These notes are part of jazz courses presented
by Bob Hudson for Nottingham University School of Continuing
Education.
Ragtime (prehistory)
Ragtime is a style of American popular music which flourished from approximately 1890 to 1910.
The term "ragged time" came to be used in the late 19th century to describe the syncopated rhythms of this music which was mainly written for piano. The word ragtime is a corruption of this.
The practice of syncopation was called "ragging" - the syncopation took place in the right hand part over a bass which was straight rhythmically. This left hand part consisted of low chord notes on beats one and three with chords in a higher register on beats two and four.
In the early decades of the 20th century the term "ragtime" was used by musicians as a synonym for jazz.
In the 1890's black pianists like Scott Joplin, Tom Turpin, James Scott and others published ragtime tunes which had been previously improvised. Tunes such as "Original Rags" and "Maple Leaf Rag" were published in 1899.
If you listen to Joshua Rifkin playing "The Entertainer" you get a good idea of the style. The left hand is very square on the beat, the right hand quavers are even quavers but are syncopated.
Jelly Roll Morton's playing is an example of how jazz piano developed from this. A suitable track is "Mr. Jelly Lord". Here the left hand patterns are similar but more varied-there is more tonal variety. The way each beat is divided up is different - quavers (half beats) are no longer even. They are now "swing quavers" the first of each pair being longer than the second.
Stride Piano
Stride piano developed from the ragtime style. The Harlem stride school originated around about 1918 and its main practitioners were Lucky Roberts, Willie the Lion Smith, and James P Johnson.
The distinctive stride bass is adopted from ragtime. Instead of the low note, high chord, low note, high chord pattern, we may now have low note plus 10th above, high chord, low note, high chord. The introduction of the 10th interval into the accompaniment pattern made for a richer texture. A typical 10th used on a C chord would be low C plus the E an octave and a 3rd above it.
Added to this accompaniment is a wide variety of pianistic devices - some of them from the classical repertory. (Many of these pianists were classically trained.) The right hand part would be melody or improvisation and include chords, octaves, thirds and other combinations.
James P Johnson's "Carolina Shout" is a famous early example made in 1921.
Fats Waller was a pupil of James P and he took a more improvisational approach to stride compositions. A good example of this is "Numb Fumblin'" which is a 12 bar blues and has many fanciful variations. (1929)
The culmination of the stride piano style came with Art Tatum. Tatum had a wonderful pianistic technique allied to a highly advanced understanding of harmony and swing.
His style featured dazzling ornamental runs and arpeggios. He also fused a sophisticated harmonic vocabulary onto the basic style.
The stride pattern of the left hand could be amended in various ways, some harmony notes can be held over several beats creating a new smoothness. Another development was "walking 10ths" in the left hand. This is like walking bass with notes on each beat moving up or down by step, but with the added resonance of a note a 10th above added to each bass note. Sometimes the left hand may abandon the rhythmic role completely and play arpeggios, sometimes answering right hand arpeggios.
The right hand frequently plays the melody but adorned with dazzling runs, which may be arpeggios or scales, and which link up with the next part of the melody in a seamless flow.
The original harmonies of the song are enriched by added notes to the chords
or by altering the chords completely at certain points (substitute chords). In
this Tatum looked forward to the coming bop era in the forties.
Boogie Woogie
While all these developments were going on in the thirties - sophisticated harmonies - classical influences - a more earthy style of piano playing developed from the blues. This was called boogie woogie.
If you listen to an early blues performer Leroy Carr singing and playing piano on "Barrelhouse Woman" you can hear the roots of this style. The left hand here plays a repeated figure based on the notes of the chords in a highly rhythmic and forceful manner. This gives boogie both its impetus and harmonic underpinning at once.
This evolved into a style of music for dancing. In "Pinetop's Boogie" you can hear Pinetop exhorting his audience to get up and dance.
In boogie woogie right hand you can hear many cross rhythms which conflict with the basic left hand pulse but which somehow resolve back to the pulse. There are riffs - that is short repeated rhythmic phrases (the main tune in "Jumpin at the Woodside" is a riff so is "In the Mood"!). There are also many "crushed notes", where adjacent notes are played together to imitate blue notes which fall between the notes of the piano keyboard. As in stride piano chordal structures are common in the right hand part.
The Swing Era
Generally solo piano was more refined in the swing era (1934 to 1945 ? approx. ). Tempos tended to be quicker and there was a lightening of the left hand part although tenths were used as in stride. Very often right hand improvisations were single notes as opposed to the chords and octaves of stride and boogie. These improvisation patterns could be quite florid at times and added sixths and ninths were frequently used. A richer texture could be employed (octaves or chords) to increase the tension when required , for example to build to a climax at the end of a piece.
A good example of this style is Teddy Wilson. A lyrical player , full of graceful right hand phrases offset by widely spaced tenth chords in the left.
Another was Count Basie. He was a player of the Harlem Stride School when playing solo, but for ensemble playing he lightened and simplified the texture a lot. There is a relaxed swing feel to this which sounds effortless. Listen to "Red Wagon" from 1939 to hear how he fits in to the bass/guitar/drums accompaniment.
From this type of playing the idea of the piano trio evolved.
One of the most famous of that time was the Nat King Cole Trio. Listen to his early trio's recording of "Indiana". There is the fast accurate right hand improvisations, while the left hand plays sparsely using tenths frequently. The guitar accompanies using chords played on four even beats a bar. In the last chorus Nat uses block chords like the style George Shearing popularized in later years. Nat's approach is more direct and propulsive than Wilson.
This piano, bass, and guitar formula was also used by Art Tatum and later by Oscar Peterson in his first trio.
Be Bop
With the 1940's came Be Bop. Charlie Parker on alto sax was the main
protagonist along with Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet. They played fast moving
melodic lines for their improvisations. They also used more advanced harmonies
and chord substitutions which had been foreshadowed in Tatum's piano style.
Bud Powell was one of the first pianists to adapt his piano playing to this new style.
A listen to his version of "Indiana" will make an interesting contrast to Cole's.
The left hand chords are more spare, very often just two notes to suggest the whole chord. Musicians call these chords "shells".
In the right hand we have very fast, odd length phrases, and much use of dissonance, with odd intervals such as the flattened fifth thrown in.
The effect is rather bare chordally, there is only the barest outline of the chords and many dissonant notes, the right hand is usually only single notes. For this reason the style has been described as unpianistic. Its certainly very different from Chopin, Lizst, even Fats Waller.
Mainstream
The term mainstream was coined in the fifties to describe a style of jazz which had its roots in Swing but which also encompassed some of the techniques of the Bop style.
Oscar Peterson is a pianist who was influence by Tatum and Nat Cole. He was trained classically and has a prodigious technique and tremendous sense of swing.
His style encompasses blues figures and be boppish phrasing, fast single note runs in the right hand contrasted with block chord passages (see Cole). In slower tunes he can sound more like Tatum but in fast numbers he has a more propulsive swing.
Listen to the album "Night Train" or "Exclusively for my Friends"
Peterson came to prominence in the fifties and sixties and is still playing today.
Erroll Garner is another great original. Erroll didn't have many piano lessons, his family could afford for only one son to have them and his brother Lynton was the one to be formally taught.
Perhaps as result of this Erroll developed a style that was truly all his own. His very early recordings sound like more conventional stride piano. But then he changed to a style which on uptempo numbers used a strumming left hand effect. Like a guitar player his left hand played chords lightly on every beat of the bar, with an occasional "off the beat" accent thrown in which gives a kick to the beat.
Over this background his right hand played single note runs which drew on swing pianists runs as well as some bebop phrases. But he also used octaves, chords and tremolo effects in the right hand. "Concert by the Sea" is a good album to hear his style.
Overall this his a highly orchestral sound with a wide tonal palette. In ballads he was richly romantic with arpeggiated chords in the left hand and a full range of effects in the right.
Erroll recorded prodigiously in the fifties and sixties.
Later Styles
Bill Evans was a very influential figure in jazz piano.
His playing produces an intense feeling. Listen to "My foolish heart".
He uses modern dissonant harmonies, not like Powell's "shell chords" but by adding notes to chords. He used different chord shapes, frequently omitting the root of the chord.
Tension is also raised by rhythmic displacement of his phrases and fragmentation. (Breaking phrases up into usual lengths with abrupt endings etc.)
He used a delicate touch and doesn't get carried away with loud passages. Intensity is kept at a low volume.
Later pianists like Keith Jarrett seem to show the Evans influence as does Brad Mehldau.
Modal Jazz
Up to now all the pianists we've discussed used conventional major or minor chords, albeit added to with extra "dissonant" notes.
With the advent of modal jazz (late fifties and sixties) the music became based on modes. Modes are scales , but not the conventional major or minor scales. In this new music chord changes were replaced by a scale for so many bars , followed by a new scale for a number of bars and so on. Each scale had one note as its tonal centre. (key centre)
The pianist's chords were not now made up of thirds like major or minor chords, but could be a combination of any notes in the mode. They frequently were built up in fourths rather than thirds.
McCoy Tyner used many chords built in fourths when he played for the legendary John Coltrane Quartet.
Finally
I hope you found this necessarily abbreviated summary of jazz piano
styles interesting. I hope it has showed what a rich and varied history of music
there is to explore, enjoy and learn from.