Piano Course - Let’s Learn That Record (advanced)

Max. 2 participants.
Registration deadline: One week before the first class.

This course is one of our summer courses with only 3 classes.
You can choose to use the course as a kind of introduction to our longer courses that start after the summer vacation

Have you ever loved a record so much that you wanted to learn every single song?

This course is an in-depth study where, over three weeks, we will learn how to play an entire classic jazz record (eg. Miles Davis - Kind of Blue, Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus, Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder, etc.).

We will focus on learning the record by ear, to play it on our instruments while employing the aural tradition that makes up so much of the music called jazz.

This course focusses deeply on the development of participants’ ears and transcription skills and will be a deep study of one specific record to be agreed upon before the beginning of the course. Participants’ will make suggestions of the record with everyone’s opinion being taken into consideration.

By the end of the course we will play the record together, taking solos, and playing the specific arrangements of the songs as they were played on the record.

Throughout the course we will learn the songs on the record while exploring our sense of time, melody, and harmony starting with the voice as well as and tapping parts to internalize the music. Once we have that down we will move the music to our instruments.

The goal of this method is to get out of a sheet-music mentality and embody the music itself.

After all, music is in the air, not on the paper.

There will be some required work on participants’ own time in learning and practicing the material so you should be prepared for some homework. 

The course is taught by New York trained pianist PJ Fossum who takes this traditional approach from legends that he studied with including Barry Harris, Reggie Workman, Ingrid Jensen, Sam Yahel, Andrew Cyrille and many others.

You already have a firm understanding of what it means to play jazz standards on your instrument. You don’t have to be an expert improviser but you should be able to play/sing over basic jazz progressions and have some experience transcribing music by ear.