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Part IllJust Do It

Just Do It

Now See What You’ve Done

Deep Roots And Rootless VoicingsWhere To Now?

Before We Go

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J u s t D o I t

Part III Just Do It

Just Do Itn this chapter, provided only that you know the names of the notes on the keyboard, and can findMiddle C, you are going to play some jazz keyboard. (If you don’t know that much, it isn’t difficult tofind out. Start by checking out the keyboard diagram in the next chapter.)

I want you to play three chords on your keyboard, one after another. Each involves playing one note withyour left hand, and four notes with your right. If you are not used to a keyboard you’ll have to work a littleto get all four to come out together.

Chord One. Left hand: the second D below middle C. Right hand: F A C E, straddling middle C.

Chord Two. Left hand: one half step lower, Db. Right hand: F Ab B E, still straddling middle C.

Chord Three. Left hand: one half step lower, C. Right hand: E G B D, still straddling middle C.

Play them in order, pat your feet, and hold them down as follows: one measure each for chords one andtwo, and two measures for chord three.

Congratulations! You have done it.

Now See What You’ve DoneEven if you don’t understand the terminology yet, you have just played a straight cadence to C , andwhat’s more a pretty good-sounding one too. Chord One had the ‘further away’ sound, Chord Two had the

‘nearly there’ sound, and Chord Three had the ‘there’ sound. Let’s look a little closer at what went on, tosee why it sounded so good.

Deep Roots and Rootless VoicingsFirst, you played a deep note with your left hand quite a lot further down than the chord you played withyour right hand. This note was the root of each sound, a solid foundation. Bass players play roots a lot,and you can see why. By playing a deep one, you set up a lot of sympathetic resonances, and these focusthe sound for your ears, making it sound ‘more like itself’.

Check the difference in sound that you get if you play the D an octave higher. (The low D, by the way isthe actual pitch of the D string on a double bass, even though sheet music for the bass is written an octavehigher.) Now check what the chord sounds like if you don’t play the root at all. Totally different.

Now try adding in a D to the chord (called the voicing ) in your right hand, and playing Chord One again,complete with root. It isn’t wrong, and you may quite like it, but at least you should be able to hear that thestrong direction implicit in the further away feel of Chord One is diffused a little.

So here is a first piece of experience for you, and it has arrived before any theory at all. You can hear thedifference between including the root in the voicing and not, and you can make a decision about which touse in performance.

Where To Now?You may be surprised to learn that basically nothing is now stopping you from playing straight cadences inall keys. You could work it out for yourself by looking at the relationships between the roots and the righthand voicing, by counting the gaps. But it would be unnecessarily laborious.

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J u s t D o I t

With just a couple of bits of new knowledge, you can learn to see simple patterns here - formulas whichgive you the voicings automatically. Knowing that takes all the labour out of the situation, and leaves youfree to get more experience and make more judgements of taste. Those bits of new knowledge are the

predicates for the Transition from Listening to Playing dealt with in the next chapter.

Before We GoAlthough you may not know the formulas which give you the voicings for each root, there are some

patterns in what you have played which are worth taking on board now, and making a permanent part ofyour experience.

First, the roots in this cadence are each a half-step lower than the one before. This means that once youhave decided on where to start the cadence, the other two roots don’t take any thought at all.

Second, the second voicing, over the ‘nearly there’ is the same as the first, except that both the middle twonotes are moved down a half-step. This means that once you have found the first, ‘further away’voicing, playing the second voicing doesn’t take any thought at all either.

There are some other similar things we could notice too, but we will come to them after the Transition chapter which follows.

For now, as you play this cadence, let it sink in that although, statically, each chord is built up vertically from its root, in order to flow from one chord to the next, you are starting to think ‘where does this note go,

if anywhere?’. That is, you are starting, like a jazz player, to think horizontally .