How to start jazz piano: a roadmap for beginners

Jazz piano can look like a huge, foggy mountain: hundreds of chords, scales with strange names, players who seem to make it all up on the spot. Many students tell me they tried to start several times and gave up, because they didn’t know what to learn first.

The good news: the order matters more than the amount. Learn a few things in the right order, and each one makes the next easy. Here is the roadmap I use with beginners.

What jazz piano is made of

Almost everything a jazz pianist does comes from five skills:

1. Chords: knowing 7th chords and voicing them so they sound like jazz.
2. Rhythm: swing feel, and playing in time with a band.
3. Tunes: reading a lead sheet (melody + chord symbols) and turning it into music.
4. Improvising: inventing your own lines over the chords.
5. Listening: knowing the sound from records, so you know what you are aiming for.

The steps below touch all five, a little at a time.

Step 1: learn the 7th chords

Pop and classical music lean on triads, three-note chords. Jazz lives on 7th chords: add one more note, a 7th above the root, and the chord gets its jazz colour. Learn these three on every root:

• maj7 (Cmaj7: C E G B): warm, open;
• 7, the dominant (C7: C E G B♭): bluesy, it wants to move;
• m7 (Cm7: C E♭ G B♭): soft, minor.

Play them in all 12 keys, slowly, saying the notes. This one step will make every chord symbol you meet readable.

Step 2: feel the swing

This is where classical players, especially, have to change a habit. In swing, pairs of eighth notes are not even: the first is long, the second short, roughly like the first and last notes of a triplet. Listen to the same phrase twice, first straight, then swung. It comes from the phrase library we wrote for JazzSync, and it uses two things you will meet again below: the blues scale in the right hand (C, E♭, F, F♯, G, B♭) and the 3rd and 7th of C7 (E and B♭) in the left:

Listen to the left hand too. In the straight version it plays right on beats 2 and 4. In the swung version it plays short chords on the “and” of 2 and the “and” of 4, anticipating beats 3 and 1. That little push ahead of the beat is a big part of the swing feel. Swing isn’t only the long–short. It is also a slight lean on the off-beats and a relaxed, forward-moving time. You learn it mostly by ear: play along with recordings, and copy the feel before the notes.

Step 3: read a lead sheet

Jazz musicians read music all the time, but a tune usually comes as a lead sheet: the melody on one staff, with chord symbols above it. The melody is written out; the accompaniment is not. You play the melody with the right hand and build the left-hand part yourself from the symbols.

The simplest left hand is just two notes: the 3rd and the 7th of the chord. The 3rd tells the ear major or minor, the 7th tells it what kind of 7th chord. These two notes are called the guide tones, and they carry the whole sound of the chord.

You don’t need the root. Play the two notes as 3–7 (the 3rd below) or 7–3 (the 7th below), whichever is closer to the chord before. In a band the bass player plays the bass line, and the roots are part of it, so your left hand doesn’t need them. Here is the most common progression in jazz, the ii–V–I, with just those two notes under a short melody I wrote for this lesson:

Look at the left hand: Dm7 is F–C, G7 is F–B, Cmaj7 is E–B. Each change moves just one note by a half step. If this works for you in C, press All 12 keys. Then take a simple standard and do the same thing all the way through. My lesson on “Autumn Leaves” walks you through a whole tune this way.

Step 4: play the blues, and start improvising

The 12-bar blues is the best place to start improvising. It has only three chords, a form you learn in a day, and one scale that works over all of it: the blues scale. In F it has six notes: F, A♭, B♭, B, C, E♭ (1, ♭3, 4, ♭5, 5, ♭7). Leave out the B and you have the F minor pentatonic, five notes that are even easier to start with.

Over a blues in F, almost every note of this scale sounds right on every chord, so you can stop worrying about wrong notes and think about rhythm instead. But don’t run up and down it: play phrases. Begin with a riff, a short phrase from the scale (here just C, E♭ and F) that you repeat while the chords change underneath. Same notes, three different chords, three different colours:

Then change one thing each time: the rhythm, the last note, the starting beat. That is already improvising. My lesson on the blues scale gives you ten more phrases to learn. The 20-minute daily routine builds this into a habit.

Step 5: listen, every day

You can’t play a language you’ve never heard. Ten minutes of focused listening a day does more than an hour of exercises done without the sound in your ears. Choose a few classic records with piano (Wynton Kelly, Red Garland, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson and Herbie Hancock are good starting points), and listen to the same tracks many times: first the melody, then the bass, then just the piano’s left hand.

If you come from classical piano

Your technique and reading will help you enormously. A few things work differently, though:

• The page tells you less, so you decide more. A lead sheet gives you the melody and the chord symbols; the voicings, rhythm and arrangement are yours.
• Rhythm comes first. A simple line that swings beats a brilliant one that doesn’t. Spend time with the metronome on beats 2 and 4.
• Mistakes are material. In improvisation, a “wrong” note that resolves by a step sounds intentional. Let yourself play without stopping.
• Your ears do the learning. Copy phrases from recordings by ear, a few notes at a time. It is slow at first and then it speeds up everything.

How long does it take?

With twenty focused minutes a day, most of my beginners can play a simple standard (melody plus guide tones) within a few weeks, and improvise a chorus of the blues not long after. Real fluency takes years, as with any language, but the first “this sounds like jazz” moment comes much sooner than people expect.

Mistakes I see most often

• Collecting information instead of playing. One voicing in all 12 keys beats ten voicings in C.
• Skipping the rhythm. Practise with a metronome or a backing track, always.
• Waiting to improvise until you “know enough”. Start on day one with a riff.
• Only playing alone. Play along with recordings or backing tracks, so you learn to keep going.

Your next lessons

1. Comping with two notes: your first left hand.
2. How to comp: five left-hand rhythms.
3. The blues scale: ten phrases to start improvising.
4. A 20-minute daily routine to put it all together.

Recommended listening

Ten classic recordings to start your listening. Choose one a day, listen to it several times, and follow the piano.

1. “Freddie Freeloader”, Miles Davis · Kind of Blue (1959): a blues; Wynton Kelly, piano
2. “So What”, Miles Davis · Kind of Blue (1959): Bill Evans, piano
3. “Bye Bye Blackbird”, Miles Davis · ’Round About Midnight (1956): Red Garland, piano
4. “Autumn Leaves”, Cannonball Adderley · Somethin’ Else (1958): Hank Jones, piano
5. “C Jam Blues”, Oscar Peterson Trio · Night Train (1962)
6. “Waltz for Debby”, Bill Evans Trio · Waltz for Debby (1961)
7. “Watermelon Man”, Herbie Hancock · Takin’ Off (1962)
8. “Moanin’”, Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers · Moanin’ (1958): Bobby Timmons, piano
9. “Kelly Blue”, Wynton Kelly · Kelly Blue (1959)
10. “Song for My Father”, Horace Silver · Song for My Father (1964)