Writing
Writing
Pieces that go all the way to the keyboard. Every claim about what a pianist played is traceable to the app's own data or to a cited source, and every chord is printed as notes rather than described.
listening · history · discography
50 essential jazz albums, and their real years
The records on a list like this are never the argument. The years beside them are, and they are wrong more often than anyone admits: session dates printed as release dates, catalogue columns printed as street dates, reissues read as originals. Here are fifty, with every year traced to two independent sources before the page was allowed to build, and the disagreements printed rather than quietly resolved.
voicings · arranging · block-chords
Drop 2: the voicing borrowed from the horns
One note moves an octave and a closed chord becomes a two-handed one. What makes drop 2 worth learning is not the wider sound, it is that the melody note never moves — which is why it came from arrangers writing for four horns, and why it still behaves like four horns under your hands.
chords · repertoire · beginners
The ten chords you actually need, counted
Every list of first chords for jazz piano is somebody's opinion about what matters. This one is a count. We took the chord symbols out of the app's whole book of standards, sorted them by how often they occur, and the answer turns out to be both smaller and stranger than the usual advice.
voicings · monk · harmony
Monk's chords are one shape and a decision
Three notes, a half step at the bottom and a third on top, small enough to sit inside a perfect fourth. That one hand position covers the major sevenths, the whole of the major scale, the melodic minor and the altered dominants — and the half step it is built on is the interval everyone else spends their time avoiding.
voicings · quartal · modal
The So What chord answers to three names
Five notes, three stacked fourths and a major third on top. Depending on what the bass plays underneath, the same hand position is a D minor chord, a B-flat major chord or an E-flat Lydian chord — and that ambiguity is not a flaw in the voicing, it is the reason pianists reach for it.
history · lineage · listening
The family tree is an argument, not a record
Every diagram of who influenced whom in jazz piano looks like a record of what happened. None of them is. Each arrow is somebody's judgement, each missing name is somebody's decision, and the most informative part of ours turns out to be the ten names it cites as influences and does not contain.
harmony · reharmonization · bebop
Tritone substitution: only the bass moves
Two dominant chords a tritone apart share the same two notes, with the roles swapped. Which means the substitution most people learn as a chord change is often not a change of hand position at all — and once you see that, the reason it works and the reason it sometimes ruins a tune both become obvious.
practice · history · learning
How ten jazz masters actually practised
Much of what circulates about how the great pianists practised turns out to be untraceable when you go looking. Here is what the record genuinely supports for each of the ten pianists on this site, where it says nothing at all, and what the documented cases turn out to have in common once you count them instead of asserting it.
harmony · progressions · reharmonization
The ii-V-I is a question and an answer
Usually the first progression a jazz student learns, and the last one they finish with. Not because it is complicated, but because so much of what happens in tonal jazz harmony is a substitution for one of its three chords, and you cannot hear a substitution until you know what it replaced.
voicings · harmony · comping
Rootless voicings: why the root is left out
The most widely shared hand position in modern jazz piano leaves out the one note the chord is named after. Here is the shape, why the omission is the point, and what the pianists who play it reach for instead when they want to sound like themselves.
Free download
The Jazz Voicing Cheat Sheet
One page. The rootless voicings working pianists actually use, in every key, with the fingerings. Free.
One confirmation click, then the PDF. Unsubscribe anytime, one click, no games. See our privacy policy.