Customer Reviews

Mel Bay's Complete Book Jazz Guitar: Lines & Phrases

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great book, especially for the guitarists who have done their homework on scales-arpeggios and look for a way to start bulding jazz vocabulary with that material. The book grabs you from the start; the introduction section named "The Craft" gives you very practical and musical ways to embellish your typical triads and diatonic scales with chromatic and diatonic passing tones. For the hardworking player, these a few pages provide tons of practical material to be applied to scales and triads and you can start sounding jazzy right away, this part alone is worth the price and that is just the beginning! Beware that this book does not include beginner level information though, so you should know your major and melodic minor scales and basic triads to get the most out of this material. The book continues to present typical bebop language "idioms" on different chord types and they sound very musical. These are not some hot licks invented by the author, they are definitely classical bebop ideas that are in every good jazz musician's arsenal. You will find all your favorite licks in there! Plus, Jacobs provides tablature as well and and his ideas suit very naturally to guitar fingerboard.
After the bebop oriented section (it lasts about 50 pages and if you can assimilate all the ideas in there, you are on your well on your way to start improvising in jazz language), Jacobs moves onto more modern sounds, such as applying pentatonic scales and fourths to produce modern and "outside" ideas. The third section adresses symmetrical scales including the augmented, whole-tone and diminished scales. In these sections Jacobs provide theoretical explanation as well (unlike the first section where you are expected to know and understand theory fundamentals, but Jacobs' other books adresses these issues as well, so you might want to check them out) and the fingerings he provides are extremely practical to get you started playing those unusual scales. Finally he addresses polychords at the end of the book. The book definitely delivers what its title promises, so what you see is what you get. If you have been loooking for a guitar oriented book to start playing the jazz language right away, this is what you have been looking for.

I had to order the CD that goes with this book from Mel Bay for 10 bucks and you get Sid Jacobs on a looper going thru the material quickly. I don't think I would classify this book as beginning level because the theory can get pretty dense but Mel Bay classifies it as beginner's level. Sid tries to teach you how to put jazz lines together from fragments with mixed results I think. You will get some lines that you'll use but there are better books for licks. Sid composed 4 etudes for this book and recorded 2 of those etudes('Another Blues in F' and 'Blues For Poly'). For me, that was where the most value in the book was so if the other two etudes had been recorded it would have been all the better. I do like this book because you get a technical discourse on jazz from an accomplished player with many examples and from the CD you get a sense of this man's work ethic which is extraordinary. Sid Jacob's will get you thinking about what it is that you are doing when you play jazz. For pure licks I recommend 1001 jazz licks(cHERRY Lane Publishing and 1001 Blues Licks by the same publisher). Beware these books have no CD and are not tabbed out for you but there is enough room left under each lick for you to draw a tab staff if you are a guitarist. This book is tabbed out for you and it's a good instructional experience,unique to this author.

I have dozens of books on jazz guitar. Method books. Books of licks. This is the best one I've found. Includes dozens of simple concepts that can be easily digested and incorporated into your playing. Highly recommended.

I honestly don't want to give this a positive review because it is a really good book. I don't want people to purchase it then there will be many jazz guitarists who can play well because of this book. Then again it would not be fair to Mr Sid Jacob. The book includes many popular improvisation lines instantly there just to learn. Regardless of modes and scale or arpeggio you can master you still can't improvise unless you speak jazz! This is what this book is about. Speaking jazz in sentences.

I've been playing guitar for six years now, and only recently took up jazz the last year. This book has excellent transcriptions of very useful lines. However, it is lacking in explanation, making it a bit hard for beginners to get a grasp on what is going on. While the musical notation is very well annotated and written, it seems that the majority of the tabulature was sloppily transcribed and has a lot of glaring mistakes, which makes quickly learning the lines difficult for people who prefer tab over musical notation.

The book has lots of good phrases that range from easy to difficult to play. Biggest drawback is that everything is in the key of C. The author tells you to transcribe the phrases yourself but it would of been very helpful if they were written in different keys in order to teach the fretboard better.