Hayden Hill
Hayden founded PianoGroove in 2015 with the goal of making the world a more musical place. He shares his love for jazz piano through his online courses and manages the community area of PianoGroove.
July 19 · 2023
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Seminar Description
Seminar Description
Hayden shares some of his favourite solo piano recordings and we analyse the harmony, fills, and techniques for solo piano performance.
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Jazz Harmony Workshop
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Hey everyone,
There is an echo on my piano audio which shouldn’t be there. I will fix that for future streams. My apologies.
The pianist that we are exploring in this seminar is called Alfonso Gugliucci and his YouTube channel name is “Pianista Italiano” – if you search this on YouTube you will find his channel.
This is his recording of “The Nearness Of You” that we analyse in the first half of this seminar.
I like his use of upper structure triads, melodic variation on the main melody theme, and the cocktail/lounge style fills and embellishments throughout his performances.
I hope the analysis is helpful and perhaps we can explore more of this playing style in the future if it is of interest to our students.
Talk soon,
Hayden
Thanks again, Hayden, for being willing to take on the challenge of arranging a tune (and a challenging one at that) without the comfort of your usual preparation. It is useful to have a bit of an insight into your arranging process from scratch.
I’m not sure how to access your Alfie playlist. Would you mind reposting the link. Thanks.
My pleasure James. Yes it was a little unusual to teach a song without preparation or even really knowing the tune or the lyrics, but I hope I shared some useful insights. I will create a jazz standard tutorial on this tune shortly as I love the harmony.
Yes here is my playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5FU847hiK7hLler8EpoKFp?si=fdc3a552604247cf
It’s not a exhaustive playlist but all of the renditions are in the key of C Major – the same as the key in which I covered the tune.
Talk soon, cheers,
Hayden
Looking for the chapters and video controls. Thanks
Apologies for the delay Edwin, the chapters have just been added.
I see that the 5-second skip back button is not showing, but the other video controls are. I’m investigating why that is. We can also use the left arrow and right arrow button on our keyboard to skip the video backwards and forwards by 5 seconds.
Enjoy the seminar!
Cheers,
Hayden
Enjoyed this very much.
Have to say prefer it in this key to the one Tuomo did it in.
Thanks Hayden.
Inspirational as always be good if you can make it into a tutorial too š
Thanks Karl.
I have just added the chapters to better review the material and yes i will cover this tune in a jazz standard tutorial once I am a little more familiar with the harmony.
Talk soon, cheers,
Hayden
@Hayden, this is a great lesson, and Iām going deep into the work of Pianista Italiano and would love more like this. Count me among the interested students wanting more exploration of this playing style.
Thanks.
Hey Marla š
Thanks for the feedback, I’m glad you enjoyed the lesson.
Wonderful, in August’s seminars I will host a session on his recording of Body & Soul which I really like:
The introduction is beautiful. It sounds complicated but it’s actually quite simple to understand from a diatonic standpoint and it’s basically a 1-4-3-6-2-5 progression with some interesting substitutions and rootless voicings to create different textures.
His arrangement of the tune also has some nice examples of ‘call and response’ or ‘question and answer’ technique, along with all of the things that we discussed and analysed in this seminar on The Nearness Of You.
I’m also planning a new jazz standard course on “Body & Soul” similar to my recent in depth standard courses on “Misty” and “Nearness Of You” which will cover harmony, fills, and improvisation principles.
Look out for August’s seminar agenda email that will be sent in the next day or so.
Talk soon, cheers,
Hayden