My name is Chris Cheung and I recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in Computer Science. I will be working as a SWE at Amazon in Seattle starting in the fall. My hobbies include classical and jazz piano and photography.
I started off as a classical pianist, but I started gaining interest in jazz in the later half of high school. My interest began from hearing jazz in some of the anime I watched—Cowboy Bebop and Kids on the Slope. I soon became a big fan of Bill Evans.
I started playing jazz in college. I took a total of two jazz courses at my college. The first one was a student-run class, which I took in 2017, and it was there that I was exposed to the form of jazz: playing through standards as a band and also getting my first taste of improvisation. I only started to get exposed to the idea of applying scales over chords during the last week of this course. The second course I took was taught by a teacher and this was in 2019. I grew the most from this class. It was a music improvisation class based around jazz, and here I learned a lot of improvisation practicing techniques that I still use to this day. I gained a lot from hearing what my peers played—all of whom were really great jazz musicians—and writing my first tune. All the students were required to compose and arrange a tune for our class, and going through this process helped me a lot with my musical maturity. My fondest memories of playing jazz are from this class.
I stopped playing jazz after that course, and started playing again half a year later, relying on free online resources to help me learn. The main resources I use to learn about jazz are The Jazz Piano Book by Mark Levine, Kent Hewitt’s Youtube channel, Open Studio, Jimindorothy’s Youtube channel, and thejazzpianosite.com.
Right now I only play solo piano. I learned a lot of what I know in jazz without a private teacher, so this blog is a way for me to write down what I learned and how I approach jazz. Personally, I think it’s hard to figure out what to practice in jazz compared to classical. Figuring out what to practice next in classical is straightforward—you have to practice what’s laid out on the music in front of you. For jazz, it’s tougher figuring out what to practice. This took me a while to figure out, but I finally ended up getting a system down. This blog will be about a lot of these systems and structures that I’ve formed as well as new systems I discover that help me play jazz. Note that a lot of these are based around solo jazz piano as that is my main background.
I began taking photos in 2019. I started off digital and branched out to film soon afterwards. I only take photos occasionally when I find the time.