Jazz Piano Masterclass with Mark Levine

by Mark Levine

Jazz Piano Masterclass With Mark The Drop 2 Book. Mark is the author of the widely-acclaimed text, The Jazz Piano Book and pianists will be thrilled to see that he has come up with a second piano book. This one deals exclusively with how to play Drop 2 piano voicings---the block-chord technique used by Bill Evans, Barry Harris, Cedar Walton, McCoy Tyner, and many other jazz piano greats. Mark gives the reader a step-by-step, beginning-to-advanced approach to learning this technique, just as he would in a live masterclass. The accompanying audio files at shermusic.com have Mark demonstrating each exercise.

Genres: Music

68 pages, Spiral-bound

First published January 12, 2006

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and sweet. This ~50 page book is a deep dive on "Drop 2", a 4-note voicing style that's especially applicable to pianists.

Some concepts that are covered:

- drop 2 works well over scalar runs in a song (in the melody or in solo-ing)
- chord tones (1-3-5-6(7)) get I chords, non-chord tones get diminished chords
- alternating between I and V chords (lots of I chord possibilities)
- basing around bebop versions of scale to get correct number of alternations
- dim chords act as V7b9 chords
- can raise one of the notes in a dim chord by a WS to make a "tweaked" dim chord
- eventually, lots of things become subject to minor chord tweaks, for a more "modern" sound (e.g. making the I chords fresher by 9s, 13s, 4th chord voicing, etc)

And of course.. lots of practice required to learn to *play* in drop 2 :)