oh my god its beautiful ….

James Blake - CMYK
Lianne La Havas - Is Your Love Big Enough
KKB - Civilisation
KKB - Time ‘n’ Place
Lindsay Lowend - Wind Fish
NewJeans - How Sweet
KNOWER - Knower Forever
Louis Cole - Quality Over Opinion
Lamp - Yume
Masayasu Tzboguchi Trio - Autumn in Tokyo

snickering to myself in the office imagining this

I bet you have more knowledge in your hands than you’re giving yourself credit for 🧐

For what it’s worth I definitely don’t think about that many notes at once - it’s more like “shapes” like “oh this is what a rootless F9 chord feels like in my left hand” so in that way it’s more like keeping track of 2 shapes. But the problem is there are sooo many shapes

It’s remarkable my teacher hears these differences at all — one thing I need to start doing when listening to jazz is listening to everything other than the piano right hand — what’s the left hand voice leading sound like? How is the rhythm of the left hand interacting with drums? stuff like that

The other side of that compliment though is that my left hand voicings were not great. I’ve already had to get used to playing rootless in a trio setting but the main takeaway this week was that the range at which your left hand should be in generally is fairly narrow — ideally between D3 and D4

Been listening to a lot of solos lately and videos on soloing and I think the main takeaway for me is to practice different textures and moving between them, eg:

- scales/runs
- chords
- leaps

all with rhythmic variation

Variety is not the same thing as narrative… but contrast creates a story

So for this week’s practice, one of the things I will do is practice taking a motif and then just improvising a bunch of lines trying to incorporate that motif. Maybe I’ll post some. My goal is always to show improvement on specific criticisms from previous lessons, shame keeps me motivated :)

In my latest class, my teacher’s main criticisms for me were that I need to actually tell a story with my solo, rather than just play “stuff”

This is something I feel pretty good at when I’m composing, but of course it’s much much harder to do when improvising

…I’ve been playing Melee against CPUs my whole life and now I’m finally playing with other people. The good part of that is all my technical facilities are there, but my brain is SO far behind. It’s been exhilarating watching it start to catch up…

Anyway I had online lessons for a few years which taught me the fundamentals, but in January I started actually playing in a piano trio on a weekly basis as part of a class

It’s been life changing — not to knock classical music (which I still love) but esp as a pianist it feels like