Playing from Nothing - Jazz Improvisation

[Music] hi guys so the way most people play jazz is by learning to play the chords and the melody of a song and then learning to improvise over that same chord progression this is the typical approach to jazz so we have a given chord progression and we spontaneously create a melody over the top of it but as a pianist you control both the harmony usually in your left hand and the melody in your right hand so really there's no reason for you to stick to a given predetermined chord progression you could spontaneously create both the chords and the melody so that you're improvising the entire song now this is sometimes called playing from nothing and the jazz pianist that comes to mind when we talk about playing from nothing is of course keith jarrett who very often improvised entire hour-long concerts from nothing he would just sit down at the piano with nothing prepared and play and improvise for an hour now this is quite an underrated skill for a pianist in my opinion just being able to sit down at the piano not have anything in mind and just make something up on the spot and have it sound you know half decent is pretty pretty fun and a pretty impressive and useful skill to have now keith jarrett talks about entering a transcendental state of mind when he's playing such that even he doesn't know what he's about to play next and it's a surprise to him when he hears it well i'm not keith jarrett and i suspect there's a very high probability that you're not keith jarrett so in this video i'm going to discuss how you too can practice playing from nothing without the need to enter any kind of transcendental plane we're going to stay very much earthbound in this video because after all this is a jazz piano channel and not a meditation channel now playing from nothing is a misleading term you never truly play from nothing because you've already played plenty of different songs and melodies and chord progressions and styles and all of those things that you've played in the past are in your fingers and can be drawn upon when you're playing from nothing this is very similar to just plain old regular improvisation where you're creating a spontaneous melody but you've already practiced playing the chords the melody the key the scale and everything else that is a feature of that song and your solo is informed by all of those things now playing from nothing simply takes this one step further and forces you to draw from previous chord progressions that you've also played so in order to just be able to sit down at the piano and spontaneously play something that sounds half decent we will need to practice a few separate elements and then follow a few general rules now first you really want to spend a lot of time practicing to play and improvise over lots of different but simple and nice sounding chord progressions in different keys now i prefer two and four notes diatonic chord progressions because they are quite simple to play and remember and they sound almost necessarily sound really nice and pleasant now our goal here is not to learn and create some kind of amazingly complex chord progression but rather it's to learn little simple chord progressions that sound good on their own that we can then spontaneously add together and combine into a larger chord progression song and performance and still have it sound nice now a good place to start is what i've listed up here in the picture-in-picture it shows you five major and five minor chord progressions that are simple and sound really really nice and five major and minor keys that aren't too hard but they will give you enough variety in your playing when you change keys for example and a number of melodic improvisation ideas that you can employ when you're improvising the melody over these uh chord progressions for example let's take a one six four five in d minor [Music] or a one four in c major [Music] now of course if you're playing in a particular key you can essentially use any of the chords from that key at random and it will still sound okay because you're you're just in a single key it's all diatonic but these chord progressions in particular sound particularly nice particularly pleasant and that's largely why they are very very common very very widely used chord progressions if you just google four chord pop song you'll find many of these chord progressions are used across lots and lots and lots of different songs and so if you learn to play all of these chord progressions in all of these keys using all of these improvisation ideas melodic ideas um you're 90 of the way to being able to play from nothing because essentially when we're going to be playing from nothing we're just going to take some combination of these chord progressions and the melodic improvisation ideas and just combine them you know spontaneously without thinking too far ahead knowing that all of these sound good individually independently therefore if you combine them properly which i'll get to in a minute they're going to sound nice as well but there are of course a few rules you should follow to make this spontaneous playing from nothing improvisation sound a bit more interesting and sophisticated now your left hand is in charge of playing the chords and so when you first begin your playing from nothing improvisation you want to take one of these chord progressions from at random and start repeating it but you don't just want to play the triad and the seventh chords you know on beat one and hold it for the full bar that that gets really boring instead we want to create some kind of pattern with the chord and then continuously repeat that same pattern through the entire chord progression and through all the repeats so we're essentially creating some kind of an ostinato or a vamp with our chords you know that could be some kind of rhythmic pattern or an arpeggio that you hold or some kind of broken chord idea you know it doesn't really matter as long as it's a pattern that outlines the chord highlights the chord that you establish and then repeat through the entire progression you also want to use a steady tempo so if we take the 1654 and d minor again a simple pattern could just be arpeggiating each chord up [Music] [Applause] [Music] or again if we take the 1 4 in c major we could use a simple stride like pattern but a slow stride and maybe even turn it into a waltz [Music] and actually that pattern is taken directly from uh certain opportunity [Music] and in fact the one under it the one five sus is taken from bill evans peace piece [Music] right all those are good ideas for interesting patterns in the left hand um while the right hand is using all those different melodic ideas but periodically when you say reach a new section or you decide you want to start a new section you can either alter the chord progression that you're playing so pick you know you're playing one pick a different one start using a different one maybe in a different key you might even want to change to a new chord progression in the middle of an existing chord progression to really vary things up so that your song isn't clearly built in four bar chunks again when you want to start a new section you could vary the pattern that your left hand is using to play the chords or introduce a break that's also a really nice technique so you're playing that repeating pattern and then for one bar usually the last bar stop just play maybe the root note of the chord and then silence for the rest of the bar also very effective and finally we don't want to stay in the same key for the entire improvisation that's why you're going to practice in those five different keys we want to be able to change to any of those chord progressions in any of those keys but when you modulate when you change to a different key before you hit the tonic chord always play the dominant chord the five chord in the new key followed by the tonic of the new key so if you're playing in a minor and you want to move to the key of d minor you would play an a7 before playing the one chord the d minor and as you can see here all of my chord progressions listed up here begin on the one chord so you're essentially playing the five chord then the one chord is bar one of the new chord progression in the new key that you're playing up here now this is called a prepared modulation and it just connects your keys a little bit smoother when you you introduce the new one chord the new tonic with a 5 1 cadence just sounds nicer so while your left hand is improvising the chords by using a pattern at a particular tempo using one of these chord progressions your right hand is improvising the melody now now while you're doing that you want to alternate between the different ideas or scales listed up here and also occasionally use some repetition or establish a motif and then repeat that motif periodically and come back to it through your improvisation especially if you can do that in a different key again if you can play in a minor and create a motif then move to d minor and play that same motif but in d minor that's really really effective now by playing all these chords progressions patterns melodic ideas enough times you eventually internalize them to the point where you don't need to think about them anymore and that is what is meant by playing from nothing it's not so much that you've never touched a musical instrument before or you've never played a song or you have no idea what a perfect cadence is you know that is not what playing for nothing is obviously you need to have some level of music ability and knowledge to be able to just sit down and play so really when people talk about playing from nothing it's just about having enough chord progressions patterns and improvisation ideas and techniques that you've played enough times that you can just sit down and kind of throw out onto the keyboard without actually planning them ahead of time or thinking about it again if you're playing a particular chord progression using a particular pattern and particular you know scales and ideas in a minor you might all of a sudden decide that you want to change to c minor or g major or f major just spontaneously you've decided to change that that level of spontaneity in both the melodic material which is you know very standard very common in jazz improvisation that's what jazz improvisation is spontaneously playing melodic material is mirrored and complemented by spontaneously playing the harmonic material but again that doesn't mean you don't know what a scale is you've never played the whatever c major a flat minor d dorian scales before you've already practiced them you've practiced licks you've practiced scales you've practiced keys you've practiced patterns all of those things are in your fingers you've internalized them the way you present them on the keyboard is the spontaneous part the order in which and the speed and the the articulation with which you you apply them that's where the spontaneity comes from same idea with the chord progressions you've already practiced a whole bunch of chord progressions whole bunch of patterns and you're just spontaneously choosing them semi-randomly during your improvisation so that it looks like you're creating something from nothing you've just sat down at the piano you don't have any sheet music in front of you you you're not playing a particular song you've just sat down and you're just playing stuff and it sounds great that is a cool skill to have and one worth practicing cool so now i'll give a brief example of me attempting this playing from nothing idea [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: Walk That Bass

Views: 22,050

Keywords: Jazz Piano, Play from Nothing, Jazz Improvisation, Keith Jarrett

Id: 7yqqfQm7rIs

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 03 2021