I gave a lesson this week to a piano player who wants to play jazz better. That session reminded me of a simple but often overlooked concept in effective practicing — one that too few musicians apply consistently.
Now, I don’t consider myself a jazz piano specialist. That honor belongs to players like Richie Beirach, Bert Seager, and Dan Haerle. But what I do specialize in is recognizing patterns, breaking down complexity, and guiding players to isolate and strengthen the key components of their playing.
That means stripping away everything unnecessary, identifying the core skill or concept that needs attention, and working directly on it — not the whole thing at once, but the one part that’s causing friction.
Think of this as targeted troubleshooting for your improvisation. Break the process of playing down into its simplest parts. Assess where you’re strong and where you’re not. Then isolate the weak part, improve it, and finally reintegrate it back into the whole.
This method isn’t just effective for music — it works for anything complex. But for our purposes here, consider this a practical way to accelerate your musical growth, make practice more efficient, and enjoy the process a whole lot more.
Contrast this with what most players do: brute-force repetition. They play a difficult lick or section over and over until it eventually gets better. That’s not inherently wrong — but it’s slow, often frustrating, and doesn’t guarantee long-term improvement.
In the next segment, I’ll show you a few examples of how to break down musical challenges and target your practice more intelligently.
What’s wrong with sheer repetition? First, it’s not enjoyable to fail repeatedly. More importantly, when you run a passage over and over without identifying what’s wrong, you reinforce bad habits instead of fixing the underlying mechanics that might be weak.
Those deeper mechanical issues likely affect more than just the one passage you’re struggling with. If you can isolate and strengthen those basics, you’ll find broader improvement in your playing — that’s real progress.
I asked the piano player to improvise for me. His phrases were short, started on downbeats, and stayed in a narrow dynamic and note range. There was little emotional movement or storytelling in his playing. Rather than just telling him to “try again,” I simplified the task.
I had him use only his right hand — removing the distraction of left-hand comping. Immediately, his playing opened up: longer lines, more dynamics, and greater variety. One simple change made a huge difference.
Of course, one-handed improvisation isn’t the goal. So the next step was to reintroduce the left hand gradually — first by playing just root notes underneath the improvisation. If even that proved distracting, he practiced roots alone. Doing them quickly helped make the process automatic, bypassing overthinking.
Once the root notes felt natural, we focused just on the left hand: comping at slow tempos, then gradually increasing the pace. Let it become instinctive. This is where repetition is helpful — once you’re targeting the right thing.
Another tip: don’t always start at the top of a tune. If the bridge is giving you trouble, start there. If you really know the tune, you should be able to enter anywhere.
Eventually, we moved to singing an improvised line while comping with the left hand. If that knocked the comping off track, it meant more drilling was needed. A good intermediate step: sing while playing root notes.
By the end of the lesson, the pianist was playing much more fluidly. He remarked that play was starting to feel more intuitive and less “mentally exhausting.” I think the lesson for all of us is that breaking difficult tasks down to their component parts makes for quicker and easier improvement. And once that improvement starts to set in, we actually enjoy more what once seems more difficult.
Trombonist, author, marketer, & tech guy
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