Jazz Piano Solo Playing: Develop the Skills to Create Your Own Arrangements (Our Love Is Here to Stay)
We've arrived.
For the past three weeks, we've been studying George and Ira Gershwin's Our Love Is Here to Stay.
We began with harmony.
Then melody.
Then improvisation.
And now it's time to bring everything together.
Solo piano.
But before we start thinking about sophisticated arrangements, stride piano, reharmonization, harmonized melodies, or improvisation...
There's a much more important question we need to answer:
👉 What are we actually trying to develop?
Are we trying to learn an arrangement?
Or are we trying to develop the musical skills that allow us to create arrangements of our own?
Those may sound like similar objectives.
They're not.
And understanding the difference may completely change how you practice solo piano.
What Is the Ultimate Purpose of Jazz Education?
Throughout this month, we've been exploring one question:
How do we actually learn jazz?
This week, I want to bring that conversation to a close with perhaps the most important question of all:
What is the ultimate purpose of jazz education?
At first, the answer seems obvious.
We study jazz piano because we want to play jazz piano.
Of course.
But think about what happens when you sit down with a teacher, enroll in a course, watch an instructional video, study a transcription, or work through a practice exercise.
What are you ultimately hoping will happen?
Are you simply trying to learn the material sitting in front of you?
Or are you trying to develop the musical understanding and physical skills that eventually allow you to navigate music on your own?
Those are two very different educational objectives.
What Happens When the Arrangement Disappears?
Imagine you've learned a beautiful solo piano arrangement.
You've memorized every note.
Every chord.
Every voicing.
Every rhythmic figure.
Every melodic decoration.
You've practiced it until you can perform it beautifully.
Fantastic!
That accomplishment has real value.
But now...
Take the arrangement away.
Put another tune in front of you.
Or take the same tune and ask yourself to create a completely different arrangement.
Can you do it?
Do you understand the musical relationships that made the original arrangement possible?
Can you recognize those relationships in another tune?
Can you physically execute those skills in a different musical context?
And perhaps most importantly...
👉 Can you begin making your own musical decisions?
Because if the answer is no, we have to ask ourselves what we've actually developed.
Musicianship?
Or the ability to reproduce a particular musical product?
Answers Are Helpful. Processes Are Transformative.
Teachers are pretty good at providing answers.
Here's the chord.
Here's the scale.
Here's the fingering.
Here's the voicing.
Here's the lick.
Here's the arrangement.
Here's exactly what to play.
And sometimes that's precisely what a student needs.
But eventually...
What happens when the student encounters a musical question the teacher hasn't already answered?
Does the student have a process for working through it?
Can they recognize the relationships involved?
Can they simplify the problem?
Can they determine what needs practice?
Can they make their own musical decisions?
Or do they immediately need another lesson, another video, another exercise, another arrangement...
Another answer?
👉 Great education shouldn't simply provide answers. It should develop your ability to discover them.
The teacher's job gradually changes from providing the answer to helping the student develop a process.
Independence Doesn't Mean You're Finished Learning
This is where something exciting begins to happen.
Eventually, you start recognizing familiar harmonic relationships inside unfamiliar tunes.
You begin hearing melodic possibilities you haven't specifically practiced.
You start making rhythmic, harmonic, melodic, and creative decisions without waiting for somebody to tell you what to do next.
You stop simply following instructions.
👉 You begin navigating music.
And once that happens, something else becomes possible:
Your own musical voice.
But becoming an independent musician doesn't mean you're finished learning.
Quite the opposite.
It means you've developed the ability to continue learning without always needing someone else to determine what comes next.
You encounter a new tune and investigate its harmony.
You hear a pattern on a recording and begin exploring it.
You discover a technical challenge and develop a practice strategy.
You hear a musical possibility and experiment with it.
In other words...
👉 You begin learning how to learn.
And that's one of the most valuable things an education can possibly provide.
The Destination Is Your Musical Voice
This brings our entire month-long philosophical discussion together.
We began by asking:
Where does jazz language come from?
We study the tradition to discover possibility.
Then we asked:
Is imitation the same as understanding?
We studied musical processes to develop understanding.
Last week:
If you want to be creative, practice creativity.
We limited our musical choices so we could practice making our own decisions.
And now:
We bring all of those things together to develop independence.
Study Oscar Peterson.
Study Bill Evans.
Study Chick Corea.
Study Keith Jarrett.
Listen.
Investigate.
Experiment.
Discover.
Learn everything you can from this extraordinary musical tradition.
But remember why you're doing it.
The ultimate purpose isn't simply to discover what they had to say.
👉 It's to develop the musical understanding, physical command, and creative freedom necessary to begin discovering what YOU have to say.
That's the destination!
Not becoming a better version of somebody else.
Becoming you.
Solo Piano Is the Entire Ensemble Beneath Your Hands
Now let's bring that philosophy to this week's practical study.
Solo piano can feel overwhelming.
And there's a good reason.
In an ensemble, responsibility is distributed.
The bass player establishes the harmonic foundation.
The drummer creates rhythmic movement.
The melody exists above that environment.
Everyone contributes something to the complete musical experience.
But when you're playing solo piano?
👉 You're the entire band.
You're responsible for harmony.
Melody.
Rhythm.
Movement.
And equally important...
Silence.
That's why ensemble playing is such valuable preparation for solo piano.
It teaches you what a complete musical experience sounds and feels like.
Solo piano asks you to begin recreating that experience by yourself.
Don't Start With the Finished Arrangement
This is where many pianists get into trouble.
They decide they want to play solo piano...
So they immediately try to create a sophisticated arrangement of an entire tune.
Thirty-two measures.
Harmony.
Melody.
Rhythm.
Voicings.
Stride.
Reharmonization.
Improvisation.
Everything.
All at once!
And before long...
They're overwhelmed.
But here's the good news:
👉 You don't need a sophisticated arrangement to begin playing solo piano.
Start with harmony and a single-note melody.
Play freely.
No strict pulse.
That's it.
And guess what?
You're playing solo piano.
From there, we'll develop additional skills one at a time.
Jazz Piano Solo Playing: Seven Stages, Not Seven Arrangements
This distinction is critical.
Jazz piano solo playing becomes much more manageable when we stop trying to memorize complete arrangements and begin developing the individual musical skills that allow us to create arrangements of our own.
The seven stages we're exploring this week are not seven arrangements to memorize.
They are seven stages of musical development.
And you don't have to reach Stage Seven before you can call yourself a solo pianist.
👉 You're playing solo piano at Stage One.
Every stage represents a legitimate solo piano performance.
What changes from one stage to another is your musical understanding, your physical command, and the range of musical possibilities available to you.
So let's look at the progression.
Stage 1 — Harmony + Single-Note Melody, Rubato
We begin with the purest form of solo piano.
Harmony in the left hand.
Single-note melody in the right.
No strict pulse.
No rhythmic accompaniment.
No fancy arrangement.
Just harmony and melody.
And don't mistake simple for easy.
The challenge is to match the harmony and melody precisely while allowing the melody to sing.
Play expressively.
Hear the melody internally.
Take your time.
If you played an entire tune beautifully this way...
You're playing solo piano.
Period.
Stage 2 — Harmony + Harmonized Melody, Rubato
Same basic environment.
Still rubato.
But now we enrich the melody through harmonization.
The right hand becomes fuller.
The voicings become richer.
And we begin exploring the extraordinary orchestral possibilities available at the piano.
This stage gives us room to experiment with voicings while maintaining the expressive freedom of rubato playing.
Stage 3 — Harmony + Melody in Time
Now we introduce pulse.
I like to call this:
Strumming the changes.
The left hand begins making time audible while the right hand presents the melody.
The important word here is accompaniment.
Your left hand supports the melody.
It doesn't compete with it.
Keep the voicings light.
Let the melody sing.
And if you played an entire tune this way with a beautiful pulse?
I'd listen to you all night long.
Stage 4 — Simple Stride
Now the left hand begins alternating between bass and harmony.
Bass note.
Chord.
Bass note.
Chord.
The classic:
Boom-chuck. Boom-chuck.
Simple?
Conceptually, yes.
Physically?
Not necessarily.
Stride requires coordination and control, so develop the left hand independently before adding the melody.
And remember...
The accompaniment still supports the melody.
Stage 5 — Enhanced Stride
Once simple stride becomes comfortable, we begin expanding its possibilities.
Tenths.
Root-and-seventh structures.
Additional chordal voicings.
More varied rhythmic patterns.
The predictable boom-chuck starts to feel more conversational.
More expressive.
More flexible.
But here's an important practice principle:
As the left hand becomes more complicated...
👉 Keep the right hand simple.
There's no prize for making everything difficult simultaneously.
Stage 6 — Enhanced Harmony and Melodic Support
Now the texture becomes considerably richer.
The enhanced stride remains.
The melody becomes harmonized again.
We introduce additional harmonic movement, substitutions, tension, and release.
A lot is happening in both hands.
Which means this is another perfect opportunity for...
Hands-separate practice.
Develop each responsibility independently before asking both hands to coordinate everything together.
Stage 7 — Improvisation
Finally, we begin enhancing the melody improvisationally.
Notice the wording:
Enhancing the melody.
We're not abandoning it.
We're developing it.
We're interpreting it.
We're improvising around it.
And we can begin improvising harmonically, too.
In this week's lesson, for example, we introduce tritone substitutions that transform circle movement into beautiful chromatic half-step movement.
Harmony becomes flexible.
Melody becomes flexible.
And the pianist begins making increasingly personal musical decisions.
Four Measures Are Enough
Now here's where this week's practice approach becomes especially important.
Our Love Is Here to Stay is a 32-measure tune.
We could take all seven stages and work through all 32 measures.
But...
That would be nuts.
We'd be asking ourselves to develop seven different skills while simultaneously processing 32 measures of harmony, melody, and form.
Instead, we're taking just four measures from the B section.
Four measures.
Eight chords.
Seven essential solo piano skills.
Why?
Because:
👉 The amount of musical material you're practicing does not determine the magnitude of the musical skill you're developing.
That's huge.
The musical material stays the same.
The skill changes.
Instead of constantly asking the brain to process new musical information while the hands develop new physical abilities, we stabilize the material and focus on one skill at a time.
That's efficient practice.
You're Not Developing Arrangements. You're Developing Abilities.
This may be the most important practical distinction of the entire episode.
After working through all seven stages, we haven't simply created seven different versions of four measures of Our Love Is Here to Stay.
We've developed seven different musical abilities.
And those abilities don't belong to the tune.
👉 They belong to you.
Take them to another phrase.
Another section.
Another standard.
A tune you've never played before.
Imagine spending several weeks developing these seven skills instead of memorizing seven different arrangements.
At the end, you might not possess seven arrangements you can reproduce note for note.
But you'd have something far more valuable:
Seven musical skills you can use to create countless arrangements of your own. Pasted text
When Does an Exercise Become Music?
Here's one final question worth thinking about:
When does an exercise become music?
When does something stop being a technical task you're trying to execute correctly...
And become something you're using to express a musical idea?
When you're practicing harmony, you're not simply learning to play the correct chords.
You're developing the ability to create a harmonic environment that supports melody.
When you're practicing stride, you're not simply coordinating your hands.
You're developing rhythmic movement and recreating an ensemble's interaction.
When you're practicing improvisation, you're not simply playing the correct notes over the correct chords. You're learning to make your own musical decisions.
And that's the point.
👉 The exercise isn't the destination.
The exercise is the vehicle.
The skill is what eventually allows you to make music.
And that's precisely why we're called...
Jazz Piano Skills.
Your Practice Challenge
This week, resist the temptation to tackle the entire tune.
Take the same four measures from the B section of Our Love Is Here to Stay and work through the seven stages.
Don't rush!
Stage One isn't something to get through just to reach Stage Seven.
Stage One is solo piano.
Make it musical.
Then move forward when you're ready.
Develop the harmonized melody.
Introduce time.
Strum the changes.
Develop simple stride.
Enhance the stride.
Expand the harmony.
Explore improvisation.
And then begin applying those skills to another four-measure phrase.
As you practice, keep asking:
Am I trying to memorize an arrangement?
Or...
👉 Am I developing the skills that allow me to create one?
That distinction changes everything.
Final Thought
Four weeks ago, we began Our Love Is Here to Stay with harmony.
But underneath this entire month's study has been a much larger question:
How do we actually learn jazz?
And look where that question has taken us.
We studied the tradition to discover possibility.
We studied musical processes to develop understanding.
We practiced making decisions to develop creativity.
And now we bring those things together to develop independence.
That's the educational journey!
Not: Tell me what to play.
But eventually:
I understand what I'm looking at.
I know how to work with it.
I know how to develop the skills I need.
I can make musical decisions.
I can create.
And perhaps the most exciting discovery of all...
👉 I can make music that sounds like ME.
That's what jazz education should ultimately make possible.
Not a lifetime of needing somebody else's answers.
A lifetime of developing your own.
So as we close our study of Our Love Is Here to Stay, remember:
Four measures.
Seven stages.
A lifetime of musical possibilities.
The tunes change.
The skills remain.
Discover • Learn • Play
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Warm Regards, Dr. Bob Lawrence
Jazz Piano Skills
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