Learn to think in music.
The Academy is a free, bilingual school of practical music thinking — taught through jazz, built by one teacher: a classical violinist who became a jazz pianist. 51 interactive tools anchored in 36 canonical sources, read and reformulated in Ofir's voice. Everything on these pages sounds: chord diagrams for guitar and ukulele, fingerings for brass and winds, tabs alongside every staff, drum patterns you can press play on — for beginners, working players, school students, and teachers.
Playing jazz, not music associated with jazz.
Free. No account, no ads, no tracking.
- Read — every page teaches one subject in plain language.
- Press play — every figure, chord, and rhythm on the site sounds. Tap it.
- Do the assignment — most pages end with one thing to take to your instrument.
- Check yourself — drills and quizzes grade you on the spot.
Two ways in: Lessons is the guided sequence; the grid below is the open shelf. Both cover the same fifty-one rooms.
Today on the Academy
Daily picks plus a moment from jazz history — fresh every day.
The Path
A numbered learning trail through the 51 tools — Foundation → Vocabulary → Craft → Application, with Context as a parallel track. The flat grid becomes a curriculum.
Follow the Path →Switch between a guided learning sequence and a flat tool browser:
Foundations
Start here. Notes, chords, and what fits where.
Intervals
Start here. 13 intervals with a pressable piano keyboard — touch the keys, they play. Multi-touch chords. 4 sounds to pick.
01Chords
From G7 to Cmaj9. Every chord with notes, scale, voicing, and the reason it works.
44Harmony Basics
Where chords come from — harmonize the scale, name the degrees in Roman numerals, and meet the three function families that drive every progression.
12Voicings
Rootless left-hand II-V-I voicings in all 12 keys. A/B forms, 3 or 4 notes, two-hand version.
19Voice Leading
How chords connect. Four basic moves, guide-tone lines in II-V-I, and a rough-vs-smooth side-by-side.
02Tensions
Tensions chart by chord family, and chromatic approach techniques.
13Scales & Modes
Major modes, minor scales, pentatonics, diminished, altered. What fits what chord, and why.
37Reading Notation
Where the Academy's core assumption comes from — five lines, two clefs, note names, durations, time and key signatures. Came in from tabs or ear-only playing? Start here.
38Rhythm Theory
What a note does in time — subdivision, groove, swing, syncopation, how a bar of 4 can sound like a bar of 3. The rest of the Academy talks rhythm; this is where the words come from.
36Circle of Fifths
Click any key — scale on staff, keyboard, and fretboard at once, tonic chord sounding. Watch Autumn Leaves and Giant Steps trace their chord paths around the circle.
39Sight-Reading
A specific, trainable ability most students never train — playing what you've never seen, in real time, well enough to be useful on a bandstand. This page is how to build it.
Vocabulary
How the music moves. Lines, progressions, and the masters who shaped them.
Lines
How a melodic line is built — targeting, approach, enclosure, bebop, modal cells, triad pairs, walking bass, pedals.
03Progressions
II–V–I, tritone sub, blues, modal vamps. With guide-tone lines in notation.
07Masters
8 approaches: Miles, Evans, Parker, Coltrane, Tyner, Monk, Hancock, Barry.
51The Players
How to play like the masters — 29 players who built the language, each with the sound, the signature devices in notation, a practice ladder, the records that teach it, and a five-second blindfold cue.
45Solo Studies
Own whole solos, not just licks. Eight canonical solos, 1945–1965 — Parker to Herbie — each with its signature device in notation and a six-pass method for making it yours.
46Lessons
67 ordered lessons in five tracks — theory, piano, listening, how jazz is learned, and playing together. Each one frames an idea, routes you through the exact pages that teach it, and hands you one concrete assignment.
48Colors in Music
What harmony looks like. Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov's rival key-color wheels, Messiaen's notated colors, timbre as a palette, program music, and a playable gallery of the exact moments — jazz, classical, rock — where the color turns.
49Rock & Pop History
How popular music actually unfolded — blues to streaming, eleven eras, with the Israeli thread through each. A clickable decade timeline, the genre family tree, and the drumbeat's own evolution notated and playable.
50Why Music Works
The listener's side. Expectation as the engine of feeling, the syncopation sweet spot, why perfect time feels dead, why repetition recruits instead of bores — and the six bandstand rules those facts explain.
47Etudes
Ten composed études, each a complete piece — guide tones, a bebop chorus, blues, modal calls, Barry's staircase, trio pianism, rootless voicings in all twelve keys, a bossa tune, rhythm guitar, and a B♭ horn melody. Notation, playback, one assignment each.
08Barry Harris
Major 6 and diminished — one scale that generates melody and chords.
21Grooves & Parts
What drums, bass, and piano each play in 10 styles — swing, ballad, bossa, samba, Latin, hard bop, modal, fusion, Israeli event. The pros' secret is just knowing all of it.
Craft
The how. Comping, phrasing, writing — the moves the pros make.
Comping
The accompanist as a vocation. Four ways to build a comp — shell, rootless, two-hand spread, locked-hands. Five stylistic feels.
22Writing
Composition, arranging, orchestration — three views of the same craft. Motif, form, drop-2 voicings, ranges, dynamic arc. Grounded in the composition and arranging canon.
23Phrasing & Feel
The improv-craft pair to Lines. Placement, targeting, approach, in & out, editing, feel by style. Grounded in the line-building and phrasing canon.
24Ensemble Feel
The most advanced tool. A trio can sound orchestral; an orchestra can swing like a trio. Same principles, both directions. Jamal, Evans, Tyner, Thad Jones, Schneider.
25Reharmonization
Six techniques that cover 95% of reharm: tritone sub, diatonic sub, secondary dominant, modal interchange, chromatic approach, pedal-point. Worked example on Autumn Leaves. LaVerne / Hyman / Mantooth lineage.
42Intros & Endings
The opening and closing bars — the two moments the leader actually shapes most. Ten ways in, ten ways out, and the words to call them on the bandstand.
Application
On real tunes and real gigs.
Standards
126 standards filtered by style, tempo, and use.
05Setlist
11 event types — what repertoire fits, with sample tunes.
06Practice Room
Pick chord + progression + master + level — get a daily practice card.
18For Classical Musicians
If you came up classical, read this once. Maps chord symbols, lead sheets, voicings, modes, counterpoint from classical to jazz.
28Draw Notation
Ask for a scale, a voicing, a progression, a line technique, or a worked reharm — get engraved, print-ready notation. Type it or pick it. Exports MusicXML.
35Chord Charts
All Academy lead sheets at a glance. Alphabetical. One click to render. Print-ready.
40Bagrut Guide
The Israeli music Bagrut — five units, three years, internal and external halves — mapped tool by tool to what the Academy already gives you. Built by a working teacher.
41The Studio
The working room — tuner, dB meter, fingerings chart, and the canonical reference for what happens to your sound between the instrument and the listener.
Reference
What to listen for, and the tools around the music.
Listening
95 albums — what to listen for and why they matter.
52The Magazine
The spirit of music, one idea a week — silence, memory, rooms, rituals, and the records worth arguing about. For musicians and everyone else. A new issue every week.
15Arrangers
Eight named arrangers and their methods — Gil Evans, Quincy Jones, Thad Jones, Schneider, Riddle, Fischer, Brookmeyer, Ofir.
16Arranging Styles
Ten schools: Big Band Swing, Cool, Hard Bop, Modal, Bossa, Latin, Fusion, ECM, Vocal Standards, Israeli Event.
10Event Fit
Two questions — get a band setup recommendation for your event.
11Metronome
A simple web-audio metronome.
30Forms & Piece Types
How a piece is shaped. Jazz forms (AABA, blues, modal, rhythm changes), classical forms (sonata, theme & variations, fugue, rondo), piece types (waltz, ballad, etude, prelude). The structural vocabulary that crosses both worlds.
31Acoustics
The physics under every sound — frequency, amplitude, the overtone series, consonance ratios, temperament, beats, room acoustics. Why anything sounds like anything.
32Instrument Physics
How each family makes its sound — strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion, voice, electronics. The hardware layer paired with Acoustics. What vibrates, what resonates, what an arranger writes for it.
33Musical Periods
1,500 years in twelve panels — Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern, Post-war, Contemporary. What broke at each turning point, key composers per era, and how jazz becomes the parallel tradition.
34History Events
The non-musical events that decided how music sounds today — notation, the printing press, the phonograph, two world wars, the Great Migration, civil rights, the internet, AI. Each one rewrote what music could be.
26Musical Glossary
The words on the page. Italian tempo and dynamics, German expression, French color, plus the jazz vocabulary you'll hear on every bandstand. ~75 terms organized for skim-once / lookup-often.
27Genres & Styles
The categorical map — classical sub-families, national schools, folk traditions, jazz families, popular music, electronic, world music. Closes the music-history arc; works with Periods (when) to pin a piece down by what + when.
29Ask the Academy
Type a question — which scale fits G7alt, what's inside a rootless voicing, what are the changes to Autumn Leaves. Answers come with drawn notation, straight from the Academy's own data.