The Bounce

Zoe Rahman is a British jazz pianist and composer — Mercury-shortlisted, MOBO-winning, with a recorded output that draws on her Bengali and Anglo-Irish heritage as much as on the Tyner-Hancock line of post-bop piano. The Bounce takes the swung-quaver, walking-bass piano-trio idiom and brings it into the Grade 6 syllabus without losing the harmonic richness of her larger work.

Technically the piece tests three things at once: a swung quaver feel (the score notates straight quavers but the performance must swing), a walking-bass left hand that walks in single beats with the occasional broken-chord moment, and a right-hand line that uses seventh and ninth chords as melodic material rather than as block harmony. The student must voice the top note of each chord clearly while keeping the inner notes present but quiet.

Two pitfalls. First, students play the quavers straight and the swing collapses. Listen to PD jazz before opening the score. Second, the seventh and ninth chords are played as block harmony rather than as melody — train the right hand alone with the top voice highlighted, then add the inner notes.

Listening: PD jazz piano (James P. Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton on Musopen) gives the early-jazz reference. For the post-bop voicing Rahman uses, the closest accessible PD reference is selected stride-piano and early Ellington.