Comping Beyond Patterns: Harmonizing Melodies

[00:00:00]Hello my friends, Jeremy Siskind here.

[00:00:04]Um I'm the author of the jazz piano fundamentals series. Here's two of the three books. I'm the author of the solo piano solo standards for piano series.

[00:00:12]Here's two of the currently two books.

[00:00:15]Number three coming soon.

[00:00:16]Um and I'm the author of playing solo jazz piano.

[00:00:20]And one of the things that I hear most often from students is that they feel stuck with their comping. Um very understandable. And let me give you the short like spiel that I give to students when we're talking comping. The pedagogical process is kind of a weird one, right? Um so eventually what we want to do with our comping is we want to be in the moment responding to the soloist.

[00:00:46]And our comping should be completely unpatterned, meaning it's not just repeating over and over again. I like to compare comping to a boxer sparring with another boxer that you know, you've learned maybe some certain punches, some certain combinations of punch and duck and and whatever. I don't know boxing.

[00:01:07]But you're not thinking about what combination you're going to put in.

[00:01:10]You're just responding in real time to the person in front of you.

[00:01:15]But in order to get there, you need to learn all the combinations and have them really, really solid. And so my pedagogical approach to learning comping, and I think it's generally the pedagogical approach, is to learn some patterns and some standard voicings first, right? Um so to learn some successful formulas that are going to give you a good swing style, that are going to give you um good foundation for playing swing harmony. This is me comping. If you're wondering what I'm doing over here, this is a piano. I'm comping.

[00:01:47]Um but I think a lot of students kind of run into a wall after or as they're learning that, which is that they don't feel like they're at all creative or spontaneous or anything with their comping. So, today we're going to talk about a different approach to comping. My recommendation would be to do this as or after you're learning those essential fundamental foundational patterns. Um kind of around the time you're ready to pick up Jazz Piano Fundamentals Book 2.

[00:02:18]Okay, so if you're a very beginner, you're still working your way through Book 1, I probably wouldn't necessarily recommend this. But here's here's what we're going to do.

[00:02:28]We're going to start with a melody instead of starting with a voicing and comping pattern. So, let me show you the difference. Um we need to get some music going here. Nobody wants to hear some dummy talk. So, if I'm comping on a blues and I'm just thinking about patterns like the Charleston, the reverse Charleston, the Count Basie pattern, the Red Garland pattern.

[00:02:47]Um Here's the Charleston. [music] Kind of sounds like Killer Joe Joe.

[00:02:57]Count Basie.

[00:02:59]>> [music] >> I'm going to put a push off into that Count Basie pattern, reverse Charleston, Charleston, Red Garland.

[00:03:14]Nobody's going to be angry with you about that comping. That comping is good for a semi-professional or even at a professional level. If you If you're playing with good articulation, good swing feel, solid patterns, um there's no problem there.

[00:03:28]But let me show you now if I'm thinking more melodically, I'm going to be now singing a little melody with the top note and harmonizing it. And I'll show you how to do this or how to practice it at least. So, two, three, four.

[00:03:45]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [snorts] [music] [music] [music] >> So, this isn't an issue of one style or one process is right and one process is wrong. During a gig, I'm going to do a little bit of both, actually. And I think, you know, realistically, as you practice both of them, your mind might kind of naturally wander and mix between both approaches.

[00:04:50]So, what I'm doing here, like I described, I'll just say it again, is I'm hearing, singing, thinking about the top note of the voicing, and then I'm harmonizing it.

[00:05:01]So, how would I practice this? Um, well, so let's look at a blues progression here. Oh, this is doing really, uh, poorly here. Um, I'm going to talk while I fix the tech, which I thought was working. Um, there we go.

[00:05:16]Perfect.

[00:05:18]So, here's a blues progression. And the first step is I would sing really simple melodies.

[00:05:25]Maybe over a 2-5-1, maybe over a just repeating four measures of a blues progression, something like that.

[00:05:32]Um, I'd sing really simple melodies.

[00:05:35]Number one, play back the melody, make sure you have the melody right. And then, number three is I would figure out how to harmonize the melody with voicings. And that's, you know, number three, of course, is probably the most complicated part. But, for instance, um so, over these first four measures of blues, I might sing ba de da down.

[00:05:59]Let's just start there.

[00:06:01]>> [music] >> And hey, if you don't get your melody the first time, that's okay. This is an ear training exercise as much as anything.

[00:06:11]>> [music] >> Okay. So, then step three is harmonize it. And here, I might do something uh relatively simple, which is that I'm keeping my my general kind of type A type B voicing. If you're not familiar with that um with that formulation, [clears throat] it just means that I have my third and seventh >> [music] >> on bottom.

[00:06:33]And then I'm adding color tones like the third Sorry, like the ninth, fifth, 13th on top. So, here is like an F7 voicing.

[00:06:44]And I'm putting that F now, which is just the root, on [music] top.

[00:06:51]So, I'm just putting the melody note on top of the rest of my voicing.

[00:06:57]And then I'm going to move to B [music] flat.

[00:07:01]Now, these voicings are imperfect.

[00:07:04]And what What do I mean by that? They're imperfect in that they involve doubling.

[00:07:08]So, you can see that there's two Cs here, for instance.

[00:07:11]>> [music] >> And in this second voicing of the F7, there's two Ds.

[00:07:16]>> [music] >> But, because I'm focused on the melody, I'm letting some of those things slide.

[00:07:24]>> [music] >> Now, if I want to go a step deeper, I might make that second F7 more altered.

[00:07:35]>> [music] >> So, here I'm putting in things like the flat nine and the sharp nine and the sharp 11 into the right hand >> [music] >> to like increase the amount of motion.

[00:07:48]>> [music] >> Okay, so that's one example. Let me sing you another one. And notice that was just two notes. So these don't have to be incredibly dense. You know, when I'm saying melodies, I'm thinking about something that would be like a background in a big band record. And by the way, that's a great place to find inspiration for the kind of accompanying that you might want to do here.

[00:08:14]So, here's ba ba doo ba doo doo. There's another [snorts] melody. I'm singing so low.

[00:08:23]>> [music] >> Melody's just right from the blue scale.

[00:08:30]Look in here.

[00:08:35]So this one's a little busier.

[00:08:37]>> [music] [music] >> So again, I'm not really doing anything fancy voicing-wise. I don't have to be a genius. I'm not doing super complex voicings or chord substitutions. I'm mainly keeping the essential tones, the third and the seventh on bottom, and then adding color.

[00:08:59]>> [music] >> And this is kind of an interesting moment.

[00:09:04]This chord as a out of context doesn't sound good, right? We're not supposed to put the 11th in dominant chords.

[00:09:11]But in context, I think it sounds okay.

[00:09:14]>> [music] [music] >> Both because of the where it's coming from and because where where it resolves to. All right, now both of those started with the root. Let me sing something that doesn't start with the root.

[00:09:33]Ba da da doo.

[00:09:35]Uh let's see.

[00:09:36]Ba ba ba da doo.

[00:09:42]>> [music] [music] >> I'm taking the same exact approach.

[00:09:55]I'm putting the thirds and sevenths on bottom.

[00:09:58]>> [music] >> And I'm I'm just moving the melody note on top [snorts] of that.

[00:10:08]Now, there are other more complicated things that we can do.

[00:10:13]I'm fighting a sneeze. I hope I don't sneeze in the middle of this video. So, one of them would be side steps.

[00:10:20]Oh, there's the sneeze. Everything's [snorts] okay. Everything's okay. Don't panic.

[00:10:25]Um, so, side steps are for when you use half steps in the melody. So, if I'm going >> [music] >> what I'm doing instead of just maintaining the same chord, which I could do, >> [music] >> but it's so much more colorful and interesting and even, I think, intuitive and natural to move the entire voicing by a half step.

[00:10:51]>> [music] >> So, it's like it's like I'm playing F7, >> [music] >> E7, F7.

[00:11:00]>> [music] [music] [music] >> Other devices that you can use to harmonize the melody are inverting voicings.

[00:11:25]So, if you have a bigger leap, you can take the same four or five notes and you can re-spell them. So, for instance, um let's see. If my first voicing is here, these are technically called pentatonic voicings.

[00:11:45]>> [music] >> I'm taking the same four notes here.

[00:11:52]I'm putting the G on bottom. This is another one that out of context doesn't sound very good.

[00:12:00]>> [music] >> So, you could >> [music] >> You can invert these voicings to make a more interesting melody. You can also use traditional harmonization devices like close position voicings and drop two.

[00:12:22]>> [music] [music] >> If you're skilled at those voicings.

[00:12:31]All right. So, let's review here.

[00:12:34]So, I'm suggesting to you that an alternate way to think about comping, to build your comping, um that can go hand in hand with learning patterns and variations, is to hear, think of, and then harmonize a top note melody.

[00:12:54]And the exercise that I would suggest would be to sing a very simple, think two to three note uh two to three different pitches maximum.

[00:13:02]Focus on the swing feel. Sing that two to three note phrase. Play that two to three note phrase. And then play it with harmony. And the vast majority of your uh of your harmonizations are going to be able to um so simply use type AB voicings with thirds and sevenths, the shells on the bottom, and some of those common color tones on top.

[00:13:24]But, you can also use devices like side step. I didn't mention tonicization, which means adding the five chord. So, for instance, >> [music] >> adding a C7 in the midst of an F7 measure.

[00:13:41]Um to- so, side-step, tonicization, inversion, especially with arpeggiated material, or standard harmonization devices like um close position voicings and drop two.

[00:13:55]So, I hope that gives you a different idea in terms of how to start comping.

[00:14:00]It could be not necessarily all these patterns, but it can be a top-down approach.

[00:14:07]If you enjoyed that, um why don't you say something about sneezing?

[00:14:10]And um you might really enjoy Jazz Pi- uh Jazz Piano Fundamentals book two and book three. They contain some of this slightly more advanced, more uh relying on in- intuition sorts of exercises and activities to get you beyond the formulas that I tried to establish for you guys in book one. Thanks so much for watching. Bye-bye.