Ask how to learn jazz piano on any forum and the answers pile up, each right on its own: transcribe, learn voicings, work on your time, practise for hours. A learner on r/JazzPiano described what that does to you after a first lesson: there is no standard curriculum, so they sat down to practise and froze in front of too many choices. What was missing was an order to learn it in.
We make Jazz Piano Master, an app for iPhone and Android phones, and it turns up below as a practice tool for the days between lessons. It is not a teacher, and nothing here pretends it is.
How to learn jazz piano, in one paragraph
To learn jazz piano, listen to jazz every day, learn three seventh chords and play the blues with two-note shells. Copy a few bars of a record by ear and improvise over that blues. Then add the ii-V-I, a first standard and rootless voicings, and play with other people much sooner than feels comfortable.
A step is done when you can play it slowly, in time, without stopping, not when it is perfect. Move on, and keep the old step as the warm-up for the new one.
The path, step by step
If you have never played the piano at all, give the first months to the basics before step 2: both hands together, a few major scales, and reading chord names. This is where a teacher saves you the most time, because habits in the hands set early. Free video lessons help too, if you stick to one teacher’s series and take it in order.
The times are our own estimates for an adult practising 30 to 45 minutes on most days, set beside what learners report on r/JazzPiano, such as the progress report further down.
| Step | What you learn | Roughly how long | Where to start on this site |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Listen every day | The sound you are aiming for: swing, space, how a pianist comps behind a soloist | From day one, for good | Fifty essential jazz albums |
| 2. Three seventh chords | The minor, dominant and major seventh, spelled from any root | 1 to 3 weeks | The most common jazz chords, then the chord pages for minor, dominant and major sevenths |
| 3. The blues with shells | Two-note shells in the left hand (root and seventh, or root and third), the twelve-bar form, swung eighths and one comping rhythm | 3 to 8 weeks | The twelve-bar blues in F |
| 4. Copy by ear | Two to four bars of a pianist you love, sung first, then found on the keys | From the first weeks, ongoing | Who to copy: Wynton Kelly’s solo on Freddie Freeloader, then the legends |
| 5. Improvise on the blues | Short right-hand phrases over your shells: chord tones first, then the phrases you copied | From about month two, ongoing | The F blues again |
| 6. The ii-V-I | The progression many standards are largely built from, and the guide tones that join its chords, in C and F first, then B♭ | 1 to 3 months | The ii-V-I on jazz piano, then the one-six-two-five |
| 7. Your first standard | The tune on top, shells underneath, read from a lead sheet | 4 to 8 weeks for the first, less after | The melody from the record or a lead sheet; the changes in any key from the free Gig Book in our app |
| 8. Rootless voicings | The A and B forms, which leave the root to the bass | 3 to 6 months | Rootless voicings |
| 9. Play with people | A duo with a friend, then the early set at a jam, on a tune you know inside out | As soon as you own one tune, then always | No page can do this one: a teacher or a local jam |
| 10. Widen the palette | Tritone substitution, drop 2 and quartal voicings | Year two onward | Tritone substitution, drop 2, quartal voicings |
Listening comes first because jazz is learned by ear before it is learned by hand. Two records make a good start. Night Train, released by Verve in 1963, is an Oscar Peterson trio album with a lot of blues on it, C Jam Blues and Bags’ Groove among them, so you hear the form you are about to play again and again and can count its twelve bars along with the bass. Kind of Blue, released by Miles Davis on Columbia in 1959, gives you two pianists behind one band: Bill Evans on most of it and Wynton Kelly on Freddie Freeloader, a blues.
Steps two and three belong together. The three seventh chords sit at the top of our count of the chords written in a book of standards, and cover most of what you will read. A shell keeps two notes of each. On the F blues, the left hand plays F7 as F and E♭, and B♭7 as B♭ and D. The upper note slips down a semitone as the chord changes, your first piece of voice leading. Our F blues page prints a fuller voicing, with the fifth beside the root in the left hand; start with the two-note shells and grow into that one. Play the shells short, on beat one and just after beat two: short chords swing, and they show you exactly where your time is. The step is done when you can play three choruses with the metronome clicking on beats two and four, without stopping.
Copying by ear starts with a phrase two to four bars long. Sing it with the record, find its notes on the keys, then play along at full speed. Kelly’s solo on Freddie Freeloader is a good first source because it is a blues, the form your hands already know. Whole transcriptions can wait until year two.
Improvising starts on the same blues. Keep the shells going in the left hand and play a few right-hand notes from each chord, landing a chord tone on beat one or three. Then drop in a phrase you copied and leave a bar of space after it. Short phrases with gaps between them let you hear where you are in the form, and that is most of what a first solo needs. A teacher speeds this step up more than any other, because they can hear whether your phrases sit in time.
Our ii-V-I page shows how the third and seventh of each chord lead into the next, which is the skill step 6 is really about.
A lead sheet gives you the melody and the chord symbols and nothing else. You make the arrangement. Autumn Leaves is a common first choice, since most of it is ii-V-I progressions in a major key and its relative minor, and Blue Bossa is a good second. For the melody and the chords together, buy the legal edition of The Real Book from Hal Leonard, or learn the melody from the record. For the chords alone, the Gig Book in our app, Jazz Piano Master, has 1,700+ charts of the changes, free, readable offline with no account, and any chart transposes to any key.
What is the best way to learn jazz piano?
The best way to learn jazz piano is with a teacher and with other musicians: a teacher hears your time and touch, a band teaches you to keep going through a mistake, and a written path like the one above gives you the order.
When a 17-year-old asked r/JazzPiano how to teach themselves, the highest-voted reply put it in one sentence: get a jazz teacher, play with people, study and listen. Most of the other well-voted replies said get a teacher too.
Where an app fits is the six days between lessons. For the blues test in step 3, set the free Expert Metronome in Jazz Piano Master slow and hear its clicks as beats two and four. Its free Practice Log adds up your minutes and your day streak, so you can see whether the 30 to 45 minutes are really happening. Note Guesser trains the ear one note at a time, which helps when you hunt for a copied phrase on the keys. Two of the app’s four free courses, Blues Piano Fundamentals and Rhythm & Comping, go with step 3, and the features page lists the rest.
Can you teach yourself jazz piano?
Yes, for the early steps and well beyond them, if you replace the feedback a teacher gives. Record yourself weekly, play along with records, and book an occasional lesson as a check-up. The piano helps, because the whole harmony sits in front of you.
Often the reason to go it alone is practical. One r/JazzPiano poster had a good teacher, but the fee and a long commute made lessons a hard commitment around a busy life. That argues for spacing lessons out: one a month, with a recording of what you played since the last, still gets you the feedback.
The weekly recording does much of a teacher’s job, because you will hear rushing on it that you never notice while playing. Before a real band, the Play-A-Long books from Jamey Aebersold, with their recorded rhythm sections to improvise over, are the traditional bridge.
How long does it take to learn jazz piano?
At 30 to 45 minutes most days, expect a blues with shells and a first short solo over it in two to four months, a handful of standards you can play for friends in one to two years, and some comfort at a jam in two to four years.
Regular minutes move you fastest: half an hour every day beats three hours on Sunday, because a skill settles in the hours between sessions. What you already play shifts the ranges too. Classical training speeds up the hands and the reading, but it does little for the ear or the swing.
Listening and company count as well. A learner with the sound already in their head moves faster, and one evening with a bass player can teach you more about time than a month alone with a metronome.
One honest data point: a 55-year-old player on r/JazzPiano described their progress: self-taught from no piano at all, at 30 to 60 minutes a day around work and family. After a little over three and a half years they could play about 10 to 15 standards, one or two well enough for an audience, comp in time in a handful of keys, and take a few choruses on Autumn Leaves or an F blues, but they did not yet feel ready for a jam. That is one person: past the slow end of our range for standards, and inside it for the jam. The famous practice hours of great pianists are no better guide: many trace to no source.
Is jazz piano hard to learn?
Yes, but not where people expect. The notes are the easy part. Time feel, hearing the chords go by and choosing what to play in real time are hard, and none of them can be read off a page.
It is hard the way a spoken language is hard: slow going, and usable long before it is fluent. Many learners stall in the middle stretch, where you are no longer a beginner but do not sound good yet. It is common enough to have its own thread on r/JazzPiano. In another thread, a player wrote that what improved their comping was playing many different standards with simple voicings and steady time. More tunes and more playing with others get you through it.
How to start learning jazz piano this week
Days one and two. Put on Night Train while you do something else, then play the three seventh chords on C. Cm7 is C, E♭, G and B♭; C7 raises the E♭ to E, and Cmaj7 then raises the B♭ to B.
Days three and four. The same three chords on F and on B♭, then the F blues with shells only, the metronome slow and clicking on two and four.
Days five and six. Keep the blues going underneath and pick out a short phrase from the record with the right hand, by ear, even if it is three notes long.
Day seven. Record three choruses of the blues on your phone and listen back once. Note the one thing that bothered you most. That is next week.
What to leave for later
All twelve keys of everything. Learn what your tunes use, which means F, B♭, E♭ and C for a long while, and widen later. The exception is the three seventh chords of step 2, which are worth spelling from every root. Twelve keys of a shape you cannot yet use in a tune is practice spent on the wrong problem.
Dense method books. Mark Levine’s The Jazz Piano Book repays years of use once shells and the ii-V-I are under your hands. Before that, it is easy to read a chapter and play nothing.
Altered chords and upper structures. They build on rootless voicings, so they belong after step 8.
Waiting until you are ready to play with people. You will not feel ready. Make the first time small: a duo with a friend who plays bass or guitar, the slow early set at a jam, a blues you could play half asleep. Then do it again next month.
Questions people actually ask
- What is the 80/20 rule for piano learning?
- It is a rule of thumb: a small share of what you could practise produces most of the results. In jazz it holds up well for harmony. Three chord qualities, the minor, dominant and major sevenths, make up most of the chord symbols in a book of standards, so learning those three first, in the keys your tunes use, pays off on almost every page you read. It does not hold for time feel, which has no shortcut and needs daily playing with a pulse.
- Is jazz harder than classical piano?
- Each is hard in its own way. Classical playing asks you to perform written notes exactly and beautifully. Jazz asks you to build the arrangement yourself from a melody and a row of chord symbols, in time, usually with other people listening and reacting. Classical technique and reading transfer well. Swing, comping and improvising are new skills, and trained classical players often find them uncomfortable at first because there is nothing written down to be correct about.
- Is it better to self-teach the basics before taking lessons?
- For the very first things, yes. The three seventh chords and a blues with two-note shells are well documented, and most people can learn them alone in one to three months. Then take lessons, because what a teacher is really for is feedback on what you cannot judge yourself, mainly your time and your touch. Arriving with the basics means the lesson is spent on those and not on spelling chords.
- Do I need to read music to learn jazz piano?
- Not to start. Plenty of players learn tunes by ear, and the ear is the skill jazz leans on most. Reading chord symbols is close to essential, though, because a lead sheet is how tunes are passed around, and it is a far smaller skill than reading a classical score: one line of melody with a chord name above it. Picking out that melody line slowly is enough for the first year.
- Can you learn jazz piano from YouTube?
- A good part of it, yes. Free video lessons are good at showing what to play: a voicing, the blues form, a comping rhythm. What they cannot do is hear you. Choose one teacher's beginner series and finish it before you start another, since ten first lessons from ten channels never add up to a second lesson. Then record yourself and compare it with the records, which is the feedback a video leaves out.
