You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - Keezer Talks Comping

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

Geoffrey Keezer talks comping, amongst other tips, as a part of his newest OS course.Have a question for us? Leave us a SpeakPipeCheckout courses from Adam, Peter and more at Open StudioLet us know what you think by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review, or head over to our YouTube channel.Follow us on Twitter | Instagram

I'm Adam Manus, and you're listening to the You'll Hear Podcast. Jazz Explained. So today we're going to do something a little different. We're going to listen to an entire lesson from our brand new course called Jazz Piano Essentials from the brilliant Jeffrey Keeser. This is a brilliant lesson. It's all about comping. Jeffrey starts out with comping with one note, which I was like, wait, where's, what's going on?

How is he? And then he comps with two notes, and then three and four and so on. And he also talks about range and comping. This features our very own Bob Dubu on bass, and Bob accompanies Jeffrey, and then Bob will solo, and Jeffrey will accompany his solo with some comping. Like everything that Jeffrey has recorded for us here at Open Studio, this lesson completely changed the way that I've been thinking about comping

and practicing comping. Ever since I saw him record it, I was there at the session. Really, really incredible stuff from one of our favorites around here. So please enjoy. Jeffrey Keiser and comping. Okay, so I get a lot of questions about comping in lessons that come up. And quite often, piano players will go to the biggest possibilities for comping, playing these big sort of, you know, on B flat, you know, the...

Something like that, right? You know, you got your seven, you got your three, you get your 13, you know, something big up on top, octaves with some notes in the middle. You know, which is fine. But you don't want to do that all the time. It's not always appropriate to play the big giant voicings like that. And so I wanted to give you some ideas in a really methodical way to develop comping voicing.

In another lesson, we're going to talk about comping rhythms. But in this one, we are focusing on voicings that are going to offer you some possibilities not only of the size of the voicings you play, but also the range of the piano you play in. and even a little trick I learned from George Cables, if you have small hands, how to make your voicing sound big. So you can comp literally with one note, and you hear this in Duke Ellington's comping sometimes. He might just choose that A-flat right there might be the seven of a B-flat-7 chord. And if you have a walking baseline, that might be all you need to define that chord. You can play with two notes, just play the third and the seventh.

Play them up here, you know. You can play it with just the left hand. You can play with just the right hand. So we're going to go through a bunch of these, and I'll just sort of call them out as we go. I might leave some off, but you get the idea. So we're going to walk a bass. Bob DeBoo here is going to walk a bass line in B-flat.

And I'm going to start with comping with just one note in the left hand, and then we're going to just build it up from there. One, two, two, three, four. Also leaving lots of space. You don't have to play every chord. Let the bass play some of the chords, right? Two notes in the left hand. You can do some voice leading.

You know, they don't have to be all the thirds and the seventh all the time. Three notes. You can do wide intervals like fourths like that, or close together. Four notes. Now you probably need, you can do it with one hand. You can do cluster. Now let's do those four notes divided by two hands. This is two notes in each hand, but you can do it like this.

You can do it like this. Okay, now I'm getting into five note voicing. Here you go. Six notes, three in each hand. Now we're getting into that more wide voicing territory. So, and you can go seven, eight, you know, you can do like that. It's really important when you're comping to be aware of who you're comping for. It depends on who you're working with.

They might want less, they might want more. For example, George Coleman, who I've been fortunate enough to accompany several times, several times. He likes big sounds. So he was used to Harold Mabre and playing piano. Harold was kind of like having a big band behind you. He had big, strong voicings, a lot of activity, and that's what George wanted. That's what he needed, what he wanted to support what he was doing. That kind of stuff. Now, not everybody's going to want that. Jim Hall, for example, on the extreme opposite end of that, really didn't want anything like that at all. If you comped for Jim, he wanted more conversational, not even so much voicing, not even really really

pianistic stuff, but more melodic kind of comping, more dialogue, single lines, things like that. So that's going back to that really sparse one or two notes at the most kind of thing. Most people that I work with, whether the singers or horn players, they want something in between, some kind of harmonic structure on the piano that plays the chords that supports what they're doing but doesn't get in the way too much, sometimes conversational, sometimes not, just laying down a nice carpet. There's all these considerations, but it's really important to know who you're comping for. And if you're not sure what that person wants, ask them, you know? It's okay to ask your vocalist or ask your horn player or your bassist, what would you like? You know,

do you want me to be busy? Do you want me to be less busy? Do you want big? Do you want small? And sometimes they'll just say, play what you hear, play what you feel, and sometimes they'll know much more specifically what kind of things they want. Also, like I said, you don't have to play every chord, you can leave some off. If you got a good strong bass player like Bob DeBoo here, I don't really have to do much at all. In fact, sometimes the right answer is to not comp. If you're playing with a horn player or a singer, sometimes that's nice to have that space. If they're okay with it, just stroll. Like McCoy Tyner sometimes didn't play behind Coltrane, or sometimes Duke Elling didn't comp, most of the time Duke Elling didn't comp for the solos.

It would be just bass drums and the soloist and the band sometimes would fill in. But These kinds of considerations. Another thing to be aware of when you're comping is the tempo you're comping at, because the slower the tempo you can get a little bit more in. The faster the tempo becomes, you have to leave more space, otherwise it becomes crazy. Let's play, for example, uptempo rhythm changes. And if I comp with the same density of information that I would put at a slower tempo, it sounds really nuts. So here we go.

Bad comping. Too busy comping here, rhythm changes. One, two, one, two, three, four. You can't do that very long. It gets very tiresome. So you have much more opportunity. Don't think of it as a hindrance that you can't play. Think of it as an opportunity to leave space, right?

So rhythm changes, I'm going to leave what I feel as an appropriate amount of space. One, two, oh, one, three, four. Don't even play the five-core. Sorry there. Take a solo. So, did that... Did that, was that okay for you?

If you say no, you're fired. But that's the idea. Trying to leave some space. Now, if we're playing at a slower tempo, of course, you can get a lot more in. Let's play like a slow blues in G. One, two, three. So in this case, I've got more space

and I can pretty much play every chord. You know, you can leave some out, of course. It's your choice. But again, it's difficult to demonstrate comping without having the actual relationship with the person you're comping for, not knowing how, you know, but I can comp for you. Why don't you play a solo on a slow G blues, and let's just see what happens. One, two, three, four.

So again, I'm trying to show you a variety of ranges on the piano. You've got the whole, all 88 notes, you can use them, right? You can use some really sub. Let me play a little solo and I'll show some. really low left hand stuff. Three, four. Something like that, right? So using the extreme ends of the piano. Now this is something that I learned from George Cables. If you've got smaller hands, you can get big sounding voicings by sort of faking. So instead of, you know, something like this, you can just maybe play one or two notes in the right hand. Instead of, you know,

Try that. So really all I'm playing in the right hand is just some thirds. I'm not really... I'm just playing the top part of it, but I think, you know, our ears, we hear, our brains, we hear the low end and the high end, and I think we kind of fill in the middle. It's a bit of an illusion. But you can get some really nice sounds that way on the piano. So I hope this has given you some ideas for comping in terms of the size of the voicing, your choices, how many notes do you? use, how much space to use, or not use.

And rhythm is always a consideration as well. And just don't overplay, I think. Generally, I've never been asked, working with so many different people, I've never been asked really to play more. I think the number one thing I get asked as an accompanist is to play less. So I think you can always err on the side of leaving space,

and if they really want more, they'll ask you for it. I'm