Mark Hayes Jazz Hymns For The Intermediate Pianist

Working Through Mark Hayes Jazz Hymns For The Intermediate Pianist

Mark Hayes is one of those arrangers who understands what intermediate pianists actually can handle. He doesn't dumb things down, but he also doesn't throw advanced reharmonization at you on page one. The book collects well-known hymn tunes and wraps them in jazz harmonies that are challenging without being impossible. It's been around long enough to have worked for thousands of students, and it continues to show up on my studio bookshelf more than anything else in the intermediate jazz section. The book contains arrangements of traditional hymn melodies —Amazing Grace, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, It Is Well With My Soul, Do What Thou Hast Done, and several others — reharmonized using seventh chords, ninths, some borrowed chords, modal interchange, and the occasional bluesy turn. Each arrangement is marked with chord symbols above the staff, which means you're expected to play from both notation and charts at the same time. That dual-reading demand is one of the things that makes it genuinely useful rather than just a collection of pretty songs. The difficulty sits comfortably in the intermediate zone. If you can already play basic jazz voicings in your left hand and you're comfortable reading standard treble clef notation at a moderate tempo, these arrangements will stretch you without breaking your rhythm. If you're still working on sight-reading triads, you're going to struggle. I always recommend students spend at least two or three months on lead sheet reading before opening this book.

One thing people miss about these arrangements is how Hayes treats the melody. He rarely leaves it completely exposed. More often than not, he threads it through inner voices or pairs it with a contrapuntal line in the left hand. This forces you to listen actively instead of just running fingers through chords and hoping the tune comes out somewhere. I've had students who thought they could play a piece after looking at it once, then came back two weeks later unable to find the melody because their ears weren't engaged with the music.

How to Use This Book Effectively

Start by playing through the melody alone, in the right hand, with no chords. Get the contour of the tune into your muscle memory first. Hayes sometimes disguises the melody in unexpected registers, so if you skip this step you'll likely play the wrong line under your chords without realizing it until you sound like an idiot in front of someone else. Next, work the left-hand chord patterns separately. Mark the chord changes in pencil. Write Roman numerals above the staff if that helps you see the harmonic movement. I usually have my students write the functional harmony in a light pencil mark so they understand why a D minor seven is sitting under a G major melody note — it's functioning as a ii chord in C, not some random accident. Then put the hands together slowly, with a metronome. These arrangements look deceptively simple at slow tempos. The moment you increase the speed even slightly, voice-leading errors become obvious. I typically start my students around quarter note equals 72, sometimes lower for the denser harmonies. When they can play cleanly at that tempo without constant corrections, I move them up six BPM at a time. Most pieces in this book become performance-ready at around quarter note equals 96 to 104.

The chord symbols are printed above the notation, which is convenient, but don't let them become a crutch. I've seen too many students read only the letters and ignore the actual written notes, which defeats the purpose of studying the arrangement. Play from the notation first, reference the symbols when you get lost, and gradually internalize both simultaneously.

A Real Problem I Ran Into and How I Fixed It

One student was working on the arrangement of "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" and kept tripping over a specific measure where the melody leaps from a low G up to a high D while the left hand plays a complex shell voicing with a sharp fourteenth and a flattened ninth. Every time we practiced, she would nail the left hand but hit the wrong note on the way up, or vice versa. The two hands were essentially fighting each other because the rhythmic alignment in that passage was asymmetric — the right hand has a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth while the left hand lands on straight eighths that don't line up with the right hand's subdivisions. The workaround was to practice the right hand melody in isolation using a rhythmic expansion technique. I had her tap the melody while counting in triplets underneath, since the dotted eighth/sixteenth pattern fits neatly into a triplet grid. Once the rhythmic displacement felt natural in her head, we slowed the left hand voicings down to half tempo and mapped exactly where each chord tone landed relative to the melody. It took about twenty minutes of targeted work, but that measure stopped being a problem entirely after that session. Without isolating the rhythmic misalignment, we probably would have spent three weeks circling the same dead end.

Common Mistakes and What They Cost You

The biggest mistake I see is treating these arrangements as performance pieces from the first rehearsal. Students want to sound good immediately, so they rush through tempo and ignore the voice leading. The result is a muddy rendition that sounds worse than if they'd just played the hymn with basic triads. Take your time with the inner voices. Hayes built these arrangements to reward patience. A clean version at a moderate tempo will impress people far more than a sloppy fast one. Another mistake is ignoring the stylistic implications of the chord symbols. You'll see sus4 chords, altered dominants, and add9 voicings written into the arrangement. If you just play them as written without any touch or voicing variation, it sounds like a textbook exercise. I tell my students to use the chord symbol as a palette, not a cage. A nine chord can be voiced with the ninth in the melody, or tucked into an inner voice, or played as a spread voicing across both hands. The arrangement gives you a starting point, not a final decision. Some pianists skip the lower-numbered arrangements entirely and jump into the harder pieces. I don't recommend this. The earlier arrangements are designed to introduce specific harmonic concepts — substitute dominants, tritone substitutions, modal mixture — in a controlled environment. If you haven't internalized those concepts in the simpler tunes, the advanced arrangements will just sound like random fancy chords over a familiar melody.

Limitations and When This Book Won't Help You

This book is not a comprehensive jazz harmony textbook. It won't teach you how to improvise, how to comp in a bebop style, or how to navigate a fake book chart. The arrangements are fixed. There are no solo sections, no vamp tracks, no rhythmic variations that push you into improvisation. If your goal is to learn jazz piano through improvisation, you'll need supplementing material like Real Book charts or a dedicated improvisation method. The harmonies are also somewhat conservative by modern jazz standards. Hayes uses standard ii-V-I progressions, common tritone substitutions, and familiar modal borrowings. You won't find dense coltrane changes or advanced reharmonization schemes here. That's not a flaw — it's the intended level — but if you're already comfortable with that vocabulary, you may find the later arrangements predictable after a few pieces. There's also the issue of piano size and hand span. Some arrangements contain wide voicings that assume a decent hand span. If you have smaller hands, you'll need to rearrange certain chords or omit specific tensions. I've had students with smaller hands simply drop the fifth on sustained chords where it's not harmonically necessary, and the result sounds perfectly fine. Don't try to stretch something that isn't going to work — rewrite the voicing instead.

Where to Get It

The book is widely available through music retailers. You can find it on Amazon, Sheet Music Plus, and through most online music stores. Hal Leonard publishes it, so it should also be available through their website. I recommend ordering from a retailer that allows returns in case the physical copy has binding issues — spiral-bound copies tend to lie flatter on a stand, which matters when you're reading two staves plus chord symbols simultaneously. Paperback copies work fine too, but you'll need a heavy stand or some strategy to keep the book open without it closing on you during practice. There are also digital sheet music versions available through sites like Musicnotes and sheet music direct. The PDF versions are functional, but I've found that reading from a screen for extended practice sessions tends to cause more eye strain than paper, and you can't write in the margins as easily. If you're going digital, a tablet with an Apple Pencil or similar stylus is the best compromise.

Bottom Line

Mark Hayes Jazz Hymns For The Intermediate Pianist is a solid resource for pianists who want to bridge the gap between classical hymn playing and jazz harmony. It's not flashy. It doesn't claim to be a complete method. But it does exactly what it says — it gives you intermediate-level jazz arrangements of familiar tunes that are playable, educational, and rewarding to perform. If you approach it with patience, work through the voice leading properly, and don't rush the tempo, you'll come out of this book with a stronger harmonic vocabulary and a handful of pieces you can actually play for people.