In my home country, there is mandatory military service for all males. I served mine about fourteen years ago. At that time, you had to do it for twelve months. The first two months were mainly training, and for the remaining period, I was waiting for the final day to come. It seemed dull to wait too long, so I started reading a lot and tried even harder to do some active thinking.
It reminded me of the life of the famous Russian engineer Jakow Trachtenberg, who developed a rapid method of mental calculation. Trachtenberg was trying to keep his mind occupied while in a Nazi concentration camp, and I was trying to create a method for developing both my Maths and Piano skills.
Before creating what proved to become my life’s routine for piano practice, I had to answer the most critical question. Classical piano or Jazz piano? Jazz Piano or Classical Piano?
To shed some light for non-musician friends, people who are avid readers might have a similar dilemma: “Should I keep reading and try to discover ‘treasures’ in new books, or maybe read old books again and again, trying to find new meanings, interpretations and insights into the author’s perspective?”
Moving forward to today, this so-called important problem of my earlier life seems so easy to tackle with the tools that I currently employ in my mental arsenal. To quote Albert Einstein, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
It was the first time I solidified the idea of always looking beyond the obvious solutions to problems that seemingly have only two. It was during the same period that I realised that, if we see life as a computer program, we are the programmers who write it, and must update it regularly, should we wish our lives to have some purpose.
Nowadays, I think of Classical piano as the written improvisation of Mozart’s, Beethoven’s, Bach’s, Chopin’s, etc. ideas, whereas I conceive the ideas of Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, etc. as classical pieces with extended harmonic rules and a lot more freedom of movement.
The 4-5-1 becomes 2-5-1, whereas the traditional dominant scale becomes Mixolydian in Jazz harmony. Anything that sounds consonant (and plenty of dissonances that, with adept use, can sound bizarrely consonant) is acceptable, and any tension before the resolution makes it more interesting.
To all my fellow pianist friends, I want to recommend splitting your daily routine into two main sections. First, allocate half of your time to some classical pieces and the other half to studying jazz. Oscar Peterson famously practised scales and classical etudes every single day to develop his extraordinary skills.
Without further ado, here is my piano routine:
Jazz course: 10 min walking bass, 10 min Latin jazz patterns, 10 min voicings, 10 min pentatonics, 10 min altered scales, 10 min diminished scales, 5 min whole-tone scales, 10 min various blues patterns, 10 min stride piano, 10 min ascending/descending patterns, 5 min slash chord progressions, 10 min major 7ths, 10 min sight-reading, 10 min new tunes.
Classical course: 5 min five-finger exercises, 5 min weak fingers, 5 min part playing, 5 min scales, 5 min tremolando, 5 min divided hands, 5 min octaves, 5 min double notes, 5 min double octaves, 5 min leaps, 5 min tonal gradation, 5 min broken octaves, 5 min arpeggios.
Depending on your circumstances, you don’t have to play all these every time you sit at the piano, but play a few different ones every day. That will keep your hands in shape and your brain awake.
Thanks for reading, and good luck with developing your daily routine!
