Accompanying Oneself

This is a preview of the educational program A Jazz Improvisation Almanac which is under development for the Outside Shore Music Online School. Feel free to browse this preview and learn what you can from it. For a more completed product, though, check out the original freely browsable jazz textbook, A Jazz Improvisation Primer.

Accompanying your own solo is a special type of accompaniment. The principles are the same as when accompanying other soloists, but the simple fact that the soloist and accompanist are the same person makes some things easier and other things harder, and it is worth discussing some of these issues.

On the positive side, communication between the soloist and the accompanist becomes automatic. There is no need to guess what the other is doing. This can allow you to create particularly engaging dialogue:

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You can react instantly to your own directions. For example, when the solo builds or drops of in intensity, your accompaniment can do so as well:

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You can also do unisons between accompaniment and solo:

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And, as mentioned in the previous section, you can predict your own reharmonizations:

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One price you pay for this increase in communication is in coordination. Many students tell me this is their biggest frustration with playing the piano - the difficulty in trying to get their hands moving independently. The first hurdle is in deciding how to structure this coordination. There are three basic approaches to this. First, you can use accompaniment as punctuation, as described in the section on Comping Rhythms:

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You can use accompaniment as support for your solo lines, playing chords in unison with key notes of your melody:

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Or, you can create a foundation with your accompaniment, setting up some sort of repeating pattern or rhythmic pulse over which you solo:

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Ideally, you would be able to combine these approaches with the same facility that you can achieve when accompanying another soloist:

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In my own experience, it is harder for me to keep a consistent riff going than it is to play conversationally or in unison between my hands. I believe coordination comes with practice, however, as long as you have a clear idea of what you are trying to accomplish. And I suspect the same is true for other chordal instruments, even if the soloing/accompanying roles are not necessarily divided neatly into right and left hands.

Another problem you encounter when accompanying yourself is that you do not have enough fingers to provide a full accompaniment while soloing. On the piano, you can limit yourself to left hand voicings while soloing with your right:

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You are more limited in this regard on guitar, since playing even a two note voicing leaves only three fingers for soloing. And on mallet instruments, playing a melodic line with only one hand is very awkward. An alternative approach is to play your chords in the cracks between your phrases:

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This works on the piano too, of course, and it allows you to play fuller voicings:

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And in fact, this supports the conversational approach to accompaniment that you might have chosen anyhow.

Playing solo - unaccompanied by bass or drums - provides additional challenges. You have the responsibility of fulfilling the roles normally played by the rest of the rhythm section. When playing in a mainstream style, you need to provide a harmonic foundation to your chord voicings, and keep a consistent pulse going. Furthermore, you cannot turn to other musicians to provide textural variety, nor can you rely on them to feed you with ideas. And you still have only two hands with which to accomplish all this.

With regards to providing a harmonic foundation, there are several different ways to do this. One is to simply play a bass line for yourself. See the next chapter for advice on creating bass lines. This normally takes up your left hand on the piano, meaning chord voicings will be less frequent unless you play them in your right hand in the cracks between your phrases:

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This is awkward on the guitar and on maller instruments, and it can become monotonous on the piano as well. Another way to provide some amount of bass support to your accompaniment is to use skeleton voicings rather than the richer but less bottom heavy alternatives such as 3/7 voicings:

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This can sound thin after a while, though. One alternative is to play a single bass note or skeleton voicing per chord, and then play chord voicings to support your solo on the other beats of the measure:

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When doing this, you should be aware that there is no single part marking the pulse, so you will need to be especially conscious of maintaining the pulse in the absence of the bass and drums:

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The style called stride takes this to the extreme of alternating between bass note and chord voicings on every beat:

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You can increase the textural variety of your playing by using all of these various approaches in combination:

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You may also wish to exaggerate different textures in your solo lines themselves, such as by exploiting the entire range of the instrument. That is, your solo line can cross into the territory normally reserved for accompaniment. You can then provide accompaniment above the melody line:

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Or, you can simply not worry about accompaniment during such passages:

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You should remain open to the various possibilities suggested to you by your instrument. One way to do this is to familiarize yourself with the solo classical literature. By "classical, I mean to include baroque, romantic, and 20th century forms of this music as well. Over the centuries, a remarkable variety of approaches to playing piano and guitar have been developed, and you can learn from all of them. Here are but a few examples:

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Copyright 2000 Outside Shore Music
Authored by Marc Sabatella

Accompanying Oneself