Piano Video Lesson: Does playing Jazz affect your classical music skills?

Hi, this is Robert Estrin with livingpianos.com and virtualsheetmusic.com with an interesting subject today, does playing jazz hurt your classical playing? Now this is a great question. I've heard a lot of different opinions about this, so we're going to explore this today, and I will tell you right out front, I have an opinion about this which will soon become apparent. I know a lot of teachers, and when their students start playing jazz or rock, they're worried that they're worried that they're not going to have the delicate touch necessary for classical music. More than that, jazz is an improvised style where the exact notation is not really the part of the music, you want to just grab the basic structure and take off from there. That's the last thing you want...in the world you want to do with a Mozart sonata, for example.

So is it going to hurt your playing? Well, I'll put it to you this way. Imagine you've grown up in this country your whole life and then you decide to study French. Is that going to destroy your English? I don't think so. And the way I look at it is you can expand your horizons. Now, it is necessary to know what style you're playing in. But this isn't just an issue of jazz versus classical, after all, when you're playing Chopin, you don't want to play with the same style as Mozart or Bach. Each period has its own demands of structure, articulation, and other factors in order to play the music so you bring the best out of it. There's no difference. Jazz is another style and I encourage students to explore different styles of music. And more than that, for anybody trying to go...have a career performing music, the more styles you can play, the more marketable you will be.

I have attached on here a couple of videos of an extremely talented student I worked with for years, Bijan Taghavi. And you'll hear, at 15 years old, he won a concerto competition, played the Grieg Concerto. He's also plays Rachmaninoff's, Tchaikovsky, all kinds of things. But more recently, he's gotten into jazz, and I put a little rendition for you of "Summertime" that he kind of was inspired by Oscar Peterson. Has he heard of his classical playing? Not at all. Although I will say, the challenge of finding time to practice all of that different music is the biggest challenge of all. So if you're willing to devote the time to it, you can enjoy all sorts of music.

Thanks for joining me. Robert Estrin here at livingpianos.com and virtualsheetmusic.com.

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