When Jazz Pianists Play Fast – A Collection of Runs, Exercises, & Idiomatic Gestures

April 28/22 – 800-word update!  Eb7 & E7 fingering maps attached. I show how you can integrate the chromatic scale and more complex harmonic movement into practice. This framework now covers most of the spatial and harmonic relationships you’d expect to see/hear in Oscar Peterson runs!

--

The article is a work-in-progress, constantly evolving as I add more transcriptions, exercises and observations.

One of the major premises of these articles is that pianists make improvisatory decisions based on physical relationships, not just harmonic or auditory relationships.  This is especially observed when pianists play fast - finger sequences, note clusters, hand positions, and higher levels of abstraction are required to support fast playing and fast decision making.

As a means to demonstrate these physical relationships, this article is dedicated to instances when pianists play their fastest.  Below I’ll be assembling a collection of runs from Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Chick Corea, and others.  This will include proposed fingering and hand positions that optimize economy of motion, and the hand positions/note clusters that form abstracted physical relationships.

With these physical relationships, I’ll also be creating exercises to help pianists expand their own playing.  The fingerings and hand positions that come from this analysis represent some of the most idiomatic and ergonomic gestures at the piano.  Though they are required to play fast runs, idiomatic gestures give pianists more control, economy, and range of motion at the piano no matter what tempo they’re playing.  So, an important part of this process will be to use exercises as a means to isolate and repurpose physical relationships and help support all types of playing.

A note about my transcriptions: My intention is to isolate spatial relationships, not to be rhythmically or metrically accurate. So, my transcriptions primarily use 16th notes and notation that better reflects a pianist’s hand positions.  I believe this reflects the intention of the performing pianists anyways. Most of these runs are meant to be played as fast as possible, or with flamboyant expression, not as carriers of rhythm and meter.  This is why transcriptions that aim for accuracy often contain absurd rhythmic notation, like 32nd note triplets, quintuplets and sextuplets (From Jed Distler’s transcription of Art Tatum playing Ain’t Misbehavin):

Pianists in these situations aren’t conceiving of complex polyrhythms, they’re more likely wiggling their fingers quickly along clusters of notes, with loose rhythmic and metric relations.  With the above as an example, my transcriptions will look more like this:

Analysis will include proposed fingering, clear note heads to represent anchor points (thumb), and stemming to outline hand positions:

The last step will represent the note clusters and higher abstracted structures:

As always, it’s important to remember that music notation is poor at representing the actual physical and visual relationships required to play the piano. Analysis should also include how these note clusters are visualized at the piano. The F major scale for example:

This analysis is extremely time consuming, so I won’t be producing these kinds of images for this article. The point is that these kinds of visual and physical relationships are closer to the act of playing the piano than music notation. If not doing so already, pianists should use these kinds of visual and physical relationships as the basis for learning and memorizing, not just music notation.

• Art Tatum - Harmonic and Spatial Interplay (900 words)
• Oscar Peterson - Finger Maps, Directional Relationships & Meter (1500 words)
• Thelonious Monk – Fingering Bias and Mindful Practice (700 words)
• Chick Corea (coming soon!)
• Exercises – Starting with Fingering Maps (1300 words)
• Exercises – Adding Harmonic Complexity (800 words)
• Exercises – Adding Left Hand and Meter (coming soon!)
• Exercises – Using Physical Transposition (coming soon!)
• Exercises – Left Hand Runs (coming soon!)

Art Tatum – Harmonic and Spatial Interplay

(Attached is a PDF of Art Tatum runs and corresponding analysis.  They are organized by recording and time stamped.  I don’t transcribe every run in a recording; I limit myself to transcribing the runs I find most interesting. For now, I’m focused on RH runs.)

To what degree are physical gestures, space, and harmony related?  Based on my Art Tatum transcriptions, I’ve made some observations below. They’re organized into three sections, which will eventually become pillars for designing exercises.

Reusing Physical Gestures

Most of the time, when Art Tatum plays a run, spatial relationships and harmonic relationships are clearly in sync. Here’s a run Art Tatum plays in E major from Humoreque:

Though this run is originally in E major, Tatum reuses its physical characteristics in different performances, in different harmonic contexts. From I Cover the Waterfront:

From Body and Soul:

This kind of interplay between harmonic and physical relationships can be used to our advantage when practicing and creating exercises.  Too often, I think harmonic relationships drive our practice goals (for example, learning something in all twelve keys).  But there’s nothing in my transcriptions and analysis of Art Tatum that suggests he would harmonically transpose and play these runs in all twelve keys.  Instead, idiomatic physical gestures are reused and adapted to maintain fluency and suit different harmonic contexts.  For example, gestures that represent “E major pentatonic” could be reused for Amaj7, C#m7, F#7sus, D lydian, and more.  When practicing and creating exercises, this represents a more balanced approach between harmonic and physical relationships.

Physical Transposition

We can further exploit the interplay between harmonic and spatial relationships by using a technique called “physical transposition.” Here’s a run from Tatum’s performance of Tenderly:

In this run, despite the unusual chromaticism, harmonic analysis still suggests an overall sense of D major. This includes physical emphasis and direction changes that seem to gravitate towards D major chord/scale tones.

Occasionally however, Art Tatum plays something like this, from Just Like A Butterfly:

I offer these examples because of their similarities (red boxes) despite being in very different keys (D major and Eb major). It’s important to note that their physical construction at the piano - including the note clusters of white/black notes and the finger sequences required to play them - are fairly idiomatic and fit under the hand nicely.  “Physical transposition” preserves some of these physical relationships while varying others.  In these runs, most note-to-note spatial and direction relationships are preserved while the hand is “transposed” left-and-right along the piano.  A physical theme!  Here are all the instances of this physical theme in my Art Tatum transcriptions thus far:

As you can see, they occur across a few different performances, in a variety of harmonic contexts, and often with unusual chromaticism.  This is because physical transposition can occur independently from harmonic relationships. It’s possible Tatum plays these runs not because of their connection to harmony, or his desire for chromatic embellishments, but simply because they’re physically accessible and easy to play.  Only assigning harmonic functions to these runs would be reverse-engineering and misinterpreting Tatum’s intentions.

As I’ll explore later, designing exercises for physical transposition is a great way to explore the instrument and find idiomatic gestures that you wouldn’t necessarily find by only using harmonic relationships.  With this approach, harmony can be subservient to the physical gestures.

Connecting Using the Chromatic Scale

My last observation from Tatum is in his use of the chromatic scale. For example, this run from Tenderly:

This is very characteristic of Tatum: Using the chromatic scale (red boxes) to connect physical themes or other hand positions that reflect the harmony. In this case, the Em7(b5) harmony is being expressed in the middle hand positions (E-D-Bb-A).  For a more complex example, here’s this run again, from Just Like a Butterfly:

Though we’ll never really know Tatum’s intent, I can say from personal experience that the chromatic scale also has its uses in supporting improvisational decisions.  Because it’s so physically intuitive and versatile in where it can resolve, using the chromatic scale allows the player to “fill in the blanks” so to speak, while focussing on the next hand position. In this example, it’s possible Tatum’s foresight is fixated on arriving at these target notes:

Using the chromatic scale to arrive at target notes and hand positions may be improvisational:

Of course, the target notes and hand positions may be improvisational also (blue boxes):

Another possibility, if this run is highly improvisational, is that Tatum’s focus is fixated more on the “present,” and building pathways using a combination of chromatic scales and other hand positions while reacting to what he’s currently playing.

These examples are all showing different ways pianists may balance composition and improvisation in their runs. Just as conjunctions connect words and phrases of a sentence together, the chromatic scale can connect harmonic and physical themes together into longer runs.  Later, I’ll be designing exercises based on this framework, and exploring numerous ways we can exploit the chromatic scale when practicing.

(One of the challenges in communicating these compositional/improvisational possibilities is in notating and describing the relationship between all the layers of foresight and improvisation. I’ve observed in my article on Directional Relationships that improvisational foresight exists at different levels of magnification, from movement between individual notes, to movement between clusters of notes and hand positions.  I’m unaware of how these layers of foresight are interacting in my OWN playing, let alone Art Tatum’s.  The best I can offer are these different models of composition and improvisation.)

Oscar Peterson - Finger Maps, Directional Relationships, & Meter

(Attached is a PDF of Oscar Peterson runs and corresponding analysis.  They are organized by recording and time stamped.)

It was interesting to listen to all this Art Tatum playing solo piano, followed by Oscar Peterson.  Personally, I much preferred listening to Tatum.  There’s a nonchalance is his playing that hides his technical proficiency.  Sprezzatura. In comparison, Oscar Peterson plays with something to prove - Tempos are faster, dynamics are exaggerated, runs are longer, performances are vigorous, etc.

One reason for this observation might be due to performance contexts. I mostly listened to Tatum on “20thCentury Piano Genius” which was recorded at a private party the year before he died.  Peterson’s “Solo” was recorded in concert where exaggerated gestures are expected (coincidently, both pianists were in their late 40s at the time of these recordings).

Regardless of preference, BOTH pianists play runs that are rigorously structured, albeit differently. It’s difficult to precisely define and measure these structures, but they’re apparent in how consistently harmonic and physical relationships are integrated, how often these gestures are repeated, and how often these gestures are repurposed for different contexts.

Some of my observations of Tatum’s runs are applicable to Peterson, especially in the way they reuse physical gestures, and connect using the chromatic scale. For the purpose of building a more complete framework for practice, I’ve made three main points of observation that make Oscar Peterson’s runs different from Tatum’s. Once again, these will eventually form pillars for practice when designing exercises.

Integrated Harmonic and Physical Relationships

With his use of the chromatic scale and physical transposition, Art Tatum’s runs can be quirky.

If improvisatory decisions are being made from a physical basis with less regard to harmonic relationships, this would explain why some of his chromatic runs are odd and unconventional.

Oscar Peterson runs however, are more elegantly constructed, with physical relationships more integrated with harmonic relationships and traditional jazz theory.  Harmonic analysis reveals clear chord/scale relationships – when chords change, so do Oscar’s palette of notes. Chromaticism also resolves as anticipated, and can more easily analysed using terms of chromatic analysis (chromatic passing notes, neighbouring tones etc.)

But the elegance of these runs isn’t just in their chord/scale relationships, but also in how intuitive they are to play at the piano. Despite having a clear harmonic basis, Oscar’s runs fit under the hand in a logical and effortless way.

Here’s one of Oscar’s runs from his performance of Yesterday (which interestingly, he plays with slight variation about six times throughout the performance):

Harmonic analysis would suggest Oscar’s using the “A Altered scale” (derived from the 7th degree of the ascending melodic minor scale).  My physical analysis would recommend putting the thumbs on “C” and “F” in order to preserve economy and range of motion.  These come together to form of kind of symbiotic relationship where both harmonic and physical relationships are equal partners in the performance of this run.  If you change the fingering, playing this scale becomes less ergonomic and less desirable.  Likewise, if you change the scale, the pianist would need a new finger mapping to preserve fluency, economy, and range of motion.

This again, brings up the issue of playing in all twelve keys. Similar to Tatum, there’s nothing in my transcriptions and analysis that suggests Oscar would play these runs in all twelve keys.  One reason for this might be because harmonic transposition, despite preserving intervallic relationships between notes, does not preserve optimal fingering and other physical relationships.  If it did, the example above would look like this:

Obviously, this is not usable with the same level of precision and control as in the original key.  Harmonic transposition requires new finger mapping:

This is much better, but still doesn’t have the same effortless feel compared to playing it in the original key.  It’s more likely, if still exploring from the Bb altered scale, that Oscar would choose different pathways that uses more effortless fingerings.

I propose that each key, chord and “harmonic zone” has its own finger mapping.  Later in this article, I’ll be showing how practicing pianists can build their own finger maps for specific keys and scales. Integrating harmonic and physical relationships in this way creates a good framework for understand how different keys feel under the hands.

Varying Directional Relationships

Another difference between Tatum and Oscar is in how their runs traverse the keyboard. To clarify, “ascending” and “descending” have different meanings depending on the magnification of your analysis.  For example, here’s one of Art Tatum’s runs from Humoreque. While finger-to-finger motion is mostly descending (3:1), hand positions are ascending:

Throughout all of my transcriptions thus far, I’ve noticed that Tatum’s hand positions are almost exclusively descending (the above being an exception), while Oscar’s are more varied. Here’s one of Oscar’s more simpler runs, from Body and Soul:

When practicing runs and designing exercises, it fairly easy to consider exercises that ascend and descend across the keyboard. It’s more difficult to manage direction changes. One way is to limit direction changes between a set range of notes. To help manage this, I’ve been using this notation, which will become very useful when building a practice framework (I’ve omitted the bottom line for brevity)

Other considerations for changing direction include the degree they correspond with harmonic changes. From Oscar on Take The A Train:

In this run, Dm7 is a pivot for changing direction.  Here’s Oscar from If I Should Love You:

In this run, Oscar plays through the D7(b9) and changes direction on the Gm7.

Another way to manage direction changes is with meter. Because I transcribed these runs outside of meter, I don’t have specific examples from Oscar.  But as I’ll explore later in this article, managing how direction changes correspond with meter also makes a good framework for intervallic practice and rooting out dependencies.

(as a side note, I’m hesitant to refer to directional relationships with terms like “ascending” and “descending.”  At the piano, movement through space is in a “right/left” relationship to the body. But using “right/left” is unconventional, and possibly confusing when paired with music notation, so I decided to keep using “ascending/descending.”  When communicating directly and problem solving with students though, I prefer using “right/left” because it’s more reflective of the physical reality of playing the piano.)

Connecting Runs with Pulse and Meter

There are a few ways jazz pianists juggle their runs with pulse and meter.

The simplest is when harmonic and metric phrasing is completely subservient to the completion of a run.  This is what you usually hear when Tatum and Peterson play ballads and there’s no pulse whatsoever.  Many of their runs are used to connect phrases and played as fast as possible outside of metric considerations.

At the other end of the spectrum, playing runs can be subservient to meter and pulse. This relationship is part of jazz’s rhythmic idealism, where runs are equally subdivided into 16th notes, 16th note triplets, or some other rhythmic grid.  Peterson is especially proficient at playing runs in this way, and is one way he can be differentiated from Tatum.

The third option is more nuanced. Though difficult to describe, it’s actually very physically intuitive. In the same way we can walk and have a conversation simultaneously, pianists can play with a pulse (in the left hand for example) while simultaneously floating around it in the right hand.  When runs are played as fast as possible, there are degrees of elasticity in how they connect with pulse and meter.  Often, both Peterson and Tatum are weaving their runs in and out of a pulse, using micro adjustments to hit target notes, hit target beats, and alter the trajectory of their fingers. This is only possible when finger sequences, note clusters, and hand positions are played intuitively - a new level of foresight and awareness is unlocked that allows pianists to focus on making these micro adjustments and other spontaneous decisions.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a transcription from Peterson (or Tatum) to demonstrate this. I’m also wary of going down this analysis hole.  Micro adjustments are made in the span of milliseconds, Peterson’s spontaneous decisions will always be unknown to us, and as I mentioned above, describing the relationship between layers of foresight and improvisation is beyond my expertise and the scope of this article.

What we DO have though, is a general framework for practicing runs in relationship to pulse and meter.  Later in this article I’ll encourage exercises as fast “finger wiggling” but also with precise, equal subdivisions (16thnotes for example). Over time, with more confidence in these physical relationships, pianists may eventually unlock a more deliberate control over hand independence, metric placement, micro adjustments, and “elastic runs.”

(Side note: Unfortunately, exploring the relationship between the right hand playing runs and left hand playing time is beyond the scope of this article.  But it’s important to remember that all human performance is elastic; micro adjustments are occurring in BOTH hands, all the time.

Thelonious Monk – Fingering Bias and Mindful Practice

(Attached is a PDF of Monk runs and corresponding analysis.  They are organized by recording and time stamped.)

Monk isn’t known for playing fast runs.  But analyzing his whole-tone runs has brought to the forefront the strengths and weaknesses of this approach of analysis and practice (as does most things involving Monk!)

For example, this whole-tone run from Pannonica:

I have proposed three fingerings that I believe are equally viable for preserving economy and range of motion. But there are indefinitely more combinations that could be used.  Gary Williamson once played me the whole tone scale using only his middle finger. Is that a viable fingering?

I believe the answer is yes…. and no.  It depends on your perspective.

My approach to fingering and hand positions is from the perspective of ‘learning to control the instrument.’  Just as we don’t drive cars with our feet, we don’t play the piano with just our middle fingers. When the design of the instrument is in sync with the design of a pianist’s hands, you unlock more economical, ergonomic, and idiomatic gestures. Learning about idiomatic gestures is key to understanding how to control the instrument.

With this in mind, I believe fingering possibilities exist on a hierarchy and in an improvisatory practice, our goal is to always prefer the possibilities at the top of the hierarchy - the ones that optimize economy and range of motion.  From this, we might derive some rules that help govern our fingering choices (for example, always ascend after your thumb plays a black key).  As I’ll share later, my approach to fingering follows these kinds of rules and hierarchies; I believe they can solve many of the technical and improvisational problems that students have.

But it’s important to remember that because this is my article, my transcriptions, and my fingering maps, I’m imposing a bias that includes my own stylistic preferences, technical abilities, hand dexterity, and hand size. My perspective may be based on ‘learning to control the instrument,’ but it’s geared towards controlling it in a way that suits MY preferences. For example, for this run, from Everything Happens to Me, I’ve proposed two fingerings:

Most people would play this run as I’ve written it in the top line, with two groups of three. I prefer to play it as notated in the 2nd line; The groups of six give me more control and precision, but some might find these hand positions awkward and inaccessible.

I like being reminded about pianist like Thelonious Monk and Horace Parlan because they challenge my perspective on how you ‘control the instrument.’  Though all pianists are still bound by spatial, directional, functional, and rhythmic relationships, the expression of those relationships are different because of the pianist’s individual strengths, limitations, and in Monk’s case, a sense of irony!  Some people, after all, DO drive cars with their feet.  This may require a slight redesign on the instrument (like the 7/8th keyboard), a reinterpretation of the instrument/hand relationship, or revised expectations of what can be done with the instrument.

Ultimately, from the audience’s perspective, different performance contexts make all fingering and technique viable. Synchronicity with audiences can be achieved in many (sometimes conflicting) ways, including through virtuosity, humour, story-telling, spectacle, rebellion, and even anti-virtuosity. We can all imagine situations where playing the instrument in the least idiomatic way would be most effective (for example, demonstrating unidiomatic fingering!).  For some pianists (and audiences), the instrument needs only to be used in a basic, functional way, so why bother with all this nuanced fingering?

Considering all this, we’re still left with another perspective – that of a ‘mindful pianist.’  Though I’m confident that my framework for practice aligns with all jazz pianists, my specific fingering maps and exercises will always be incomplete. A mindful pianist searches to fill those gaps, constantly evaluating their goals, and asking questions like:

• “Does this fit my hand?”
• “Are there better solutions?”
• “How could I play this better?”
• “Did I play this as I intended?”
• “Does this fit my imagined performance context?”

My framework for practice follows a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ approach.  I provide many different examples, including those derived from transcriptions, but it’s important to always experiment with designing your own, so practice reflects your goals and capabilities. Whether your goals are to play like Art Tatum or Thelonious Monk, I’m sure mindful pianists will find value in (and even improve!) this framework.

Exercises – Starting with Fingering Maps

(Attached is a fingering map for Ab major (and F minor).  As I create more maps, I’ll upload them here.)

A finger map is a hierarchy of hand positions as it relates to playing in a certain key, scale, or chord. So long as a pianist is using their fingers to play the instrument, they are using some kind of fingering map to express harmonic relationships.

When used properly, they provide pianists clearer channels of abstraction to support economy and range of motion. Unfortunately, not all pianists use them properly or deliberately. Lack of control, trouble with certain keys, and even sore hands/arms could all be symptoms of using poorly designed fingering maps.

My approach is to use fingering maps as a basis for designing exercises so harmonic and physical relationships are integrated from the start.  Fingering maps can be approached in many different ways depending on the goals of an exercise. Considering the topic of this article, for each key, I’ve assembled a collection of 3 to 7 note patterns that traverse an octave (I’ll be writing about 8 notes patterns and bebop scales in another article).

Making these fingering maps was a creative process. My decisions to include certain patterns were based on a combination of harmonic theory (does this relate to Ab major?) and physical relationships (is this interesting/ergonomic to play at the piano?).  Sometimes they’re based on runs from my Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson transcriptions.

The point is that this kind of broad fingering map will always be incomplete. This is okay - Including every variation and every chromaticism in these maps isn’t necessarily the goal.  I recommend starting with fewer patterns anyways.  As we stitch them together, you’ll find that they’ll combine in ways make many variations redundant (see “Reusing Physical Gestures” above). Plus, practicing every variation will have diminishing returns as you become more familiar with the process and the physical relationships – it’s only going to get easier!

Here's an example of a 6-note pattern that you might play in relation to Ab Major:

As a means to integrate harmonic and physical relationships, each pattern includes proposed fingering, clear note heads to represent anchor points (thumb), and stemming to outline hand positions. Each pattern ascends and descends over two octaves with hand positions and note clusters repeating in both directions. You’ll also notice that there’s no connection to meter (yet!), or any relationship with the left hand (yet!).  I’ll discuss both of these things later.

This pattern itself makes for an interesting exercise to start practicing and managing difficulty. From here, there are a few directions we can take to add variation and complexity.  Below, I’ll be exploring many of the directions that I took in my own practice, but I encourage pianists too choose their own patterns and design their own exercise within this framework.

First, obviously, we can practice different patterns. For example, this 4-note pattern:

With these two different patterns, we can explore different ways to stitch them together.  Here are a few examples, with one pattern marked in red, and the other in blue:

This process of “stitching” is fundamental to managing difficulty, measuring improvement, and at its basic level, may represent how improvisation works. Perhaps Oscar Peterson runs are simply hand positions stitched together in an unpredictable way!  Stitching will be a common tool that I use in this article to generate new exercises. In some cases, imaginative stitching uncovers alternate hand positions, and can help generate more interesting exercises.

Another consideration for designing exercises is that you improve at EXACTLY what you practice, and exercises rarely represent the material you actually want to play.  In fact, practicing an exercise will always create unwanted dependencies.  So, it’s important to always assess the strengths and weakness of exercises based on your goals and create complementary exercises too fill in skill gaps and root out dependencies.

Generally, in a jazz practice, pianists will want to play these runs anytime from anywhere, move between them freely, and play them in relation to multiple harmonies. We can tweak these exercises to address these goals.

First, I’ve written these patterns as if they “start on C.”  We can create two simple variations of the first pattern by “starting on the thumb” and ascending/descending two octaves.

With these two variations, we have more opportunities for stitching:

Two observations: The thumb is a strong physical and visual anchor for building note clusters. It’s a convenient way to start conceptualizing a pattern, but doesn’t always reflect our goals of playing runs from anywhere. Secondly, changing direction encourages us to build different note clusters.  This 6-note pattern is built by stringing together two 3-note clusters, but when we change direction, we pivot on our 4th or 5th fingers, which creates a 4-note cluster.

Considering these observations, we can incorporate some logical rules that encourage us to start patterns and change directions from multiple locations.  I like to use Schenkerian style notation to represent note ranges, direction changes, and other logical sequences/rules that govern the unfolding of an exercise. For example:

A more complex exercise:

An even more complex variation would be changing direction on every finger:

With more diverse directional changes and “starting points,” we may discover alternate ways to stitch together different patterns from fingering maps.  Here are two different patterns, but “starting” on Eb:

We now have a few things in our toolkit for generating new exercises: Fingering maps, stitching, and varying direction changes. Last is my obligatory note about intervallic practicing:

One of the best ways to structure practice is through managing difficulty.  If an exercise is too easy, you won’t learn. If it’s too hard, you won’t learn.  There’s an optimal level of difficulty – a sweet spot – that you should always try to operate within.

What makes an exercise more or less difficult?  Difficulty is very subjective – what’s difficult for you might be very easy for me.  We need to establish an objective measurement of difficulty from which we can start managing our exercises.  Personally, I’m always thinking in terms of cycle lengths.

When practicing, we create repetitive cycles that contain the things we want to improve.  For example, there’s a tendency in jazz to practice over the form of a tune.  This is good because what we’re practicing has context.  The problem with this is that practicing longer cycles (like a 32-bar jazz tune, or an entire Chopin etude) is more difficult than shorter cycles (like a two-bar loop).  By the time you reach bar 32, and have played though the entire tune, you’ve forgotten all the mistakes you made in bar 1.  So, you’ll probably repeat them again. This isn’t good practice.

As you practice within your difficulty sweet spot, improvement should be noticeable within a few minutes.  This means at some point, the exercise you’re currently practicing will be too easy, and a change needs to be made.  Changing an exercise to make it more difficult represents the beginning of a new practice interval, and can occur every 3-6 minutes. If improvement ISN’T noticeable after six minutes, the exercise is probably too difficult - the cycle needs to be simplified, and/or the tempo slowed down.

One of the strengths of this framework is in its ability to support pianists at different skill levels.  If you’re a beginner, you might be starting with single patterns from a fingering map and stitching them together.  Hopefully you can see how you can integrate this framework with intervallic practice, and progress through increasingly complex exercises. If you’re a more advanced or professional player, you may want to start with more complex exercises, which is the topic of the next section.

Exercises – Adding Harmonic Complexity

In the previous section, we started assembling a toolkit for designing exercises and managing difficulty.  They include stitching together fingering maps and adjusting direction changes between different note regions. In this section, I’m going to add complexity by incorporating different fingering maps into this framework and exploring different functions for the left hand.

The Chromatic Scale

Starting with incorporating different fingering maps, one of the most versatile fingering maps is derived from the chromatic scale. As I wrote about Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson, the chromatic scale is often used to connect physical themes and other hand positions. Experienced pianists use the chromatic scale in this way very intuitively, but some students might need exercises to start unlocking its usefulness.

First, I highly recommend reading my article “The Chromatic Scale and Fingering Maps” and becoming familiar with the chromatic scale’s fingering map:

Next, we incorporate the chromatic scale into our stitching!  Here’s the new rule:  All direction changes must be preceded by a chromatic hand position.  Here’s our pattern in Ab, without chromatics:

Because we’re now juggling up to three fingering maps, I need a new colour.  Chromatic hand positions will be coloured green. With our new rule incorporating the chromatic scale, we get this:

Here’s the same 6-note pattern, but starting on F:

In fact, we can include this rule into every exercise from the previous section. Below are a few examples.

I admit, the coloured stitching is starting to look ridiculous. But I believe it’s an interesting depiction of how physical gestures and fingering maps drive improvisation.  Unfortunately, it’s imperfect. While the colours help isolate and sort all the different parts, it doesn’t always reflect the new spatial relationships and overlapping hand positions that occur when stitching.  A combination of parts may still be perceived in a compartmentalized way, but at some point, it also needs to perceived as one, unified pattern.  Notation and colouring don’t always reflect this process of combining multiple things to create ONE thing.

Also, there are multiple ways I could have coloured these exercises, stemmed the notes, and stitched together all the fingering maps. This reinforces my view that pianists should always be experimenting and designing their own exercises. Stitching and colouring are excellent conceptual tools for understanding improvisation and practice frameworks.  But ultimately, it’s real playing and real physical relationships that are needed to fully understand how all of these pieces fit together.

Adding More Harmonies

As we gradually open this framework, one pathway jazz pianists will definitely want to explore is adding multiple harmonies. For simplicity and demonstration, I’ll start with exercises that move between Abmaj7 and Eb7.

Considering intervallic practice, it might be necessary to first explore an Eb7 fingering map first (attached to this article). When ready to stitch, here are two patterns from AbMaj7 and Eb7:

When stitching, we can start by aligning chord changes with direction changes.  For example: “chords change with ascending motion.”

The inversion of this is “chords change with descending motion.”

We can also associate chord changes with ALL changes in direction:

Lastly, we can DISASSOCIATE chord changes with direction changes:

Because stitching is so versatile, it’s also possible to incorporate transcribed runs into our fingering maps and exercises. Here’s an exercise that includes an Oscar Peterson run over Eb7:

For simplicity, I’ve chosen patterns that “begin on C.” As mentioned in the previous section, this gives us a convenient way to conceptualize and manage direction/chord changes. But we should also consider exercises that encourage us to start patterns, change directions, and change chords from multiple locations.  Here are a couple exercises I designed using different fingering maps:

From here, difficulty can be increased is by incorporating more fingering maps. As explored above, the chromatic scale can be easily incorporated into these exercises.  You could also stitch together multiple fingering maps from Eb7 and AbMaj7.

Lastly, you could expand into different harmonies. If you’re learning Eb7-AbMaj7 in the context of a jazz tune, say Donna Lee, if would make sense to then practice Bbm7-Eb7-AbMaj7, and then Bbm7-Eb7-AbMaj7-F7. Though it may take many weeks, eventually, you’ll have assembled all the harmonic building blocks, and could play these patterns over the entire tune.

Because this framework integrates harmony with physical relationships, it’s very modular, and can support the practice of unconventional chord changes.  For example, practicing E7-AbMaj7 is just a matter of incorporating E7 fingering maps into our stitching.

By incorporating the chromatic scale, multiple harmonies, and various fingering maps into exercises, our practice framework is almost complete.  In fact, this framework covers most of the spatial and harmonic relationships you’d expect to see/hear in Oscar Peterson runs.  The last piece is connecting these runs to meter and the left hand.