, and use rubato (see p18, above). The notes I’ve skipped are mostly passing (i.e., non-chord) notes. All the notes I’ve kept are chord notes, except the F on ‘the’ in the pickup bar and G on ‘num-’ in the sixth bar.
41
Beginning to elaborate Now have a look at this version. Because I’ve added some complexity I’ve taken out the lyrics, so you might find it useful to play this through at the piano. Each note and phrase underlined in red comes from the ‘stripped out’ version on the previous page. All the others are new. With the exception of a single E in bar 6, none appear in similar places in the original melody.
4 &4 ‰ j œ œ œ C
G7
& ˙
‰ jœ œ ˙ œ
˙ C
‰ œœœ J ˙
C7
F
F‹
‰ j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
‰ œj œ œ#œ œ œ œ œ œ
If you play this through, you should notice that even though the tune only has slightly more than half of its original notes and it’s had brand new notes added that don’t come from the original tune, it’s still more or less recognisable as When the Saints... The way I’ve changed the original tune here isn’t very complicated, but it’s worth looking at it in a bit of detail. There are three key approaches I’ve taken. 1. Not only have I retained the most important notes - the ones that give the tune its identity - I’ve also more or less kept their original prominence in the tune. I’ve done this by keeping the additions fairly sparse and simple, barring a few decorative bits (e.g., the chromatic run up
C7
C
G7
C
œ œ œ œ ˙
E-F-F# in the third bar from the end) which don’t take up much time. In other words, I haven’t been afraid to keep things simple. 2. Many of the ‘new’ notes are taken from the same chord as the original notes in those positions. 3. When I haven’t used chord notes, I’ve used notes from the scale of C (the key of the melody). These are mostly from the pentatonic scale of C - we’ll find out more about pentatonics and how useful they are in the next part of the book, when we discuss improvisation.
42
Elaborating on rhythm and tempo Remember that you can vary the rhythm and tempo as well as the notes when you elaborate on a melody. We looked at this on pp8, 14 and 19. There are various ways you can vary the rhythm and tempo of a melody. By far the most common rhythmic technique in cocktail is rubato, which we first mentioned on p8. Rubato is very difficult to notate, but, unlike some musical concepts, it’s fairly easy to describe. There are two basic types.
When you’re playing cocktail version of a song, it’s common to combine both techniques, varying the tempo to suit the expression and pulling the melody around as part of your elaboration. The other really common technique is to give melodies a ‘swing’ that often isn’t written into commercial arrangements (see note on p9 - ‘this rhythm has been simplified…’). This is fairly universal across cocktail adaptations of ‘standards’ such as showtunes and jazz hits of the 1920s-1950s.
In the first type of rubato you linger on some notes and speed up others, but the underlying pulse (‘beat’) of the music remains regular. In other words, you should still be able to count an even 1-2-3… as you play. You can see this type of rubato in action in the first bar of our development of the standard cocktail song on p11. Compare it to the ‘original’ on p10, in which the first three notes of the tune, G, Ab and Bb, are played as crotchet- quaver-quaver. In our ‘cocktailized’ version on p.11 that’s become dotted crotchet-semiquaver-semiquaver. In the second type of rubato the whole piece of music, both melody and accompaniment, slows down and speeds up depending on how you want to handle the expression. When you play like this, a listener would struggle to count a regular pulse. A typical approach is to pause between phrases of the melody. Songwriters and arrangers sometimes add a direction like ‘freely’ at the top of scores for songs that are meant to be played this way. Some songs are almost always played heavily rubato: Misty and My Funny Valentine are famous examples.
43
Using chords and suspensions in elaborations Finally in this chapter, I want to mention how you can play two or more notes to ‘thicken’ your elaboration with chords. We’ve already looked at this (on p12), but it’s worth discussing again, and also thinking a bit about suspensions. Have a look at the four bars below. Melodically, they’re identical to the first four bars of the elaborated version of When the Saints... on p42. But as you’ll see, I’ve made some additions.
4‰ & 4 ‰ œj œœ œ J C
˙˙˙
‰ j œ œ ˙˙ œœ
These are straightforward fill-outs of the chord notes, played at important points in the melodic line (you can play them elsewhere, too - these are just the most obvious places). I’ve kept these chords fairly conservative for the sake of clarity, but remember you can add to the cocktail sound by using more complex chords like major sevenths (see chapter 2).
C7
G7
‰ j œ œ˙ œ œ œœ œ b œœ n ˙˙
j ‰ œœœ œœ
Suspensions vs. sus chords Suspensions are different from, but related to ‘sus’ chords - a type of chord you might have come across. I haven’t covered sus chords here because they’re relatively unusual in the kind of songs we’re dealing with (they’re much more common in post1960s popular music). However, if you want to know more I have a tutorial on them.
These are suspensions. In each case I’m holding a chord note with my thumb underneath the main melody, which I’m playing with the other fingers of the same hand. Suspensions are useful for thickening out a melody, and for creating a sense of complexity and flow. There are lots of ways of playing suspensions (upper note suspended with fifth finger, melody line played below; two notes suspended etc.) but this is the most common. As you become more confident with your cocktail playing, you should find suspensions come fairly naturally to you. A good habit to get into is always to think in terms of the underlying chords, rather than leaving the chords to the left and just thinking melodically in the right. Always having the chords in mind - but not thinking about them exclusively - is important for improvisation, as we’ll see in the next chapter.
44
Chapter 3: summary As we’ve seen, the most important part of elaborating on a melody is to work out how much of the original you can strip away, and how much you need to keep. Notes at the beginnings and ends of phrases, and the high points and low points of phrases, are usually the most important ones to retain. 1. ‘New’ notes can come from anywhere, but they tend to work best if they’re from the chord, pentatonic scale (see below), or scale of the melody’s key - that’s going from strongest to weakest. 2. It’s fine to work out elaborations in advance if you’re not confident about doing them on the fly to start with. 3. Remember elaborations can also include rhythmic variation - feel free to include some rubato (see p43, above). As we’ve said, cocktail doesn’t usually have a strict beat, so you’re free to play around with timing and syncopation (swing) too. 4. Adding chords and suspensions to your elaborations can help to create interest and depth. Now it’s time to move on to one of the most interesting and useful cocktail skills - improvisation.
45
Chapter 4 Making it up: chordal and melodic improvisation
46
Approaching improvisation If you’re reading this book there’s a good chance that you’ve already seen a few of my YouTube videos, and that you’ve started improvising already. If you’re familiar with my approach, you’ll know that I like to demystify improvisation. Being able to ‘make it up as you go along’ isn’t miraculous, even though it can sometimes seem that way to musicians who have had a very traditional music education based on learning to read from scores. Rather, it’s a process you can learn like any other. Most improvisation is more planned and structured than it looks, and it’s reasonably easy to learn if you do it the right way and you have some patience. The problem most people have when they begin to improvise is that they try to do too much, too soon. Improvising on any instrument is difficult, but improvising on the piano - where you have to think about melody and harmony, using two hands - places great demands on your brain. In neurological terms, your brain has to lay down a lot of new pathways and circuits before you can become a really competent improviser. That doesn’t have to take years, but it does mean you have to go in baby steps to start with. The trick is to learn something simple really thoroughly, then begin to push out of your comfort zone with something a bit more difficult. That means spending a lot of time at the piano practising, and putting up with a lot of mental effort and frustration. It is mentally painful. But - and this is a point I’ve made time and time again elsewhere - you have to embrace the pain. The times when you’re really fighting hard to get something right, stretching your ability so much it almost physically hurts, are the times when you’re doing your best work, forcing your brain to grow and adapt in response to the challenge.
1. Learning to improvise, or improving skills you already have, is much more about experimentation and discovery than it is about learning specific techniques. Take time to explore, play with your own ideas and have fun - that way you’ll get into the true improvisation mindset, and also develop your own style rather than sounding like a re-heated version of someone else. 2. You need to practise a lot. Little and often is good - two lots of half an hour a day is better than a single hour’s sitting. Some things you’ll just need to play over and over again to get right. If your family or the people you live with are complaining about repetitive practice, that means you’re doing it right! 3. Play other music too. If you’ve had a classical training, you may find that interspersing classical practice with improv practice helps both - don’t ask me why, but it does. Baroque keyboard music like that of Bach seems to be best (many great jazz pianists were and are obsessed with Bach - Oscar Peterson, for example). Don’t worry if you’re new or you don’t have any classical experience, though - it’s not mandatory. 4. Listen to and watch other pianists, both in improvisational and other genres. YouTube is great for this. Different people learn in different ways, but I found I learnt a huge amount just watching what other pianists do on the keyboard. 5. Remember there’s no such thing as a ‘wrong’ note - it’s just that some notes sound better than others in particular places. What this means is that when you’re practising your improvisation you shouldn’t obsess over perfection, at least at first: grind on through and get the thing played before worrying about the glitches.
There aren’t many rules when it comes to improvisation, but as you work through what follows I want you to bear in mind the five suggestions I’ve made opposite.
47
Getting started Every improvisation uses a chord progression. To get started, we’ll use a very simple (and very common) one that you’ll find in lots of songs. It turns up in all sorts of major keys, but to keep things clear we’ll look at it in C major. Here’s a fairly logical realisation of it in that key:
4 & 4 ˙˙˙ C
{
? 44 ˙
A‹
˙˙ ˙ ˙
F
G
˙˙˙
˙˙ ˙
˙
˙
™™
∑
∑
™™
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
You might notice that the progression is circular - it ends on the dominant chord (G), so you can keep repeating it over and over - which is just what we need for practising improvisation.
To start with, we’re not going to play the full chords - just the single-note left hand part, and an ‘improvisation’ over the top. At this stage, we’re going to keep that improvisation as simple as possible - in fact, it’ll just be one note:
{
4 &4 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ? 44 ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ C
A‹
F
G
C
A‹
F
G
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙
˙
Pretty boring, isn’t it? Actually, the point of the exercise isn’t to play exactly what I’ve written there - it’s to take that right hand note and improvise on the rhythm side of things. Keep the left hand rock solid and steady, but cut loose with syncopations, triplets... whatever kind of crazy rhythmic variation you want with that middle C in the right hand.
˙
˙
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑ ∑
Finding this familiar? If you’ve read How To Really Play The Piano you’ll recognise the improv method I use here. Stick with it, though, as there are extra bits and pieces here that you’ll find useful.
48
You might, for example, end up with something like this:
4 & 4 œj œ œj œj œ ™ ? 44 ˙ ˙ C
A‹
{
F
G
3
C
j œ œ œ œ œ œ™ œ
F
G
j j j œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ™ ˙
˙
˙
A‹
˙
˙
˙
Wait - C over a G chord ? And Eb over C?
However your one note improvisation comes out, play it over and over again, trying out different rhythms each time. When you’re really - and I mean really - comfortable with it, you can move on to the next stage. That means adding an extra note to the mix - in this case, Eb.
Ignore the fact that this exercise has you to play a C repeatedly over what is supposed to be a G chord. Ordinarily you wouldn’t (unless you were after that particular, rather unusual, effect) but we’re doing it here for the purposes of keeping the exercise simple. You can give all the chords a more obvious identity once you’re using a wider ranger of scale notes in the right.
Do the same thing, but this time create your rhythms using both notes. Here are four bars of what that might sound like:
4 & 4 œ œ bœj œ œj œ œ bœj œ œj ? 44 ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ C
A‹
C
A‹
{
At this stage, if you’ve never done any improvisation before, the trick is to practise this simple stage of the exercise very hard - probably for a few hours, split into shorter chunks - until it comes absolutely naturally, and you can more or less do it without thinking. One variation you might find useful is to play with hands further apart - in other words, move the left hand down an octave and the right hand up one (or more).
You might also be wondering why we’re playing an Eb over a C major ‘chord’. That’s because we’re using the blues scale in the right hand - more on that below.
C
A‹
j b œ œ™ œœœœ ˙
3
˙
F
G
˙
˙
j j bœ œ œ œj œ ™
49
Building it up From there you can begin to extend the exercise by adding more notes. After C and Eb, go for G. This time, you’ve got the notes you need to make the dominant chord at the end sound more convincing. One possible fourbar chunk might sound like this:
j j 4 & 4 œ œ bœj œ œj œ œ œ bœ ™ œ œ œ ™ bœj œ œ œ œj œ œ œ bœ œ œ œ ™ ? 44 ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ C
A‹
F
{
G
3
C
A‹
F
3
G
∑ ∑
Again, practise and practise and practise until you’re really happy. As you become more confident, start ranging around between the octaves more, especially in the right hand. Once you’ve got it down with three notes, you can begin to add the rest of the basic blues scale, one note at a time. After C, Eb and G add F, F# and Bb. After a fair bit of practice - probably a few weeks’ worth, if you’re really new to improvisation - you should be able to do something like this:
3 3 œ™ œ™ j j 4 bœ œ™bœ j œ œ œ j b œ &4 œ bœ œ œ œ™ œbœ œ œ J œ œ œ™ betc... œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ bœ ? 44 ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ C
{
A‹
F
G
C
A‹
F
G
∑ ∑ 50
∑ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ We’ve built up that improvisation using the basic, six-note, blues scale. Using other scales
&
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
Which, running up and down in C* looks like this:
&
œ bœ œœ œ #œ nœ bœ œ # œ b œ œ ˙
Ó
∑
You can use it to improvise against any song in a major key (including any minor middle sections, usually, because those will be in the relative minor key of the main key, and the notes of their scales more or less identical). You’ll find that a plain major gets a bit dull after a while, but it’s useful, especially because it contains the major seventh (B in the key of C) which, as we’ve seen, is one of the most important sounds in cocktail.
But you can also use other scales for improvisation - in fact, when you’re improvising on a particular song you might use several different scales. Over the next few pages we’ll have a look at some of the most useful. First up are the basic major and minor scales.
4 &4 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ 4 œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ &4
∑
This is the basic major scale, in this instance in C major. If you’ve ever had classical piano lessons, both this and the minor scale, below, will be well-known to you.
∑
∑
∑
∑ This is the harmonic minor scale, which is the basic minor scale you’re most likely to use when improvising on minor key songs. You might remember it from p29.
∑
∑
the ∑ sharpened seventh when playing a V chord or, ∑ need rarely, some sort of augmented chord. Most of the time One slight complication is that you will generally only
you can (and in fact need to) use a natural seventh. So, in A minor you would use the G# when playing over an E chord, but G natural when playing over most other chords.
* Strictly speaking, it’s wrong to refer to a blues scale as ‘major’ or ‘minor’ - it’s neither. However, in cocktail (and jazz, and blues) blues scales are usually played against major or minor progressions, you’ll often hear the terms bandied around in a way that doesn’t quite make sense if you have any background in music theory.
51
Pentatonics Pentatonic scales are the great standbys of improvisers everywhere. They’re even simpler than major and minor scales, and offer one huge advantage: an improvised pentatonic melody line in a particular key nearly always works against a chord progression in that key, providing the progression doesn’t contain too many non-diatonic digressions. In other words, when you use a pentatonic you’re almost always on safe ground. That’s handy in all sorts of situations. If, for example, a more complicated improvisation has gone a bit awry, or if you’re temporarily stuck for ideas, you can retreat to the pentatonic of the key you’re in and be pretty sure you’ll be safe.
4 &4
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ œ œ œ
∑
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙
∑
∑
4œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙ &4
∑
∑
&
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
∑
The major pentatonic is the root, second, third, fifth and sixth notes of the major scale. This is C major pentatonic. You can also think of it as the C major scale with the fourth and seventh notes taken out.
The minor pentatonic is the root, third, fourth, fifth and seventh notes of the minor scale. This is A minor pentatonic. A minor is the relative minor of C major if you look carefully you’ll see that the notes of the two scales are the same, just in a different order.
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Blues scales
4 &4 œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙
Bluesy sounds aren’t as common in cocktail as they are in many forms of jazz (and, obviously, blues), but they’re still pretty handy. You probably wouldn’t use a blues scale exclusively when improvising a cocktail melody line, but it’s good to be able to drop in the odd bluesy run.
& œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ ˙
&
∑
∑
∑
∑
bœ œœ œ œ #œ nœ œ bœ œ œ œ # œ b œ n œ œ ˙ œ œ
∑
∑
Ó
∑
∑
∑
& œ bœ œ #œ œ bœ œœ œ #œ nœ bœ ˙
∑
∑
∑
There are two blues scales you can use. The first is the basic blues scale we looked at on p51, above. The other is an extended blues scale, which builds in notes from the pentatonic, and uses every note in the octave apart from the minor second, the minor sixth and the major seventh. To make that concrete, here it is in C:
∑
∑
∑
Fingering blues and pentatonic scales There aren’t fixed ways of fingering pentatonic and blues scales. For most cocktail players this isn’t a problem - cocktail, like jazz and blues, isn’t as demanding of smooth (‘legato’) playing as classical piano is. Gaps in fingering and be easily covered with careful use of the sustain pedal if necessary. As such, I wouldn’t worry too much about using regular, consistent fingering on these scales, still less about practising them as standalone scales as you do with the regular majors and minors. Rather, learn how to finger them by playing them in actual improvisations. One way you can help yourself here is by practising improvisation in a number of different keys from early on.
53
Other useful scales You should be able to do a lot with the major, minor, pentatonic and blues scales - in fact, if you never use any others you should get on perfectly well. There are three other types of scale that you might find useful, though. Chromatic scales use every single note on the keyboard between two given notes. So, for example, a chromatic run from a C to a G will use C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F# and G. If you’ve had classical lessons, you’ll probably have come across chromatics already. Fingering them is easy - you can just use thumb (1) and middle finger (3), incorporating your index finger (2) when you have to bridge the extra white note at E-F and B-C:
4 & 4 œ # œ œ #œ œ œ #œ œ #œ œ #œ œ œ œ bœ nœ bœ œ bœ œ œ bœ œ bœ ˙
Ó
∑
Whole tone scales are useful if you want to create a magical, slightly unearthly sound. They usually work best played as a simple scale, usually going up the keyboard. The great thing about them is that there are only two. I’ve started them on C and C# here, but you can start on any note.
4 & 4 œ œ œ #œ #œ #œ œ #œ #œ #œ œ œ ˙
Ó & 44Œ Œ Œ œŒ œ Œ œŒ œŒ #œŒ œ œ Óœ œ ∑ #œ ˙ # œ #œ
Ó
Œ Œ Œ Œ
Other useful scales include the modes, which (at least in common usage), are eight-note scales that use different intervals than the regular major and minor scales (though, strictly speaking, the major and minor scales are also modes) and the altered dominant scale. Both are commonplace in jazz, but a full discussion would be a bit beyond the remit of this book. Check out the section on jazz resources in Chapter 5.
54
Making the scales fit the chords
edgy, bluesy sound, but it might not work every time. The second is to incorporate notes from the chord itself, or even some from the scale of the (different) key associated with the chord. Once again, the secret is to play around and see what happens. Some standard songs have so many non-diatonics, especially in their middle sections, that they effectively go through a sequence of miniature key changes (famous examples are I Won’t Dance and Taking A Chance On Love). Faced with situations like that it’s often best to come up with an individual strategy for each song, and even to devise and practise ‘improvisations’ in advance.
The single best way to learn how different scales fit over different chord progressions is to sit down with a few chord progressions in different keys and spend quite a bit of time experimenting and discovering for yourself. There’s really no substitute for taking the tools I’ve discussed and figuring out how to apply them through trial and error, at they keyboard, using the method I explained above. That said, there are one or two pointers you might find pretty useful. •
Although most notes of the scale will be safe over most progressions, it’s useful to have a thought for the notes of the underlying chords; when you come to the end of a phrase of improvised melody, you’ll usually get the best sound if you land on one of the chord notes. You’ll also get a slightly more natural sound if the main notes of a phrase (i.e., those notes that aren’t simply ‘passing’ notes) roughly correspond with notes of the underlying chord.
•
However - and this is where you need to use your judgement - you’ll find that if you tie your improvised lines too closely to the underlying chords your lines will sound jumpy and choppy. To avoid that, you need to think about the progression as a whole rather than one chord at a time: if you’re saying to yourself ‘I’m on G, so I need notes that work with G’ then, four beats later, ‘now I’m on Am, so I need notes that work with Am...’ you’re not going to end up with fluid improvised melody lines. Improvisation is often a kind of mental balancing act, as you weigh the competing needs of the melody and the progression.
•
Some clashes will sound worse than others. Combinations like the seventh note of the scale over the IV chord (e.g., a B note over an F chord in C major) or a tonic note over an unaltered V chord (e.g. a C note over a G chord in C major) can sound weak unless they’re just passing notes. However, honestly the best way to learn to manage these sounds is by practice, rather than worrying about them as you play (‘G chord coming up, musn’t play a C...’)
•
With non-diatonic chords you have a couple of options. The first is to stick with the original key in the right hand: this can give a pleasingly
•
When things start to go wrong, or if you’re unsure, remember that you can always retreat to the pentatonic scale for safety. You can still run into some awkward sounding situations (the pentatonic doesn’t save you from the tonic-over-V-chord problem, described above) but by and large it’s safe ground.
55
Chordal improvisation As well as creating meloding improvisations, you can also improvise using whole chords. There are various ways of doing this: 1. Using chord notes to thicken a melodic improvisation. In principle this is straightforward: when you find yourself on a note that belongs to the underlying chord, fill in some of the chord notes in the right hand. We saw this happen on p10, in our cocktail realisation of our standard cocktail song, and on p13 and p44 when we were thinking about elaboration. The secret is not to overdo it, but to thicken up the line with chord notes at important places - the beginnings, ends and high points of phrases, for example. 2. Playing chord patterns step-wise, as an effect in themselves. This first realisation is based on the chords from our standard cocktail song (p8). You’d play it with the same type of easy swing.
b4 & b b4
{
? bb 44 b
j œ œœ œœœ œ œ ‰ œœœ œœœ œœœœœ œ 3 œ œœ œ œ œ
E¨
C‹7
Check out this suspension: I’m holding the Bb from the previous chord at the top of the Fm7 before resolving it half a beat later on to the Ab (which belongs in the chord). It’s not a complicated thing to do, and is a neat way of adding a bit of interest to the movement between chords.
œœ œœ œœ œB¨7œ ™™ œ G‹7 jC‹7 j œ œœœ œœ œ œœ œ œœ œœ J J J œ œœJ œœ œœ J œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ F‹7
I haven’t modified or extended the chords much here, to keep things relatively clear. If you play it through, though, you’ll notice I’m avoiding really enormous jumps in favour of movement that takes the chords up and down step-wise through their inversions. That’s not to say that big jumps are a bad thing (as we’ll see...), but in this type of movement it’s good to keep things relatively predictable. You could make a big jump now and then (say to take the whole thing up an octave), but step-wise chords are generally easy and listenable without giant leaps into the unknown every other bar.
j œœœ œœœ œœœj ˙˙ œ œ œ ˙˙ œœ œ œ œ œ
F‹7
B¨7
∑ ∑
Note the simple stride/shell left hand, as discussed on p17.
56
Chordal improvisation (cont.) 3. Using chords to move quickly up and down the piano keyboard. Here’s the standard cocktail chord sequence again. This time I’ve abandoned stepwise movement decisively in favour of more pronounced jumps:
œœ ™™ œœ œœ ™™ œ j œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ J J œ œ œœ œ œ œ
E¨
b4 & b b4
{
? bb 44 b
C‹7
œœœ C‹7 œ œœœ œœœ œ œ œœœœ œ œœœ œœœ ™™™ J J œ™ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ F‹7
B¨7 ˙ ˙ œœœ ˙˙ J
This sort of effect can be very showy and impressive, especially if you do it fairly rapidly (though it’s not as showy as some of the arpeggiations we’re going to look at next). However, you need a fair degree of finger confidence, and you need to know your different chord inversions very well indeed if you’re going to land confidently every time. You also need good evenness and lightness of touch, or your jumps might end up sounding clunky and crunchy rather than light and graceful, as they should. If you have a classical background touch shouldn’t be too much of a problem. If you don’t - or if your classics are rusty - you can really help yourself by practising your scales regularly. It may be dull, but it makes a difference. Once again, I’ve kept the chords fairly simple for ease of reading. If you were using richer chords, again, you’d need to have a very good, instinctive sense of all the right choices and inversions before you started jumping around.
G‹7
F‹7
œ œœœœœœœ œ
œœ ™™™ œ œœœœ œœ œ™ œ œœœ œœ J B¨7
œœ
œ
œ œ
∑ ∑
Learning inversions One of the best ways to get a feel for the different inversions of various chords is just to sit around and play them. Choose a chord - say, Fm7 - and spend three minutes (time yourself) jumping from one inversion of another on the piano keyboard. As you grow confident, jump from octave to octave quickly and decisively. You’re aiming not just for knowledge but for accuracy and evenness - make sure you’re landing on each chord securely each time. You can also use two hands and practise your chord voicings (a righthand chord with appropriate chord notes in the left). If you’re unsure about voicings and inversions and how they work, you can find video tutorials here and here.
57
Chordal improvisation (cont.) 4. Using broken chords and arpeggios. These can sound very impressive indeed, but the more difficult ones are hard to play well. I’ve included four types in this realisation of the chord progression. Remember we’re still playing it with a steady swing.
œ œ b œ œ 4 œ & b b4 œ œ œ œ œœ ? bb 44 œ b œ œ E¨
In bar 1 there’s a simple arpeggio on each chord simple and easy to play, if a bit dull.
In bar 3 things start to get a bit more complicated - and impressive from the point of view of listeners. These fast upward runs sound great, and playing each inversion twice rather than just once make them easier to play than you might think - you don’t have to throw your hand up the keyboard in the way you have to in the next bar. NB: fast runs like this are always easier going up the keyboard rather than down.
{
C‹7
œœ œœ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
F‹7
B¨7
In bar 2 I’m using a type of broken chord technique that’s sometime’s called ‘split chords’. You can play around with the rhythm of the splits to make things a bit more interesting. Again, it’s pretty easy.
C‹7 œœ œœœ œ œ œ 3 œ œ œ œ œœœœ œœ œœ œ œ œ b œ œ œ œ œ &b b œ œ œœ œ œ ? bb œ œ bœ œ G‹7
{
œ “” œ œ ” “ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ
F‹7
b &b b
4
{
? bb b
B¨7
In bar 4 we have the ultimate challenge - fast upward runs without a pause for breath. Careful with these, because they’re not that difficult to play as such - but it’s difficult to get them smooth They should sound effortless and ‘floaty’. Accuracy on individual notes is actually less important than the overall effect.
58
Improvising intros and outros Finally in this chapter, let’s look at some brief techniques for intros and outros to cocktail pieces. Whether or not you play an intro or an outro for any piece is up to you: sometimes it’s good to dive straight into the main progression and then stop clean, and sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of a run-in and run-out. Intros There are two basic approaches you can take to building an introduction. The first is to use a section of the chord progression: the most common choice is the last 4-6 bars, plus a turnaround (if you’re not sure how turnarounds work, I have a couple of video tutorials on them with examples - you can find them here and here). Using that progression, the two usual approaches are either to put together a chord-based improvisation that just helps listeners to get a flavour of what’s coming and its key, or to play some fragment of melody - usually the final phrase or hook of the the song - to give them a clue about the specific song they’re about to hear. The second approach is to be a bit more free and easy and improvise a chord progression, usually based on dominant or dominant-like chords. These tend to be shorter than intros based on bits of the chord sequence, but they’re also quite easy, and the improvisation tends to be based on chord shapes rather than melody lines. If you were running into a song in C, you might put together an intro progression a bit like this:
An introduction like that gives a useful run-in to a piece, helps you to warm up a bit and helps establish musical context. The trick with intros is to make sure they don’t run on too long, or you might confuse listeners: is this still the introduction, or has the main piece started? Most listeners, even non-musical ones, can roughly discern the difference between an intro or outro and the main progression, and it’s best to fall in line with what they expect - nothing too long and elaborate. Outros Again, there are two general approaches to outros, and they mirror the approaches for intros. The first is to repeat a final section of the chord sequence at least once and possibly more times. The second is to linger on an extended dominant/tonic resolution at the end, progressing through a number of different substituted chords until finally resolving. A common way to finish a cocktail piece is with an arpeggio (see previous page) running right to the highest notes of the keyboard and fading away. With an outro you can also combine the two approaches - in other words, repeat the final chords and then finish with an extended dominant/tonic resolution. As with everything, experiment and develop your own toolbox of approaches.
Cmaj7 | Dm9, Em7 | Fmaj9 | FmM7 / G ... That final chord before the main progression starts is an Fm with a major seventh (i.e., E natural rather than E flat) over a G in the bass. Substituting a IVm for a regular IV chord is a common technique in intros and outros, and works especially well when the IV is being used as a substitution for a V, as is the case here.
59
Chapter 4: summary Piano improvisation is hard, but it’s not magic. If you approach it methodically and put the work in, you can get reasonably good reasonably quickly. Cocktail is a pretty user-friendly style in which to improvise, because it usually has a relaxed, forgiving tempo that doesn’t keep you under constant pressure. Key tips: 1. If you’re new to improvisation, don’t try to do to much at once. Start improvising using very restricted resources (i.e., just a few notes and some simple chords) and gradually build the complexity. Remember that piano improvisation is a complex task that requires your brain to lay down a lot of new circuits - if you try to do too much at once you won’t make meaningful progress. 2. That said, you should always be stretching yourself, searching for the sweet spot in which you can play the improvisations you’re attempting (however imperfectly to begin with) but where you’re having to make a mental effort to do so. Mindlessly playing stuff you find easy is great fun and you should definitely do it, but the best practice happens when you’re stretching yourself. 3. There are two basic types of right-hand improvisation: melodic and chordal. You can balance and vary the two. Exactly how you do that will depend on the song you’re playing, the personal style you develop and your own personal strengths and weaknesses as a player.
60
Chapter 5 Additional resources
61
Things to watch As I’ve already said, learning from other pianists is really useful – but you really need to watch what they do rather than just listen. You learn a lot more looking over shoulders, even if you’re doing it virtually. Surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of really great cocktail piano on YouTube. There’s quite a bit of stuff that calls itself cocktail (which, as I said in the intro, is fair enough: there’s hardly a strict definition) but which is actually ragtime, jazz, blues, boogie or straight-up pop. When it comes to traditional cocktail, there’s less material than you might expect, but some good stuff all the same. Obviously pianists are uploading new material all the time (maybe you could make a video of yourself when you’ve worked on your skills a little?) so it pays to keep hunting around. One really great video I’ve found is from London-based cocktail pianist Stefan Ciccotti. In his promo video Stefan uses quite a few of the techniques and sounds I’ve covered in the book. A trained percussionist as well as a pianist, Stefan is a very good musician indeed and worth keeping an eye on (or booking, if you’re organising a party...!) Here’s Glen Rose playing cocktail classic Misty. Listen to how Glen uses the upper octaves of the keyboard to get the melody to sing out (sometimes even playing it in octaves for extra clarity). Glen has several other videos, including some tutorials, and I recommend checking them out.
When it comes to more general material on piano improvisation, there’s an enormous choice – to the point where it can be difficult to know where to start. I have more than 100 piano tutorials posted on my own YouTube channel, but they’re really just a drop in the ocean when you look at the total number of piano tutorials on YouTube. I’m not going to make any specific recommendations, but it’s worth spending some time on YouTube searching around for piano channels that you find useful. One common problem you’ll encounter is that some videos are pretty difficult to follow. Don’t be put off if you find a bunch of YouTube piano tutorials that don’t make sense to you. Oftentimes some of the more complex ones (say, where a jazz pianist is playing and talking through a transcription of a solo) are baffling even for quite highly skilled pianists. Rather, hunt around and try to find the guys who explain things clearly. They come and go, but they are out there, and good new ones are springing up all the time. Be a bit carefuly with “How To Play [some song]”-type tutorials - YouTube has many of them, and while they might be useful if you want to learn to play that one song, they’re unlikely to teach you many skills you can apply across all your playing. Unfortunately, if you search for “piano tutorial” you’ll get a huge list of them; you’re better off searching for things like “piano improvisation” and “piano chords”.
Finally, a couple of videos - Curtis McLeod here and Bela Papai here - that give you an idea of what it’s actually like to play cocktail in the real world. Both are very, very good pianists. McLeod is having to cope with a very noisy environment and manages well (helped by what sounds like a very chunky, ringing acoustic piano). Papai doesn’t have quite such a noisy gig, but he has to deal with other problems - check out the guy with the drink that comes up to him and starts singing along around the twenty minute mark. That sort of stuff happens all the time when you’re playing a cocktail gig, and last time I checked ‘dealing with drunk people’ isn’t on any of the major piano exam syllabuses.
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Things to read (and play from) I mention most of these in How To Really Play The Piano, but it’s worth listing them here, too, in case you don’t have that book. If you don’t, by the way, and you feel you need to strengthen your knowledge of some of the basics, take a look at it. I guess I would include my own book in a section on recommended reading (!) but, based on the feedback I’ve had, many people have found it useful - so I guess you might, too. Piano World is a goldmine of piano-related stuff, especially in its forum. It also features the ever-handy Piano World Virtual Piano Chords tool, which, if you’re unsure, will show you how to play a vast range of chords in all sorts of inversions. If you want a paper reference for chords, The Keyboardist’s Picture Chord Encyclopedia by Leonard Vogler (ISBN-13: 978-0825611322) is very handy. There are quite a few chord encyclopedias on the market, and this is one of the most useful and comprehensive. As well as the notation for each chord, Vogler includes a photo of how it’s played on the keyboard: useful if you’re not a hugely confident reader of music, or you get fed up translating endless sharps and flats into real notes.
If you’re looking for music to work from, there are various compilations and collections on the market. Since they vary from country to country, I won’t list any specific ones. However, a good collection of Broadway showtunes and jazz standards is always useful. I also like to have composer specific collections by the most important of the Great American Songbook composers: Richard Rodgers (with lyrics by Lorenz Hart and, latterly, Oscar Hammerstein II), Cole Porter, George Gershwin (with lyrics by Ira Gershwin), Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin. If you don’t know this material, check it out: it’s all been played by cocktail pianists for years, and nearly all of it is of a very high quality and very playable. The best songs by Rodgers, Gershwin and Porter represent the top of the songwriter’s craft, and in terms of their artfulness and brilliance stand comparison with the best songs and arias by classical composers like Schubert and Mozart (well, I think so).
The Manual Of Scales, Broken Chords and Arpeggios For Piano, edited by Ruth Gerald (ISBN-13: 978-1860961120) will really help you brush up your scales - which, as we’ve seen, are useful for cocktail, but will also improve your playing in general. This book – which is designed for students taking Associated Board exams – is a comprehensive resource, and includes every standard scale (but not the jazz ones) you’ll ever need, plus the necessary fingerings. Jazz Piano Scales: Grades 1-5, published by ABRSM (ISBN-13: 9781860960086). Useful if you want to improve your jazz knowledge, this book is based around the Associated Board Jazz syllabus. I have a few reservations about applying the grade system to jazz playing – jazz piano is supposed to be about having a good time, not competing for certificates – but there’s no doubt that this book is really useful for would-be jazzers.
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