Jazz piano: chords and melody in right hand. How?

Question

Aiming for being capable of playing solo and in ensemble, a jazz pianist is exposed to the following:

• Bass player is playing the root tones, hence the pianist can play rootless
• When playing alone or improvising, both hands can handle harmony and and typically right hand melody. In the case of playing alone, base tone needs also to be covered.
• While comping, the melody is covered by the soloist.

During my time learning piano I’ve basically in my solitude opened up jazz standards and learned them with compact voicings in my left and melody in my right. Straight forward. Now, moving towards more complex solo playing and playing in ensembles, I want and need to learn having voicings in my right hand, preferably combined with the melody. It’s a bit of unlearning, and I find old habits hard to break. This is my quest, and I find it overwhelming to learn.

So I wonder:

• What is the best approach for learning this? Voicings and melody combined in right hand.
• How does one plan the layout? The chord/voicings can clash with the melody or the hand positioning and there are so extremely many combinations at each moment, such as when combining fingering and from what chord you’re coming from to what you’re going to, that I don’t see how one consciously can decide between all those. This is significant with jazz piano/theory: this overwhelming amount of combinations. For instance, given twelve tones and all different intervals, you have a huge amount of combinations to navigate in order to understand various concepts. To me it seems one has to learn a set of combinations/sequences and then fall back to that subconscious routine/muscle memory.

In one way the answer is simple: “just expose yourself to it through your grinding and practice, until you get it”, but I suspect that you people have as usual something clever to say!

Answer 1

You don't seem to have done anything that jdjazz suggested in his answer three years ago. It was a very good answer. As Laurence Payne says, you need to study, or at least play through, lots of piano music.

You say you're playing jazz standards "with compact voicings in my left and melody in my right." So you only use one RH finger at a time? And all its spare fingers do nothing? Well why not stop playing these compact voicings all the time, uncompact them and give some of the notes to your RH? Sharing the notes of the chords between the hands is very elementary stuff for a piano-player.

BTW, have you been playing a lot of George Shearing?

Answer 2

Study piano music, from Mozart to contemporary. You'll find a multitude of ways of playing bass, chords and melody all at once. That's what piano music DOES!

Ok, different rhythms, different chords. But it's still the three basic elements - melody, bass and something in the middle.

Answer 3

A small point: when comping, a way to avoid quite a bit of trouble is to choose voicings that do not overlap on the range of the melody line. Either both hands below (especially if there's no other bass line), or one above and one below, or even both above if the melody line is mid-range and there's a bass and maybe other mid-range stuff happening.

Another specific: unless your group wants that kind of thing, voicings that would otherwise be interesting but create minor seconds (or major seconds?) or non-meaningful tritone intervals with the melody line are maybe not a good idea. That is, some voicings that would be interesting for a solo piano are maybe not so good as accompaniment.

Also, unlike solo, where you more-or-less need to have something happening all the time, when comping you can play in a much lighter way, leaving lots of silence in your part. There doesn't have to be the same continuity. So you can imagine harmonic or melodic progressions (perhaps in other parts), and just "tag up" here and there, especially for rhythmic purposes.

And, the latter: in an ensemble, the piano part can be much more a rhythm instrument, with some tonal and harmonic sense, but with an important rhythmic role. For example, off-beat harmonic suggestions... This is quite different from playing lyrical solo pieces.