Jazz Piano

Jazz piano is the sound of a single player carrying a whole band: melody, harmony and rhythm at once, ten fingers doing the work of a rhythm section and a horn line together. It grew out of ragtime and the blues in the early years of the twentieth century, then took its first mature shape at the Harlem rent parties of the 1920s. There the stride pianists, James P. Johnson (1894-1955) and his pupil Fats Waller (1904-1943) foremost among them, built a rolling left hand that leapt between bass notes and chords while the right hand sang and ornamented above it.

From there the music kept reinventing what the two hands could do. Earl Hines (1903-1983) broke the stride pattern with sudden accents and ringing octave lines that cut through a band like a trumpet. Bebop pushed further: Bud Powell (1924-1966) pared the left hand back to spare, jabbing chords and set the right running in long, quicksilver single-note lines. Later players opened the harmony out again, Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) through angular space and dissonance, Bill Evans (1929-1980) through soft, floating voicings. Under every era runs the same pulse: swing, and the freedom to improvise over it.

That division of labour, a supporting left hand beneath an improvising right, is exactly what these note-for-note transcriptions hold onto by keeping the two hands on separate channels. Slow a performance down, open it in practice mode, and you can follow each hand at its own work before bringing them back together.