Jazz Piano Workouts
Structured Practice for Jazz Piano Players

Welcome to "Jazz Piano Workouts — Intermediate · Vol. 1" — a structured practice system designed to build real jazz vocabulary through harmony, chord-scales, and ear training. The approach is simple and deliberate: one key at a time. Rather than rushing through all twelve keys, each workout stays in a single key long enough for you to absorb how the harmony moves, how tensions behave, and how different dominant colors resolve.

Although these workouts sound musical and expressive, they do a lot of work beneath the surface. Each weekly workout develops:
• Jazz voicings
• Functional harmonic progressions
• Chord–scale relationships
• Ear training

Chords and Scales Are the Same Thing. A chord is simply a scale played simultaneously, stacked in thirds. When you play the notes one at a time, you hear a line; when you stack them vertically, you hear harmony. Same notes, same sound world — just a different presentation. For that reason, every chord in this book is treated as a chord-scale. When you add scale movement to a chord, you are not adding something foreign; you are simply extending the harmony horizontally.

Each workout is built on a core jazz progression: ii – V – I, followed by V7 of ii so the progression loops naturally back to the beginning. In C major, that is: Dm7 → G7 → Cmaj7 → A7.

Within that framework, we put special focus on the V chord, since dominant harmony is where much of jazz’s color and tension lives. You’ll explore four dominant sounds over the same progression:
• A basic dominant (Mixolydian — with an optional passing maj7 for Dominant Bebop color)
• An augmented dominant (Whole Tone)
• A dominant with ♭9 and natural 13 (Half–Whole Diminished)
• An altered dominant treated as a tritone substitution (D♭ Lydian ♭7 — the same note grouping as G Altered)

How to Practice These Workouts
Each exercise is practiced in three passes, all built on the same harmonic framework:

First pass — Chords only
Play the chords simply and clearly. This establishes the harmonic landscape and lets your ear focus on the sound of the progression itself.

Second pass — Chord-scales
Add the corresponding chord-scale to each chord. The goal is not speed or technical display, but connection — hearing how scale tones belong inside the harmony and how tensions resolve naturally.

Third pass — Improvisation
Improvise freely using only notes from the current chord-scale, paying special attention to the different versions of the dominant chord. This is where harmony, color, and resolution come together in real time.

You do not need to worry about strict time or counting beats precisely. These workouts are primarily ear-training exercises. Play freely, listen carefully, and avoid overloading your attention by trying to control too many parameters at once.

What matters most is that you can clearly hear:
• The voicings
• The tensions
• The resolution
• The relationship between chords and scales

When you can hear all of this clearly, you are practicing the exercise correctly.

This volume is organized as a 12-week practice system. Stay with each key until the sound becomes familiar and predictable — until you can anticipate how each dominant color resolves without having to think about it. Each workout includes clear written exercises, chord-scale reference material, additional challenges (lead-sheet style), and video demonstrations so you can hear how each exercise is meant to sound.

Video Demos in Every Key
Use the QR code (or click it in the PDF version) to watch the demos on YouTube and follow along with each week’s key.

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