The Evolution of Improvisation in Early Jazz Piano Pedagogy

This article engages the history of jazz theory, investigating how the concept of improvisation evolved pedagogically in jazz piano methods from ragtime to the early 1930s.Early jazz theory publications did not teach improvisation as currently conceived, but rather how to play popular songs as songs with their melodies recognizable as such.In the 1910s, this primarily meant how to "rag" melodies, and then, in the 1920s, how to insert "breaks," or short, improvisational fills.In the early 1930s, however, a new understanding of improvisation emerged for pianists.Building on the idea of breaks, the Vincent Lopez Modern Piano Method (1933-34) taught students to play "hot," to improvise on a tune's form and harmonies with an admixture of the blues.Further, the Lopez method seems to have been the first publication to identify a blues scale, and it anticipates chordscale theory by equating "blued" chords and blue scales.This article first describes these breakthroughs in detail, then sums up the "hot" approach to improvisation found in the Lopez method, citing writings by Louis Armstrong and others regarding the importance of "hot jazz."By the 1930s, influential critics were advocating this music, rooted in the blues and Black music, as more authentic and artistically valid than conventional popular music.In proceeding from ragtime to the 1930s, this article demonstrates a three-step evolution of jazz piano pedagogy: from ragging tunes, to the use of breaks, to outright improvisation.