Modal Jazz Piano Techniques

Educator resources

Join Sergio Pamies Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music (CCM), for a webinar that examines the relation between Claude Debussy’s harmonic and melodic techniques and those of post-bop jazz pianists through the analysis of selected piano pieces and transcriptions of important recordings that helped establish new aesthetics in jazz during the late fifties and early sixties. Similarities between Debussy’s modal techniques and hallmark traits of post-bop jazz harmony are discovered within the contributions that Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, and McCoy Tyner made to Miles Davis’s and John Coltrane’s small groups. The analysis presented in this article is intended to serve as a model on how jazz research can develop into pedagogical tools for jazz educators and performers aspiring to reach new levels of sophistication in their playing.

A presentation from the Jazz Education Research and Practice Journal, a publication of the Jazz Education Network.

charlotte lang

Swiss/Dutch saxophonist Charlotte Lang was born in 1996 in Basel and studied the bachelor and master program at the JAZZCAMPUS Basel under the guidance of Domenic Landolf and Daniel Blanc. She is currently studying the Master of Music in Global Jazz at the Berklee College of Music in Boston under the artistic direction of Danilo Pérez. In addition she is part of Terri Lyne Carrington’s Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice.

 

From 2015 to 2018, Charlotte she was a member of the Swiss National Youth Jazz Orchestra under the direction of Christian Muthspiel. Since 2020, she became a member of the German National Youth Jazz Orchestra (Bundesjazzorchester Deutschland), under the direction of Niels Klein and Ansgar Striepens. She also plays is the Austrian FJO (Frauen Jazz Orchester→Women Jazz Orchestra of Austria).

 

In 2021, Charlotte founded her own Quintet the „Charlotte Lang Group“, for what she is composing, arranging and booking. In the fall 2023, her first album will be recorded and hopefully released by a renowned label.

 

Charlotte plays in the “Swiss Jazz Orchestra” and the “Zurich Jazz Orchestra”, the two professional Big Bands of Switzerland.

Charlotte recently got the unique opportunity to write a monthly blog for the Swiss Jazz & Blues Magazine called JAZZTIME, to tell readers about her time at abroad and specifically her time at Berklee. Her graduate program lasts only until the summer of 2023. She hopes to stay in the United States to enlarge her network and build her musical career.