As a classical musician, sometimes people will ask me: 'but do you like Jazz?' Consider this video a response. SHEET MUSIC now available here! willskeyboardsheets.sellfy.store Contact: willskeyboardsink@gmail.com
There is a joke I always tell my students: If you want a classical musician to stop playing, take away his scores. If you want a jazz musician to stop playing, give him scores. thank you so much for sharing!
"Are you telling me jazz musicians pay for sheet music that isn't even finished?" me, a jazz musician: "No! God no. Of course not. We don't *pay* for it."
Omg bro I laughed so hard when you were handed Take Five, because as a classical musician it was the first Jazz piece I was ever handed by my teacher, and I had the literal same reaction to the 5/4 time signature as you did and my teacher was like "Oh! it's so easy!" and I was like: "Bruh. I've been a classical pianists for 6 years wtf is this-"
@@novamusic5134 actually i lied a bit. my friend who was the drummer wrote by hand the score for drums, the basic rythm. i wrote the general score and my teacher would then transcribe the clarinet and violin part from my general score separately so my colleagues would have only their specific part. it was some sort of orchestration from the piano score for take five, it was a great deal for me at the time because i learned to write a score just like you write one in sibelius/musescore, having equal lenght measures, each time from each instrument wrote down one beneith the other and so on. even the barlines were drawn using a ruler so each bar would be perfect lol. now i it's easier to just use musescore but yeah, for a 16-17 yo guy who played only classical and some sort of pop music, i was really happy and considered kinda bold
imho handing a jazz score to a musician to get him to jazz is bad teaching. If you want to get the student to jazz you should make him listen to the thing before playing it. Of course when you're playing in an ensemble and in many other situations you will have to play jazz tunes without hearing them before but teaching tradition in jazz should always start by listening. If you just hand out the sheet music to the people, you're not teaching the jazz tradition but an overly simplified and soulless version of what anyone would actually play
it's only my second year learning how to perform jazz and we literally never follow the sheet music. we literally use it for the base but we change EVERYTHING 😭
@@alanyue3714 " “I remember guys would look at his music and say: ‘We can’t play this’, but by the end of the rehearsal everybody was playing it anyway.” SONNY ROLLINS on Thelonious Monk...
True though... It's like you learn different scales, modes and then altered chords and substitute them here and there and and then after all that: forget all the rules and improvise.
There's great irony with 1:43. Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann, all of the 'great pianists' were also great improvisers. Chopin's improvisations were mindblowingly complicated. This is a skill nearly completely lost to modern pianists. Even I (outside of jazz), don't have much interest in improvising an entire classical style work.
Yup :)) it stems back even further (and even more impressively) into the baroque era, where it wasn’t uncommon for the best to improvise fugues which is ridiculously hard (most people these days can’t even write a fugue given all the time in the world)! This is more of a fun video than a full history lesson but I hope in the future i can cover a lot of different things and bring up this kind of stuff too :))
I think music has become a lot more complex and specialised. Back in those days I guess most pianists were composers and vice versa, whereas nowadays most pianist stick to piano. Pianists also have a huge database of great pieces to perform thanks to all the great composers who came before us
@@sabinhong0307 meh. Complexity is just a two sided coin that never stops spinning. Fugues are still the highest complexity of art and no one makes those anymore. Also "great composers that made great pieces" is low quality thinking. It idolizes normal people that had real issues and imperfections just like everyone else.
I think you have to differenciate between a pianist/interpreter/performer and a composer. A pianist isn’t nessecarily a composer (and vice versa). Nowadays, compared to the times of Beethoven or Chopin, there is a much greater importance of the performance/interpretation of a piece as its own, complex art. Still, many pianists I know do compose or improvise, and to a certain extend you do learn basic theory for that in music school as well.
Many years ago, I sponsored a week-long jazz mini-course at my school. (I played drums.) One of the students involved was a professional classical pianist, far and away the most accomplished musician of the bunch. She just could not improvise. A senior who was the project's musical director-now a three-time Grammy-nominated instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer-ended up writing charts for her solos, which she played beautifully. They sounded completely improvised, but could not have been less so.
i find this so interesting how some beginners are essentially more 'skilled' at improvising than classically trained musicians just because they don't know how many 'rules' they are breaking by just playing whatever they want. they play what they feel like playing which is great. but both skills are really important.
@@Ace-dv5ce yes that is true. The hard thing about it is, that Coltrain is constantly modulating in every second bare. The piece is also written at a very high tempo, which makes it even harder, because you have think very quickly. In fact, even the pianist Tommy Flanegan who played on the original recording, didn’t managed to improvise over it, but Coltrane still decidet to leave it on the record.
I do not agree with this recommendation. I would recommend beginners start with “Impressions” or another tune with minimal changes. “Giant Steps” has some awkward changes that are not intuitive for improvising.
@@NightOfCrystals that was a joke. The joke is that it is so hard to improve over and that it isn’t good for beginners at all. It is like saying, that Liszt is good for beginners.
This reminds me of when I was 13 and my music teacher (who was a jazz musician and arranger) and he gave me this piece to play (Monk's 'Round midnight). So I played it like it was a classical piece. He responded - well you site read it ok, but it doesn't go like that! This is jazz. He played it (brilliantly) and I was hooked on Jazz.
My daddy played classical and jazz piano. I loved it! As kids when he started playing we came from ever we were to the living room to listen! One of my best childhood memories.
You'd probably like cruising through Charles Cornell's RU-vid channel, especially the ones where he begins to examine and explain the differences between playing jazz and classical music. Both of you are amazing musicians! And happy new year to you with excellent health & great success!
you are so incredibly talented! i can tell by just the first seconds! everything is perfection! awesome job! your videos are always amazing and a pleasure to see! keep up the great work! liking and subbing rn!
That was really funny. That is EXACTLY what went through my mind years ago. It was really hard for me to transition to Jazz after years of classical piano. AND, I have so much more learn. I have only scratched the surface.
Oof. I feel the pain bro. I tried learning how to play jazz and the sheets just make little to no sense. I understand that they do sound great if played properly, but how am I supposed to focus on 4 things at a time while reading and playing weird gibberish-looking notes!? Improvising just makes it worse, having to make up music while playing other music, along with the gibberish gives me headaches. I've been getting better at it though, but some sheets still hurt my brain. Great video btw.
It's very rare for jazz musicians to use sheets at all, most of us learn reportoire by ear. This might sound a bit foreign but a good way to practice jazz is to just try and play a fitting melody while listening to the tune you're practicing and getting a good feel for what notes work and what notes don't.
Jazz Pianist here. I believe human cannot focus on 4 things at a time, and can't even do 2. The reason we can play piano in the first place is not because we can think about multiple things in the same time, it's rather because we learnt to use muscle memory to off load our thoughts, therefore, we can treat multiple things as one thing, or even nothing. The main challenge for classical musician to play Jazz is that the muscle memory they relied on didn't train to recall different memory spontaneously. It's not true that we focus on multiple things at the same time. We learnt to play different component like chord shapes, Bass lines, melodic lines, scales, arpeggio as part of the muscle memory. So when we read chord charts they trigger our brain to recall the appropriate muscle memories for the chords. If without chord charts, we just go straight into the muscle memory without the triggering part. Both can combine a little conscious decision to make it more spontaneous. The more components we learn, the more option we get. The more option we get, the easier we can play them, because it'll feel like we have more safety net to fall into. Many Jazz musician often expressed " feels like playing anything would sound right".
@@Kingstonlomusic It feels a lot like relearning how to play the piano a little. But with prior experience you get me? Kind of like carnival games that are "based off skill". You get a little handicap basically if you've already had experience, but the actual game is altered against your favor. For me, jazz as a classical musician is like rewiring your head with extra components and those components start off difficult to get the hang of, but eventually when it does work right, is great. I have to admit, sometimes it gets oddly addicting to mix some kind of jazz into compositions, even if it is for a tiny bit.
1:37 Literally what I told to my piano teacher the first time he told me to improvise… as a classical music player I was really confused at that point. now I’m doing a blues improv
I love jazz and classical, especially from the romantic and classical period, and jazz from the bebop through the late 60's. For pianists that know both, they are truly gifted. I started with classical but realized I was better with improv. and being able to re-harmonize chords, chord subs, progressions etc. seeing classical music would terrify me---so many notes! I envy those classical pianists who can site read and play all the notes perfectly in the first or second try.
Both are their own special skills! Glad to see someone who gets that, and you're absolutely correct...anyone who can bounce between classical and commercial/jazz even with moderate ease is a gifted unicorn!
Please make a longer version of that LA Campanella PLEASE! That 2 second transition might be the audibly pleasing thing I've ever heard. No exaggeration
I‘ve played piano since I was 4 and i always played classical music. Once I had to take a jazz piano class and I was completely lost, so the piano teacher wrote me an impro😂🥺
Awesome video! As a jazz bassist, the last chord symbol was def for a classical pianist reading jazz symbols. I'd write it as G#min(maj7), but that's my perspective.
When you play jazz you can’t do so from having a good memory copying, you have to be able to bring your mastery on the fly and play all sorts of different timings, dynamics incongruous congruous music whilst music to the ear. You have to be well down with all polyphonic to the point it’s like alien. I find jazz more challenging than classical and has given me more control in my classical playing.😊
Rarely do people know that back in the day, classical pianist would actually do lots of improv during their concerts and were really good at it! I laughed too hard at the chords. TRUE. Your not a classical musician if you can play chords. This whole thing killed me and I can completely relate but this teaches us though that we should expand our horizons :)
How can you not recognize that piece at the start of the video? xD ( Chopin: Ballade in G minor [The Horowitz versions are really good]) And there are componists like Hamelin and Sorabji and etc. who make insanely hard but beatiful pieces:D (because of the la Campanella you played in the end. The Hamelin version of la Campanella actually made a ascend the first time I listened to it)
Bruh, I am DEAD 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 As a classically trained musician with a musical theatre degree, turned commercial and jazz musician, I feel your pain SO HARD! Don't get me wrong, I love singing it all but turning to the commercial and jazz world to attain my dream job has been more of a struggle than I realized...still struggling and learning, but it really has allowed for a wider appreciation for what goes into each style :) But also love how you referred to it as a "piece" as a classical musician but as a 'tune" or something similar as the jazz musician...I don't know if that was on purpose, but lets' be real, that's exactly the vernacular they use in real life! That said...Autumn Leaves is a JAM, and it's THE song that has taught me the most about jazz, and I continue to use it as a learning tool for progressions and scat improv! I remember when I asked for the Real Book for my birthday a few years ago, my parents ended up getting it for me, they saw inside and went "What the hell is this??" 😆 Heck, I still didn't know at the time if I'm honest!
Jazz and classical are like the books of music, it takes patience to get to like them but it's very worth it. I like both and I used to think they were boring. You should listen to more classical (I recommend chopin ravel and debussy) if you're a little curious
If you like weird rhythms, the Horseman Etude (Op. 25 No. 3) by Chopin should be quite good to learn. Here's one version: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-IqG2Mxx3MM8.html&ab_channel=TraumPiano (Traum Piano calls it "The Knight Etude" but it is the same as "The Horseman"
