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Jazz Piano Minimum Requirements

This lesson aims to answer a simple question: ‘What are the minimum number of things I need to
learn to be a somewhat competent Jazz Pianist’? Obviously there is no objective answer to this
question, but here I will give my personal list of my Jazz Piano Minimum Requirements or a kind of
‘Jazz Piano Starter Pack’ or ‘Jazz Piano Core Competencies’.

Ingredients

Whenever I am learning a new song, I learn it using the following techniques:

Left Hand Right Hand Both Hands

Bass Chords (‘comp) Chords (‘comp)

Walking bassline Rootless Two handed voicings
Stride Quartal Spread
Root notes Shell Quartal

Chords (‘comp) Melody

Rootless Melody
Quartal Base scale
Shell/Powell Improvisation
Licks/Fills

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Combining Ingredients

Think of these as your ‘ingredients’ for Jazz Piano. It’s them up to you to combine these ingredients
into a full song (meal). You have to be able to combine any two of these techniques:
 Walking Bass-line (http://www.thejazzpianosite.com/jazz-piano-lessons/jazz-chord-
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voicings/walking-bass-lines/) + Rootless Chords (http://www.thejazzpianosite.com/jazz-
piano-lessons/jazz-chord-voicings/rootless-voicings/)
Walking Bass-line + Quartal Chords (http://www.thejazzpianosite.com/jazz-piano-
lessons/jazz-chord-voicings/quartal-voicings/)
Stride + Melody
Rootless Chords + Improvisation (http://www.thejazzpianosite.com/jazz-piano-
lessons/jazz-improvisation/)
Root Notes + Two Handed Quartal Voicings

And keep in mind that this is just the minimum requirements for Jazz Piano. It’s enough to make you
appear like a competent Jazz Pianist and like you know what you’re doing. You can then start
combining these technique to create some interesting variations. For example, you could combine
stride piano using rootless voicings and intersperse it with walking bass-lines. And there are
countless other voicings and techniques and scales you can learn. Right, we haven’t even talked
about upper structures (http://www.thejazzpianosite.com/jazz-piano-lessons/jazz-chord-
voicings/upper-structures/), using chord substitutions (http://www.thejazzpianosite.com/jazz-piano-
lessons/jazz-chords/chord-substitution/), adding passing chords
(http://www.thejazzpianosite.com/jazz-piano-lessons/jazz-chords/passing-chords/), using the
wholetone scale (http://www.thejazzpianosite.com/jazz-piano-lessons/jazz-scales/wholetone-scale/)
to improvise, etc.

But for each new song, as a bare minimum, I learn to play it using all the techniques listed above. In a
sense, this is my quick ‘to do’ list for each new song. Now, obviously this is entirely subjective, so feel
free to add or remove other items to make your own customised list.

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 Jazz Piano Minimum Requirements 

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