Jazz Piano Cafe

Category: Practice Recordings

  • Working on original tune – Joy

    I wrote a tune last fall which is my most harmonically advanced as of yet… it’s called Joy and I recorded it in a pretty hasty recording session last weekend (click here to listen). My bass playing friend Jason said that this tune is the most difficult to play of all the tunes I have…

  • Days of Wine and Roses and Originals work

    I love practicing because it allows me to take as much time as I want to work out nice ways to play tunes. When playing with a group I am always trying to play in time, and there is less time to be very thoughtful about learning new voicings and ways to play the chords.…

  • Free improv and Stella By Starlight

    I couldn’t sleep, so I tried to relax my mind by doing some freeform improvisation on the piano. I find that it can sometime have a calming effect to improvise freely on the piano for about 10 minutes, or longer if I feel like it. At the end of this session, I worked a little bit…

  • Practice recording – How High the Moon and Satin Doll

    I was inspired to work on my jazz chops a bit after attending a wonderful concert given by Amanda Tosoff quartet with Brad Turner at CBC Studio One. So I picked the standard How High the Moon and did some practice on playing a bit faster, trying to get some lines to flow, and my hands…

  • Practice Recording: original stuff and Giant Steps

    Worked a bit on an original as well as the standard Giant Steps. (Click here to listen).

  • Article: How Jazz Pianists Practice

    Jazz pianist Ted Rosenthal has put together a very detailed and comprehensive web page on “How Jazz Pianists Practice” (click here to read). He also posted an interview between himself and Keith Jarrett, and an article about how to incorporate Mozart idioms into jazz playing. More about Ted Rosenthal on his web site.

  • Geoff’s Piano Practice recordings

    After receiving some “fan mail” from a girl in Japan, I decided to make an update to my Piano Practice page, where I post recordings of my piano practices. Listening to some of them, I came across a “killer” practice (well, as practices go anyways), where I developed many cool ideas and worked on lots…