Week 7: How to Play Jazz Piano (Autumn Leaves, Part I)

As we near the end of our learning projects, I started working on my final goal piece, the jazz standard “Autumn Leaves“. This has always been one of my favourites and my earliest introduction to jazz music.  After a little bit of analysis, I found that it follows the simple 2-5-1 chord progression I started working on at the beginning of my learning project.

I love that I can start transferring my new skills to different pieces! Here is my progress this week:

What I worked on:

• Using a YouTube tutorial with a suggested paid resource, I went through 5 basic steps to start learning Autumn Leaves

Wins:

• I successfully moved through all 5 steps of the lesson
• Bonus round – tried playing the piece with a drum/bass backing track (from the same YouTuber, David Magyel)

Fails:

• This week was heavy on sheet music use, but I tried to use it as a tool (by analyzing the score) rather than a crutch.

Resources used:

• How to Navigate Autumn Leaves
• How to Learn New Tunes (Autumn Leaves) – Jazz Lesson #32
• Drum/Bass backing track (starting at 5:07)
• Musicnotes paid sheet music – Autumn Leaves (David Magyel lesson)
• My iPad and Musicnotes.com app (save the trees!)

Next week I will continue with Autumn Leaves, but I plan to go back to only using a lead sheet and begin practicing scales for improvising.