Teaching Jazz to Kids

Today’s piano students often prefer playing contemporary music. I am a follower of the classical approach to music education, however I also believe that using modern music increases the student’s motivation significantly. There is already some amount of contemporary music available commercially, but surprisingly I found myself only being able to use very little of it.

Many piano books that promised to be entertaining and fun ended up being either too difficult or sound way too childish. So in about six years I really have tried almost every jazz educational piano book available and found few that I use consistently. One of the problems I have encountered deals with beginner jazz books. There really were not any of them that offered music that sounded good. Most of the composers and arrangers firmly believe in moving the melody from one hand to another just so the left hand gets to play some music too.

From my experience playing classical music, the concept of moving the melody from one hand to another is actually quite advanced and difficult. Bach has a great deal of this in the Well Tempered Clavier; Beethoven Sonatas sometimes show examples of it, but almost no relatively easy piano piece alternates hands with the melody. So even though to a piano teacher it looks like it should be easy to perform, children have hard time with this concept.

Emphasizing music reading is also something I firmly believe in. Learning notes is the first step that every student should take. Piano methods using finger formulas really create more damage, making students believe that solving puzzles is how we read music. Amazingly, in some methods you can spend up to six years taking piano without reading a single note.

As a teacher I used to get a lot of students who went through this sort of training, and I had to figure out how to make them read music and regain their interest in playing piano. Because, after all, I personally play piano mostly because I think it is fun. So I started to look for easy and fun piano books and found some, but less than I would like to. In my case, this resulted in my writing many educational pieces for particular students.

My Jazz Piano for The Young Beginner, which was published by Mel Bay Publications last month, is a compilation of some of these pieces. In some way the format of the book was inspired by William Bay’s Classical Guitar for the Young Beginner. My book also starts with general information on note and rhythm reading. The book discusses briefly what to look for when shopping for a piano. I find it very important, and I have had this conversation with approximately a third of my students or their parents.

The rest of the book consists of thirty fun piano pieces, including Chatter Rag, Friday Boogie, Max's Trot and Blue All the Way. It starts with very easy material that literally can be introduced at the first piano lesson and goes all the way to early-intermediate. The book comes with a CD that allows students to enjoy the music and to hear how the pieces should be performed. Here is an example: