$129.00
Jazz Piano for the Bandstand
Build confidence for your first jam session by developing left-hand voicings, improvisation, and two-handed comping using the tune “Solar.”
Feel comfortable playing with others.
Playing jazz piano in a band requires more than knowing your chords — you need voicings that support a soloist, harmonic vocabulary that holds up in real progressions, and the improvisational tools to sound like yourself. This course builds all three using Miles Davis’ “Solar” as a through-line, preparing you for real bandstand situations.
After taking this course, you will be able to:
- Comp with rootless shell and two-handed spread voicings — including 9th, 11th, and 13th extensions — across all common chord types
- Adapt your role as a pianist to the ensemble, from melody-plus-chords in a trio to full two-handed comping in a quartet
- Improvise over “Solar” using a scale map, melodic development techniques, and bebop tools like chord-tone targeting and chromatic enclosures
- Apply the Red Garland block chord technique and “pretty note” extensions to create colorful, professional-sounding piano parts
Meet Your Instructor
Peter Martin is an acclaimed jazz pianist, educator, and founder of Open Studio. He has performed and recorded on six continents with artists including Wynton Marsalis, Dianne Reeves, Betty Carter, Christian McBride, and Joshua Redman, as well as with his own ensembles. Through Open Studio, he has created over 600 piano lessons and helped pioneer the field of online jazz education, earning recognition from The New York Times for his groundbreaking work. Peter also co-hosts the award-winning music podcast “You’ll Hear It” with Adam Maness.
Meet Your Instructor
As Open Studio’s Managing Director, Adam Maness develops the curriculum of all of the courses, in addition to teaching his own popular course like Magic Voicing System, Piano Fingering Independence and more.
Adam is a versatile pianist, arranger, composer, and producer whose performances, original compositions, and arrangements have been featured on numerous recordings and on national and international radio and television broadcasts. He is best known as co-founder and composer for the genre-bending chamber ensemble, The 442s.
