A Creative Approach to Jazz Piano Harmony: Keyboard/Piano Book

Dobbins refuses the false choice between systematic study and creative freedom. By anchoring harmonic exploration directly to piano's unique physical and acoustic properties, he gives advanced students permission to develop a personal voice rather than merely replicate existing vocabularies. The hundreds of musical examples make this genuinely usable at the instrument, not just conceptual.

Exploratory and liberating. Rather than prescriptive, the book invites curiosity and personal discovery, opening harmonic possibilities that feel uniquely suited to piano's range and resonance. It's the sound of constraint transforming into creative advantage.

Advanced jazz pianists and serious keyboard students ready to move beyond learning existing harmonic systems and start building their own. Composers and arrangers who want to deepen their understanding of jazz harmony in its most pianistic context.

• Work through the examples slowly enough to hear the sonorities clearly; the piano's resonance reveals harmonic color that rushing would obscure.
• Spend time at the keyboard exploring variations on each concept before moving forward; this is a book designed for hands-on experimentation, not passive reading.
• Use the five Dobbins compositions as compositional models, studying how the harmonic approaches translate into actual musical decisions.

Reserve this for students who have mastered foundational jazz harmony and are ready for graduate-level independence. It works equally well as a semester-long private study focus or as a reference students return to throughout their musical lives as their ears and hands develop.

• Voice leading within extended and altered harmonic structures
• Understanding chord voicings that exploit piano's acoustic and physical range
• Harmonic improvisation and spontaneous reharmonization
• Composing with jazz harmony in an idiomatically pianistic way
• Analyzing and applying harmonic concepts from professional jazz recordings