Peter Martin gives you some quick tips to playing the standard “Autumn Leaves.”
=============================================================
What’s going on everybody? Peter Martin here for 2 Minute Jazz Piano. I want to go through the tune, Autumn Leaves, give you a brief tutorial on playing the head with some real simple and pretty voicings.
We’re going to think about it in three zones. You’ve got the melody:
and then you’ve got the middle zone, and these are going to be triads. Three-note voicings with nice resolutions. Some fourths. Just some good sounding stuff and then you can have the root at the bottom.
Okay, so you got melody, voices which are split up between the two hands at different times and the root, okay? One, two, a one two (pleasant piano playing)
Okay so you saw we had a lot of triads in that middle zone. We had some nice little kind of clusters there, like over the G minor.
So a little bit of a variety. but I really tried to put those voicings in based on voice leading, good resolutions really fitting nicely to that tenor range. But that’s sort of the foundation and you know, when you start to extend beyond that, you’ll find those same voicings in the middle, in that middle zone will serve you well for your left-hand voices. But that’s for later. All right? So have fun. Autumn Leaves.
Happy practicing.
See Part 2
