Hi Humberto,

Thanks for your comments.

I wonder if you could take a deep dive in a future seminar as to your thought process in choosing chord voicings when arranging a jazz standard, how and why you pick for example among a rootless voicing with or without a stride pattern, or a two-handed spread voicing, between a basic three-note voicing or a fuller 6-9 voicing, an upper structure, block chords, So-What, Herbie Hancock or Kenny Barron voicings, etc, based on melody note, tempo and rhythm of the song, the mood you are trying to convey and any other factors.

Yes absolutely I can cover that. As you say it is a broad question but we can certainly explore all of this in a ‘deep dive’ session for a specific jazz standard.

Also have a comment on the drills. While I am nowhere at the level I aspire to eventually be, after months of practice I am above the level I thought I would be, and I am beginning to add some alterations to the dominant13 chord and experiment with various sounds. These drills do work.

Yes these drills certainly do work. They are the drills I used to learn these progressions by memory.

Tuomo hosted a great session yesterday on “Drop 2 Voicings” both rooted, and rootless. This is just a slight variation on the drills that I cover here, and using drop 2 gives a more balanced and sophisticated sound.

You can see his seminar here and I just added the chapters: https://www.pianogroove.com/live-seminars/drop-2-voicings-zoom-workshop/

These drills do work. I have also found it useful to drill the voicings in isolation, not necessarily as part of a 2-5-1, since not everything in jazz is a 2-5-1, to use a metronome and to do the drills without referring to any chord charts but rather by knowing what chords belong in each progression.

Yes indeed that’s a great exercise too. Using the metronome is a good idea so that you are trying to keep a pulse and ofcourse start slowly and gradually speed up.

And as you say, the learning is reinforced when the voicings and progressions are applied to a jazz standard like for example the Ebm9, Ab13, DbMaj9 progression in Body and Soul and the bridge of In A Sentimental Mood. That progression is well ingrained in my mind and fingers now.

Yes exactly. It’s important to also play through the harmony of tunes, as this is the end goal.

It’s a gradual process… I started learning these progressions around 12 years ago and I can still get better at them, but as I mention that shouldn’t hold us back from perfecting our voicings in a selected number of tunes which make up our ‘go-to’ repertoire.

Looking forward to all future seminars.

Awesome… likewise!

Talk soon,
Hayden