I especially want to thank my two predecessors Rob van Kreeveld and Rob van Bavel. My grateful thanks go to everyone who inspired me, taught me and introduced me too much great music. Downloading this textbook from my website is free, but I of course welcome donations to support my work on this project. Eventually 'updates' will be available at my website (go to 'Teaching'). I'm working on it but I'm hoping for corrections, suggestions, comments and completions from readers. This certainly is true about the chapters 'Europe', 'South Africa' and 'Asia'. To my opinion its always interesting if someone is playing he/she wants to play. This by no means is meant as a condemnation. By this definition an 82 year-old Bop pianist can be more progressive than a 56 year-old Modal pianist.
When I use the term 'conservative' I try to point out if someone is creating music by challenging 'borders' or rather wishes to create music by respecting them. Conservative - To me being conservative and being reactionary are two different things.Mainstream - I use the same definition as writer Stanley Dance: a period of multiform music in between clearly definable approaches.I strongly advise everybody to leave the question "Would I have made the same choices?" behind as much as possible. This course is about studying these elements by studying other pianists and trying to discover why they make/made which choices. To me it's the challenge for every contemporary musician to study as much of these elements as possible, intensively and constantly. To me each musician sets light to different elements and aspects in music. Neither would I describe its imagery as a line. To me the 'Historical Development' part of this course is not about progression or degression. Other people might have drawn the line much earlier than or somewhere else than I did. Whenever I hesitated whether to include a certain subject I always decided in favor of this subject. To be honest I'm not interested in defining the 'Jazz' during this course.
There's only one reason why chapter 'Plugged' isn't in depth like most other chapters: I had to draw the line somewhere. This is not because I think electronic keyboards are insufficient Jazz instruments or I don't like to listen to electronic keyboards, at the contrary. I decided to focus on the 'Piano' during this course. When writing this reader I had to decide where to draw the lines. During the course we will also use MP3 CDs with representative recordings. The second part, 'Appendix', contains registers, lists with essential recordings etc. It has two parts: The first part of the reader is the textbook. PREFACE TO THE TEXTBOOK This reader is written to accompany the Royal Conservatory course 'Historische Ontwikkelling Piano Jazz'. PART I: TEXTBOOK PART 2: APPENDIX Contents part 1 - Preface to the textbook 1. Introduction to the history and development of