Positions à trois notes et shells

Love That Man - Music Lesson

The next tune, Love that Man, was actually inspired by the famous standard Lover Man, written in 1945. It has been played by countless musicians, including:

• Charlie Parker
• Sarah Vaughan
• Billie Holiday (who famously recorded this tune)

Key Features

• Tempo: Slow tempo with a kind of 12/8 feel.
• Chord Progressions:
  • Short two-fives: D minor to G7
  • G minor to C7 (bars three and four)

When you have these chord pairs, think of them as like brother and sister. You can play the same scale over both of them, but also try to move only one note.

Chord Shapes

Here's your D minor 7 root position. You don't need to go to the second inversion; you can keep the A in there and just move C to B.

• You may have noticed I was doing just that in the previous tune, G Minor Waltz:
  • I wasn't putting the root in the dominant chord.

The equivalent can also be done in other inversions by just moving C to B.

• The seventh falls to the third:
  • D minor, third inversion moves down to B, becomes G9 (first inversion).

Practice these shapes in your left hand as well. They are all four-note shapes, and it's quite effective to do something similar with three-note shapes too since the fewer notes you're playing, the further down the keyboard you can go.

Additional Techniques

• Here's my three, seven, three, and seven on the bottom:
  • Seventh falls to third.

To make it a bit more jazzy, you would play the ninth on top of the D minor. This ninth is E, and if you keep that in, it becomes the 13th of the G chord.

These shapes are commonly used in jazz piano since the 1940s.

Final Shapes

Here's the final shape with the seventh on the bottom. Get familiar with these shapes and play them for G minor and C7 as well. You'll come across them again in the arrangement of Love That Man.

You'll also encounter the left hand played as shells, another style we've looked at already.

Left Hand Shapes for 2-5 Progressions

Here are the two possibilities for a 2-5:

1. C Major:

   • Start with root and third.

2. Alternative:

   • Start with root and seventh.

If you find C major to be a bit discordant, you could play C6 or both.

Summary

We will come across all these left-hand shapes in Love That Man. Just try to memorize these three-note configurations:

• D Minor: 3-7 root or 3-7-9
• G7: 7-3-5 or 7-3-6