The Best Exercises to Improve Your Jazz Piano Playing

Jazz piano can take years to develop fluency on.

A combination of perseverance and varied approach is essential to gain the skills you need to become an expressive improviser.

Regular practice in different formats is also required, giving you healthy doses of individual improvement and experience in group situations.

Here are the best ways to individually practice and improve your jazz piano skills.

Scales

Scales are an important part of learning any pitched instrument, both for the purposes of technique and key-based language.

It is essential to know the scales related to any key you are playing in.

A good way of absorbing these is to pick a chord progression, and play through every scale associated with each chord.

Learning all 12 major scales, mixolydian and dorian modes, and melodic minor, is a good way to cover the essentials.

Learning the diminished scale, otherwise called the whole-half diminished scale, is also good for covering diminished chords.

Once you have these, extended modes such as the lydian dominant and the locrian natural-2 will also prove useful.

Scales do not need to just be played linearly, and can be turned into varied exercises.

For example, take the first five notes of a scale, and play them in a jumbled order (e.g. 53142), then move this shape up through the notes of the scale, repeating the pattern in your fingers each time.

This approach allows you to absorb every note in the scale fully, while exercising your fingers in an ever-changing assortment of notes.

Left Hand Harmonisation

The left hand often gets neglected when learning jazz piano, as the right hand takes most of the focus for soloing.

The left hand is not just an accompaniment device; it is a tool that can be used to make nuanced textures in the lower end of your sound.

Playing through chord progressions with only the left hand is essential practice when trying to improve your overall sound.

Depending on the styles of playing you want to incorporate in your playing, you can exercise stride techniques, quartal voicings, shells, and walking basslines.

It is recommended to have elements of all of these under your fingers, as they can all be used in small doses as part of fluid self-accompaniment.

Eighth Note Practice

Continuous eighth-note soloing is brilliant for speeding up your phrase resolution skills.

This involves soloing over a chord progression using non-stop eighth notes.

By forcing yourself to be constantly problem solving and finding continuations of your lines, you constantly adapt to the progression in front of you.

Be sure to play this exercise at a low tempo, not worrying about swing feel, but just playing straight notes.

It is more useful if you focus on hitting strong chord tones at key points, or focus on shape manipulation, as the constant need for notes will force more creative motif development.

Transposed Lick Practice

The idea of this exercise is simple and easy to formulate.

Take a solo lick that you like, it can be your own or a transcribed lick.

Play this lick in all 12 keys, choosing your fingering carefully for each key.

Then take a chord progression, and apply this lick in as many different ways as you can within the progression.

This works very well over tunes such as Rhythm Changes, Have You Met Miss Jones, and Joy Spring.

This exercise can easily take up a whole hour of practice, while giving you essential language and technical skills.

Limited Range Practice

When you have 88 keys at your disposal, it is very easy to play solos that wander aimlessly around a wide range of the keyboard without much melodic control.

Try limiting your range to a single octave, or even less.

This way, you weave compact lines that force you to be more creative in the space you give yourself.

This exercise is underrated, as it does not instantly show great improvement in your overall playing, but simply triggers your creativity in a way that makes your on-the-spot improvisation more effective and varied.

Hand Trading

Take a chord progression, then play 8 bars of solo in your right hand.

Play the next 8 bars of solo with your left hand, drawing influence from what your right hand played.

Repeat this process over and over, always using what one hand plays to inspire what the other plays.

This gives good exercise to your left hand, while forcing both hands to learn shapes not necessarily natural to their finger layout.

Practicing Effectively

Using these exercises, you should be able to construct an effective practice regime which builds both your technique and language skills on the piano.

It is recommended to pick only one or two exercises per practice session.

Complete the exercise thoroughly; if you feel like taking a shortcut to get to the next exercise, then make sure you finish your current exercise fully, and then take a break.

This way you will not let yourself dodge difficult keys or cherry-pick your favourite elements.

To develop your jazz piano playing with expert guidance, structured practice, and inspiring one-to-one tuition, discover our jazz piano lessons for adults at the London Piano Institute.