1. The Circle/Cycle of Fourths
Very important to be aware of, the circle of fourths is what most chord progressions are based on. The human ear is very used to this, even if the owner of said ear does not possess the theoretical knowledge behind why it works. When composing, playing freestyle or trying to memorise jazz chord progressions (or a lot of classical/romantic, to be fair), know that moving 'up a fourth' happens probably 70%+ of the time.
This video helps you to master it via some technical exercises:
2. The 12 Bar Blues
If you want o get into improvisation and jazz, you need to know and feel intuitively the 12 bars of the infamous blues structure. It's a feel thing so do lots and lots of listening to blues recordings by piano and guitars. A long time ago, I wrote a blues which contains common elements in the RH and can be played with a variety of LH accompaniments, all of which I demonstrate in this very bluesy video! At least master this piece and show it off to your friends, then build on it or start composing your own.
3. Absolute Chord Mastery
One of the main reasons you can't play the piano is because you don't know the major scales so you get lost in a sea of disconnected black and white notes, so first of all: master your 12 major scales with this playlist. The second reason is that you don't know your chords in enough (read: all) 12 keys. So to address this, you no longer have any excuse not to know all the most common chords in all the keys because I made two videos (part two included in part 1), with which you are to play along, super slowly, all the chords chromatically from C to B with both hands. It may be a few weeks of effort but once you've got them all down, you'll feel so powerful and confident over the piano keys that you won't quite believe it yourself!
4. Common/Favourite Chord Progressions
You should get used to playing some common chord progressions because they appear in a lot of jazz repertoire. Instead, however, of overwhelming yourself by learning them in all 12 keys, start with the most popular jazz keys of C, F, G, Eb and Bb.
In this video, I share four favourites, including the song from which I first discovered it. I then show you ho easy it can be to do that progression in any key (combine major scale mastery and my chords play-along videos, you have no excuses anymore!)
That should keep you busy for a few weeks! Enjoy.
