One of America's most beloved entertainers divulges his personal tricks of the trade (trills, octave vibrato, "fake runs," blues riffs etc.) and shows you how to build arrangements and spice up jazz pieces with a variety of easy techniques.
In his only instructional lesson, Steve Allen covers basic blues, boogie woogie, stride, walking basses, the use of 10ths, descending bass lines and more, while he plays and analyzes
Honeysuckle Rose, Spring Is Where You Are, I'm Confessin' That I Love You, You Can Depend On Me, A Time For Love and other jazz standards.
You'll get inside tips about the musical contributions of several jazz masters too, including Erroll Garner, Oscar Peterson, Count Basie and Art Tatum in Steve's entertaining and informative overview of jazz piano. A great springboard to further jazz studies!
Review:
"Allen's affable tour of the basics of keyboard jazz is not only useful, but refreshingly free of the cant of jazz pedagogy. An instructive pleasure." -- Jazz Times
Student Reviews:
"I wanted to tell you that I have enjoyed and got a lot out of your jazz lesson from Homespun. I have run through it five or more times and as you said, pick up something new each time. You use excellent teaching and learning techniques, which as a former teacher at Pierce College, I recognize." -- Eugene Dow, Woodland Hills, CA
"Words cannot adequately express my gratitude and admiration for your video, "A Lesson with Steve Allen." I find so much to learn with each viewing that as a beginner, I take comfort in knowing there will be years of pleasurable instruction ahead for me, with such an inexhaustible resource I can always turn to. I was truly sorry when the tape ended, as if a dear friend was ending his visit after a long absence, but it is nice to know that Steve can always grace us with the pleasure of his company simply by my slipping his Homespun tape into the VCR, as easy as that! Someday, I hope Steve will honor his fans with a follow-up video lesson, but when I mull it over, I find it difficult to think of what else he could teach, because he seems to have covered all bases in his initial tape. How could Steve possibly top it? Impossible! I appreciate Steve's fine grasp of jazz piano history and his mastery of so many styles. He is able to convey his knowledge with such succinctness and he uses the exact words that expresses how great each artist of the past was. Then for him to demonstrate on piano the technique these jazz greats used is like icing on the cake. I enjoy the fact that Steve shares my love for 'pretty' jazz ballads and I look forward to the day when I can construct my own interpretation of "The Shadow of Your Smile" and "My Funny Valentine." Still workin' on it!"
--Warren Delane
