Recently I've had the urge to learn jazz piano although I have no idea where to start.

I've had a look around the AB site and have found this. It looks good as I'm planning on teaching myself. I have a reasonable understanding of theory and am confident on the piano. I just want to know if this would be a good idea of would getting a teacher be better.

Any other books you could recommend or general tips/advice would be great!

I've got that book and would recommend it. You can read through the book and listen/try out the examples as you read. Jazz piano is great - hope you enjoy it

For me piano (jazz in particular) was a 2nd instrument and was something that I enjoyed without being taught. Just going at my own pace and doing the stuff that I wanted was fine for me. Obviously my technique was pretty bad as I hadn't bee taught otherwise, but I wasn't looking to be a world class player so it didn't really matter.

If I were you I wouldn't bother with a teacher for Jazz. Just use it as an extra bit of fun if you know what I mean. If you get a teacher there's the danger of not doing the style/type you want and losing interest.

Theres a book called 'Teach Yourself Jazz Paino' and it's got loads of chords, progressions, helps you form your own stuff and is very good.

I also have a urge to learn jazz.. Think it is just cool and nice ! I know there are many upbeats.. is better to learn ourselves? or just hire a teacher?

I would say get a teacher and then you learn the right techniques from the start. You don't know where it will lead, and if you want to take it more seriously at a later date rather than just for fun, it will be harder to get out of bad habits later than it is to learn good habits correctly from the start.

You could talk to a few teachers in your area to see how they would approach teaching you.

I started with doing a lot of Pam Wedgewood's 'Jazzin' About' series which give you a taste, but aren't proper improvising however have really nice pieces. But that AB book looks great.

I just uncovered this gem of a film from youtube - "The Universal Mind of Bill Evans: The creative process and self-teaching".

In the film, Bill articulated in great depth about the process of learning and playing jazz piano, and demonstrated some amazing harmonics and improvisations in part 2 and part 3. The sheer talent of this jazz pianist is simply unbelievable!

Here's the link to part 1 of 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm6V7bWnVpw...ted&search=

Wow, looks like a great resource - brilliant

Thanks for posting this, I really enjoyed it.

Three points really stand out for me: 1) it look him 15 years (from age 13 to 28) before he felt he had the freedom of the keyboard
2) He pushed himelf through the barrier and knows he can't do it for his students.
3) Like maths, learning jazz goes through levels of complexity.

I also quite liked the analogy with maths, being a math'n myself.

I have been slowly going through and jumping around in these two spiral bound workbooks by Tim Richards (Schott):

Improvising Blues Piano
Exploring Jazz Piano

These are very rich resources with pieces to play, CD performance play along tracks, lots of theory made digestible, etc.

Highly recommended.

Yes I love these books too, there's a lot in them though - its taking me ages to go through them