Way Out West

Letanka is a British jazz pianist, composer and educator (Trinity Laban; Royal Academy of Music) whose teaching writing brings the jazz vocabulary onto the page in a way Grade 2 hands can actually deliver. Way Out West is a small swing-flavoured piece with a country-and-western veneer — an excuse to teach syncopation through a friendly idiom.

Technically the test is rhythm. Although the bar lines are 4/4, the right hand lands across the beats while the left hand walks in steady crotchets — Grade 2's first taste of syncopation against a fixed pulse. The notes themselves stay close to a five-finger position; the difficulty is the rhythmic placement.

Two pitfalls. First, the left hand collapses under the right hand's syncopation — the metronomic bass is the entire foundation, and once it wavers the piece falls apart. Practise the left hand alone with a metronome until it is locked, then add the right hand. Second, students sometimes try to swing the quavers (this kind of writing invites it); for an exam, clean even quavers played in time are safer than an attempted swing that lands uneven.

Listening: any clean PD recording of Scott Joplin (Musopen) is useful for hearing how syncopation sits over a steady bass — the Way Out West idiom is later, but the underlying mechanic is the same.