Stride Explorations
Not a mastered competency for me yet, but worthy of chipping away at, ‘cause stride is the basis of solo jazz piano.
Most ‘post-bop’ pianists do not have the left hand facility to play well in this style, but it’s certainly good to work at it! I started with nothing, and practiced for a while. I can’t play many 10ths in the left hand (and any ‘filled’ tenths), so I just started in with single bass notes or octaves, and tried to get the “oom chuck” groove going. It’s definitely easier to do the stride left hand during melodic statements than it is to do it while soloing, but I’ve managed to be able to sneak it during some of the solo sections. Baby steps. I can see incremental progress. Our counterparts from a century ago were commonly quite adept at this style. Likely it arose out of necessity, when the pianist was expected to emulate a full orchestra — in stride, the left hand emulates the full rhythm section, while the right hand emulates the ensemble (usually wind) instruments. Of course no backing tracks were available, so they had to do everything themselves.