Jazz Piano Demonstration in A Major

Series Summary

Music is a vibrant and necessary part of the human experience—even a salve for the human condition. Since the first sound wave burst forth from the womb of creation, we have come up with ways to write, record and play musical compositions. We’ve invented fancy-sounding Italian names for every musical idea we could imagine, and collected these into a body of knowledge and practice which we call “music theory,” complete with a circle of fifths. Concepts like minor and major, intervals and chords are all fine examples of the way we, as a species, like to catalogue and classify. Yet, improvisation is an instance where we play at the speed of thought, without classification or nomenclature. Very popular among jazz players, improvisation is a great tool to expose one’s true knowledge (or lack thereof) of a particular musical instrument—as well as let go of some of the traditions of the past to allow for new and different modes of creative expression.

In these free jazz piano lessons on video, pianist Ryan Larson teaches us not only how to improve our freestyle technique, but also how to read and write music—since you are only able to improvise with what you know. Keyboard lessons include how to play 5th chords, how to do chord progressions in the key of A major, how to use sharps, flats and intervals, how to play bass lines, how to change chord voicings, and how to compose for jazz piano.

Video Transcript

"So this is the key of a major. You can see you have your basic pattern. A B C sharp D E F sharp and G or G-sharp which are these 3 black notes and these four white notes. So you want to get that pattern under your fingers, just move it around. And we got A as your root. If you just hit some clumps, some groups of notes in the scale, you'd be playing what you call chords, there is a name for every chord you play but you don't need to know the names you just have to know you are playing chords. And that's the key of a major."