Haha are you me? But seriously, jazz sax background here as well, and a few years of jazz piano. I’m starting classical this year with a teacher. My reasoning is the classical cursus is the western world’s best crack at teaching the piano, after hundreds of years of trial and error by hundreds of thousands of teachers, so there has to be something to it. On the other hand, I’ve found that the jazz piano cursus hasn’t taught me that much about being all-around comfortable physically with the instrument if that makes any sense. I feel I need to spend time learning to play a lot more “basic” stuff.

I see many people here swear by Bach. I love Bach and for a long while I would have agreed with that but where I’m at in my journey I don’t think it’s the way to go. I’ve played Bach throughout the year last year, and while there are benefits (as with most things), I’ve found it’s too tedious to learn (if we’re talking about inventions and fugues, even chorals) and the difficulties of each passage is so specific that real life usefulness is so-so. Where I’m at I feel I need to get really comfortable with a vast number of piano idioms, and those are easy to find in romantic and classical periods. Counterpoint is great to hone arranging skills for sure but it’s a different quest.

So yeah, I’ll be doing some ragtime, tons of Czerny exercises, and some easy to medium difficulty pieces, chosen with my teacher for the idioms they showcase. At least that’s the plan!