Teach Yourself Jazz - online guidebook
For the beginning player, with sheet music samples
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JAZZ PIANO |
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as a pianoforte solo", writes critic R. W. S. Mendl ("The Appeal of Jazz", 1927). "If you perform syncopated music on the pianoforte, it is ragtime, not jazz."
Boogie Woogie
The one form of piano playing which purists admit to the jazz family is that known as Boogie Woogie. The name is claimed as the invention of pianist Charlie 'Cow Cow' Davenport, who said he had derived it from the 'Bogey Man' and the low-life associations of jazz. Boogie is characterised by the 'walking bass' of the left hand:
Example 17 |
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a figure probably derived from the rhythmic accompaniments of the strolling guitar players in the early days of jazz. This bass provides a steady eight-to-the-bar beat over which the right hand can play syncopated figurations which form exciting cross-rhythms.
Boogie dates from the pioneer days of jazz and was developed by pianists in dives and saloons of the logging towns of Mississippi and Louisiana. It is essentially a 'pub' style of playing: the left hand beat lies comfortably within the compass of the hand, and the pianist can rock away with his left hand while he devotes most of his attention to intricate rhythms and brilliant figuration in the right hand. Among the principal exponents of Boogie are |
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