Full Version: Jazz Piano
Anyone taking or preparing for Jazz Piano exams at any level in the New York or New Jersey area????
hi! can i know wat is jazz piano? wat's the difference between classical piano and jazz piano?
well jazz piano involves playign jazz. Classical piano involves playing classical/baroque/romantic/modern period "classical" music.
Some people ask silly questions 
I agree TenorClef...thats why I didn't reply.
I found this on the Bill Evans (Jazz pianist) Web site. Hope it helps.
What is it that makes jazz different from Western classical music? The answer is deceptively plain and simple. Jazz is almost totally improvised, while classical music is almost totally written down. Classical music is a composer's art: even the greatest geniuses and fastest-working composers in history - Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gioacchino Rossini, Franz Shubert, Frederic Chopin, Hector Berlioz, Richard Strauss - took hours, days, or weeks to compose even so much as one minute's worth of music. And this is even true of those composers (Bach, Mozart, Chopin) who were known as great improvisers. Very little of their improvisations actually made it into their finished, published works; there was always some finishing or refining process that took place before their work went to the publisher.
Jazz, conversely, developed as an improviser's art. Despite the fact that there have been some very clever jazz composers and arrangers who formulated, in advance, introductions, main themes, bridges, and codas - Morton, Ellington, Eddie Sauter, George Handy. Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus spring immediately to mind - the principal interest in a jazz performance is not the pre-arranged formalities, any more than it is in a classical performance. The central crux of the listening experience is the manner in which themes are interwoven or developed. In classical music, this development is written down, while in jazz, it is improvised. There is no editing when you improvise; there is constant editing when you compose. In jazz, then, it takes exactly one minute to create one minute's worth of music...and therein lies the excitement, the danger, of playing jazz as opposed to playing classical music.
What is it that makes jazz different from Western classical music? The answer is deceptively plain and simple. Jazz is almost totally improvised, while classical music is almost totally written down. Classical music is a composer's art: even the greatest geniuses and fastest-working composers in history - Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gioacchino Rossini, Franz Shubert, Frederic Chopin, Hector Berlioz, Richard Strauss - took hours, days, or weeks to compose even so much as one minute's worth of music. And this is even true of those composers (Bach, Mozart, Chopin) who were known as great improvisers. Very little of their improvisations actually made it into their finished, published works; there was always some finishing or refining process that took place before their work went to the publisher.
Jazz, conversely, developed as an improviser's art. Despite the fact that there have been some very clever jazz composers and arrangers who formulated, in advance, introductions, main themes, bridges, and codas - Morton, Ellington, Eddie Sauter, George Handy. Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus spring immediately to mind - the principal interest in a jazz performance is not the pre-arranged formalities, any more than it is in a classical performance. The central crux of the listening experience is the manner in which themes are interwoven or developed. In classical music, this development is written down, while in jazz, it is improvised. There is no editing when you improvise; there is constant editing when you compose. In jazz, then, it takes exactly one minute to create one minute's worth of music...and therein lies the excitement, the danger, of playing jazz as opposed to playing classical music.
This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.