Jazz Piano Lessons
in Chicago.

You want to sit down at a piano and actually make something up — not just play what’s written on the page. Jazz is the language for that, and like any language, it’s learned by speaking it.

What we work on

Real jazz piano study moves between the same things that working players think about every day: how chords actually function, how voicings evolved from stride through bebop into modern, how to hear what’s happening in a tune in real time, and how to respond instead of just playing prepared lines.

Every student lands somewhere different on that map. A complete beginner might spend the first month getting comfortable with major and minor seventh chords and walking through “Autumn Leaves.” An intermediate player who’s read changes for years but never improvised confidently might focus on rhythmic vocabulary and motivic development. An experienced classical pianist crossing over for the first time might work on the relationship between voice leading they already know and the harmony they want to learn.

Standards, ear, and your own voice

Lessons at the in-person studio happen on a real acoustic piano, with a Fender Rhodes in the room when the music calls for it. The Rhodes is the iconic electric piano of jazz from the ’70s onward — not a digital approximation, the actual instrument. More on the studio →

Jazz piano study leans heavily on the standards repertoire because that’s the literature working musicians use to communicate. We’ll learn tunes — not as memorized arrangements but as harmonic and melodic frameworks you can move around in. We’ll work on transcribing solos by ear because that’s where the language actually lives. And we’ll spend real time on the question of what you sound like — what your particular musical voice is, separate from imitation.

This is one of the things that working jazz musicians teach differently than career educators. The goal isn’t to become a smaller version of someone else. It’s to find what’s yours.