Playing the classic Disney song with a nod to the great pianist Art Tatum.
I have been messing around with playing rubato, dynamics, and building inside countermelodies while playing ballads on solo vibes... I thought I would share this for comment. It is short.
Revisiting "Country", a beautiful composition written by Keith Jarrett. It's an AABB form composition. This clip features three separate renditions of the melody chorus.
I remember seeing Keith play this solo piano on SNL in the 70s. It was amazing seeing him play solo piano on prime time commercial television. Country is also one of the tracks on Keith's great recording "My Song" featuring Keith and his European quartet (Jan Garbarek, Palle Danielson and Jon Christenson). It's one of my favorite recordings.
Playing Hoagy Carmichael's classic composition "Skylark" this morning before an enjoyable day of teaching at Berklee. So many great songs written by Hoagy Carmichael and this is one of them.
Volumes 1 and 2 of the four volume series The Complete Guide To Improvisation are now available via my website, Amazon and the Berklee College of Music bookstore.
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I'm posting this final "round up" of Giant Steps to stress the importance of sculpting each phrase, no matter what the tempo. Ben pointed out the advantage of not playing the tune too fast, so here's a medium tempo where I did my best to shape each phrase, using dynamics, dampening and legato playing.
Motivic Playing: Practicing today at Berklee on "All Of Me" with a focus on motives. More or less changing motives every eight measures. Motivic Playing is a chapter in The Complete Guide To Improvisation Volume Two.
Lots of octaves with the right hand. Arrangement PDF included.
This version of My Wild Irish Rose is inspired by pianist Keith Jarrett. I love how he subtly shifts keys on familiar tunes. This version is an example of playing a tune by ear and then looking for interesting ways to change keys. I decided not to improvise on this one — just played the melody in slightly different ways that seemed to fit each key. Every chorus is the same, yet slightly different each time.