Piano Solos

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June 15th, 2009 admin Leave a comment Go to comments

Piano Solos
what can I play for piano with jazz solos?

I’m starting to learn how to play jazz piano and need some intermediate music with some solos in it. I am a medium high skill level so sight reading shouldn’t be much of a problem as long as it’s not crazy. Also I’m looking for a piece with a sort of fast and upbeat tempo.

Also if anyone knows a good sight that teaches you the basics of soloing then please suggest them to me.

Thanks

Get yourself a fake book, man. A fake book is a collection of lead sheets – meaning that you’ve got the basic melody to the song, and the chord changes written above the staff. With a fake book, you can interpret the song however you want and you can make it your own. You can lay the chord voicings out how you like, you can choose a tempo you like, you can add any embellishments you want to the melody, you can take as many solo choruses as you want, etc. A fake book is a lot more loose and provides a lots more opportunity for broad interpretation than a standard scored-out fully arranged part.

You can add other musicians, too – my favorite combo arrangement is the piano trio because I have a friend who’s a really good drummer and a friend who’s an amazing bassist. I take lead on the piano, and together we sound pretty good – we’ve even scored some gigs around the area where we live. What we do, though, is take songs from my fake books and just play. Sometimes we’ll make changes or arrange some parts (especially when we’re playing with a sax or trumpet player – we’ll arrange backgrounds and stuff for them), but most of the time we pick a song, a tempo, a style/feel, work out how the solo sections are going to go, and then go for it. It’s really unstructured and it’s really fun stuff.

If you want to get a fake book, by far the best one (and the most legal one, and the one that the most jazz musicians have) is called “The Real Book”, published by Hal-Leonard. It’s got 400 different jazz standards in it, and you can get it for about $20 at Amazon.com If you don’t want to drop the cash or if The Real Book doesn’t have the song you’re looking for, there’s an excellent online collection of single lead sheets at http://www.wikifonia.org – from there, you can search for songs, download and print pdfs of them, and even transpose them to a different key if you need to.

I realize I didn’t really give you a suggestion for a specific song to play, but with a real book or a bunch of lead sheets, you can easily find and play any song that you like. I guess I could suggest a few cool songs that you could perform pretty well as a solo pianist: It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing), Autumn Leaves, Summertime, Take Five, Moonglow, Misty, etc. There are a bunch of great songs out there, and with a fake book you’re open and free to interpret them however you like.

Titanic – My heart will go on – Piano / Klavier Solo