Thickening the chord in the right hand

I want to give you an idea of what “It’s A Raggy Waltz” would sound like played in voiced position. Before I do that I want to introduce one new idea which is to thicken the chord in the right hand where there’s opportunities to do it. For example, if I were to play the middle section of this with the left hand voicing in the usual position and the right hand with the tune. I get this.

What I want to do now is to add one or two more notes in the right hand to thicken up the chord. For example, the first chord I might try something like that. You see it’s a nicely balanced chord with thirds and fourths all the way through it. That’s adding G,B,E in the right hand which is a 3 note chord.

I can either add 2 notes to my B minor7, or 3 notes A,B,D. I can’t do much with the E minor7 because the tune is so low. Then either 2 notes again or 3 as before, 3 notes - there’s an alteration there - 2 notes, or thicken it up, and then 3 notes, 3 notes, 2 notes, 2 notes, 1 note really - there’s only really room for 1 note there.

This idea of thickening up the right hand in the same way as sometimes we thickening up the chord in the left hand - it comes in again when we’re going to look at a topic called “comping”, which is playing chords behind soloists where, again, we’ll play voiced chords in the normal position in the left hand but we’ll add some notes in the right hand to thicken them up.