SAVE 25% on Keezers new course, Jazz Piano Essentials! Use code - KEEZER openstudiojazz... World-class jazz pianist Geoffrey Keezer demonstrates how to practice pentatonics, melody, bebop and blues, all over one timeless form.
Yes. This is the approach Mozart and Beethoven would take often when teaching composition to a private student. Take a theme, or melody, like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (Ah! Vous Dirai-je Maman) and have the student compose a set of variations utilizing different textures and stylistic elements but retaining the original form and melodic outline. Just gotta say I love that piano playing. So clean and musically dynamic. Like George Shearing meets Herbie Hancock meets Russ Freeman.
I’m a guitar player/songwriter who has been writing unpopular popular music for decades. I love watching videos like these despite understanding less than 1/4 of them.
Great video. What's really interesting is even at the end when you switched styles every 4 bars and said it might sound "all over the place," I actually loved it...it was lively and engaging to me as a listener. That's the way I like my jazz--and as a student of jazz piano being able to fluently switch up like that is an aspiration of mine. One day!
The pentatonics modern approach was the only one of the four styles that sounded very outside of the blues (to me). Great stuff and thx for the transcibing what you were playing!
Great inspiring lesson and wonderful playing! I loved it all but playing melodies like that is my thing.its hard to do as well.gotta see this man live someday!
Great lesson - and from a Master of the modern piano. Much to practice and absorb here re an intro to the fundamental language of blues and bebop. More like this please.
Great lesson and impressive impro! you really shred the Keys Geoffrey.. I really loved that modern pentatonic stuff! That was pretty much playing with fourths and superimposing pentatonics to get that nice outside feeling right? (Just a stupid guitarist here😀)
Amazing video, thank you so much! and superb playing and teaching. I was already adept to trade fours with myself or similar on practice, but in a very simplistical form, this way of changing consciously over several styles and ideas is very refreshing! It works specially well the 4/3 thing, four styles over the three four groups of the blues, so you have to keep changing and aware.
Brilliant demo of the options and nice to hear you are continuing your voyage of magnificence!PS I first heard you live with Art Blakey30 odd years ago in Aberdeen,Scotland on Art's 70th birthday and it was STUNNING!
Something like the 4th category but much more advanced. But still using a lot of pure melody and blues. Trane wasn't doing a "restrictive practice"-type exercise on CTT that I can identify, although he may have been working within certain parameters of his own invention. Who knows? It's an incredible tour de force.
Beautiful, I'm a guitar player, but I'm gonna cop those choruses, all have the essence of the Blues despite, the different approaches....'Modern Penta Style' = McCoy Land. Love it, thanks for sharing.
Everything played here sounds fantastic. Will check out the course mentioned here. Subscription to Open Studio is the best thing I've done for my piano learning adventure. Tried a lot of courses, some great things out there, but OS really clicks for me.
Totally amazing playing and a great lesson! Question for Open Studio: is this the video that you intended for "What is Restrictive Practice....?" I recall a different discussion around that concept from you guys - even if this might be one of Geoffrey's approaches to (somewhat) restrictive practice.
Although I don't use the term "restrictive practice" in video, it is that in the sense that you are focusing (or restricting) yourself to playing one singular way at a time. Does that make sense?
I've played with musicians who when asked to play the blues go right to "blues scales". The outcome has often been, meh. I'll show you a blues by Bill Evans (the pianist) done not with a blues scale that will make you cry. Relying on scales is like a guitarist who plays "in the box". They're tools. Just because you can play a blues scale doesn't mean you are/can play the blues. OF course, what I just wrote is easier said than done. Really playing the blues, like everything else in music, is a learning process.
Those double octave sixteenth notes work really well for the bebop. Funnily the conscious effort to produce something melodic is what works least well, perhaps because you are defining the melodic thang as being not the other three thangs, (and not vanilla either) without giving it some positive quality to aspire to .
Interesting how (at least on the first run-through) you grooved on the first and fourth variants, but not as much on the middle two. You can obviously do all four, but it suggested where your musical heart really is. One other comment: you spoke of playing “just pure melody” as one of the variants, but I think a real singing “voice” nearly always must be at the heart core of what we do when we play.
@@magohipnosis It's all old music, not contemporary. I am a professional bebop and beyond player myself, but all these styles are traditional, not modern. And most definitely not contemporary. Nothing which is 6 or 7 decades old is contemporary.
This is great. It’s a bit ‘show-off-ey’ but with the pause button, very useful. Piano Pig gives a nice easier to digest piecemeal approach but this give you the finished product. I definitely prefer the former.
@@afrodiameter not so sure. I’m a prof career pianist - always looking for new tips. Great pianist etc but just commenting that, for me, there are advanced clips with better teaching style, more slow and analytical (eg Piano Pig). I also teach jazz at college level and know the importance of it. My comment was pretty balanced I thought. Comments can be measured and not always fawning too!
This video is a preview of the complete course on openstudiojazz.com which gives you options to slow down the video and a lot more detail/explanation :)
