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Jazz/Blues - St. James Infirmary

8/15/2019

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The New Orleans song St. James Infirmary is a great example of a minor blues tune with some slightly fancy jazz chords included in the mix.  

For starters let’s take a look at an instructional video for the song created by French jazz pianist, composer, and teacher Antoine Herve.  And don’t worry - although he speaks in French there is English at the bottom of the screen.   Herve is a dynamic teacher and a passionate player.  

Antoine plays the song in D minor and makes use of the D minor pentatonic scale - D F G A C - in his improvisations.  This scale is basic to any blues song - and learning the blues is basic to learning how to improvise.  At 2:08 he plays the song in a theme and variation style, at 3:15 he adds a lot of improvisation, at 4:32 he plays it in block chords (thick chords with the melody on top), and at 5:00 he explains what he is doing.  All throughout the video he makes use of the melody in his improvisations - a key technique in building a jazz rendition of a song.  

The second video is a version of St. James Infirmary performed by Free Range Cats, my jazz and groove band.   We do the song in F minor and in the improvised piano solo (which starts at 0:25) I make use of the F minor pentatonic scale - F Ab Bb C Eb - quite liberally.   Check it out.

Best, Dan


St. James Infirmary by Free Range Cats from Daniel Belmont on Vimeo.

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Piano Teaching

6/25/2019

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Welcome to my Blog !  I plan to cover a wide range of topics in this blog - the basics of piano playing, learning how to improvise, how to get a great sound from a piano or electronic keyboard, fingering, and more.  

Learning how to play the piano is lots of fun and as well takes concentrated practice.  The more you are able to practice the more you will advance.  Practicing can be fun too !

I’d love to hear you comments and suggestions !

Best, Dan
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    Dan Belmont is a seasoned piano teacher working in Northampton, Massachusetts.  

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