Customer Reviews

Beginning Jazz Guitar: The Complete Jazz Guitar Method (Book & DVD)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've played guitar for more than thirty years and have focused on straight ahead jazz for the last 15 or so. All that time I've absorbed bits and pieces of musical knowledge from method books, lick guides and transcriptions as well as from the experience gained playing with others. No resource that I've encountered offers the degree of fundamental understanding that one can gain from this series of books.

Unlike most other method books, "Beginning Jazz Guitar" starts from chapter 1 with a dual track instruction mode of chord and scale studies mixed with a moderate dose of musical theory AND the author wisely limits the first volume to just the major scale. Too many other fine publications insist on bedeviling the student with a bewildering array of scales and modes in rapid fire succession. This volume shines when it comes to supplying answers to real world questions as the student might actually encounter them. Additionally, Jody Fisher presents scales in a format that encourages horizontal rather than vertical playing (one of the most important and most overlooked aspect of improvisation). As a matter of fact, more experienced players may have to relearn scale positions to work through the etudes and excercises in this book since they are fundamentally different than those normally found in most instructional texts.

Likewise, for a beginning book, the text does a credible job in presenting harmony and chord progressions with just enough theory to understand how progressions are structured and how to extend and alter chords. Most books present chordal theory in the first part of the book and then take up lead playing in the second half as if they bore no relationship with one another. Again, the author scores with the dual track approach.

Finally, the information contained in the "Coda" at the end of the book is worth the price alone. One could spend half a lifetime studying jazz guitar and not stumble over some these gems of info.

As a companion to this book I might also recommend "All Solos & Grooves for Jazz Guitar" by Jim Ferguson (Mel Bay) which serves up major scale studies along with more advanced solos utilizing similar techniques. As a matter of fact all of Ferguson's books would fit in nicely with this series.

All in all, an excellent resource for the determined student.

I have used this book a lot since I got it, and I have learned much from it. While I at first was quite entusiastic about the book, I am slightly more critical now.

The book proceeds along two tracks, chords and solo. In both cases etudes goes alongside the theory so you can apply what you have leared. But after learning some of the etudes, I started wondering if I had really learned the theory. You learn to play basic triads on any three adjacent strings, and this accompanied by an etude. But as the etude is written in TAB I do not think about whether the chord I play is an d-minor or an A major or any other chord. I found that when I took an old song-book and tried comping using the same basic triads, I had to think about how to form the chord and hence I learned more. For many of the other etudes I got a similar feeling that what I learned was not the chord or the fingering, but to read TAB.

Another strange point is that the book starts out by a short review of the pre-requisite. You are supposed to be familiar with fingering of the pentatonic scale, and basic blues chord progression. But nowhere in the book would lack of such knowledge be an aparent problem.

Still, this is an good book. The basic theory is excellently explained. I have learened a lot from the book. It starts out easy both in construction and voicing of chords and improvisig, proceedin to modes of the major scale.

First off, when this book says "beginning," it does NOT mean it is targeted to a complete beginner to guitar. It means it is written for a guitarist who knows the basics of rock guitar and would like to learn more about the more sophisticated and traditional jazz style.

The book assumes that you already know a couple scales (pentatonics, etc.) and most standard rock chords, and I greatly appreciated that it assumed I knew these, because I was afraid the book would be too "dumb" in the beginning.

This book is fantastic... it shows you what to play with clear diagrams and explanations and all the etudes and songs are written in TAB and traditional so it exposes you to playing guitar using traditional notation, which is an important skill.

I highly recommend this book. If you are a fairly good intermediate-level rock guitarist who knows all the basic open and barre chords, this book will pick up right where you want it to and help you add some sophistication to your playing... all you have to do is practice what it teaches you!

I agree with the other reviewers on the content of the book. While some of the material in the beginning may be a little basic, it is clearly and concisely explained. The subsequent material is explained with the same clarity, and thoroughness. The sections on playing in various modes are particularly helpful. Great material!! I mistakenly rated the book/DVD down at a three because I didn't think the DVD included the audio tracks for the lesson and was frustrated. But thanks to another Amazon reviewer who straightened me out, I found them and am making great progress. Now if I could only figure out how to change my rating from 3 to 5 stars....

I've been playing guitar on and off for about 20 years and have only recently started trying to learn about jazz guitar. I purchased three other books before finding this one and they all had some pretty serious shortcomings. I found this one in a bookstore and after thumbing through it found it to be extremely well laid out and full of really useful information. Each section is broken down into lessons for comping and lessons for soloing so you can alter the way you go through the book to suit your own focus. It does assume some basic knowlege, but if you're interested in learning jazz guitar you probably already know the major, minor and 7th chords already and major and minor scales which is about all that's assumed. I bought a version with the cd, but so far I haven't really had the need to listen to it. I really like the idea that there are another three books which follow this so that if I ever master the material in this book I know where I can go to further my study. Highly recommended!

First of all, I think Jody Fisher has done a commendable thing by putting together a book for beginning jazz guitarists because there are so few books of its kind. Unfortunately, I have not found this book to be very useful other than as a source of reference.

The main problem with the book is that, while the material it covers is fairly comprehensive, it provides very little guidance in actually learning and memorizing the materials presented. I liken it to someone handing you a Japanese dictionary and expecting you to learn how to speak Japanese from it. For example, the book covers triads and all of their inversions, diatonic scales and modes, a whole bunch of chords (7th, 11th, 13th, Add9, dominant 7th suspended, etc.) and many different fingerings for each. Yet, for all the material that it covers, the book relies exclusively on short little etudes to demonstrate the application of each concept. I do not think these etudes are very effective in internalizing the concepts presented. The best instructional books provide a lot of guidance on how to learn. Ted Greene's books are always full of comments like, "Don't worry about memorizing all of these forms right now, just focus on hearing how they sound..."

Another problem was that you have to get through well over half of the book before you get to anything that sounds remotely "jazzy". Compare this with Mickey Baker's Complete Course in Jazz Guitar which gets you playing cool sounding jazz chords from the very first page of the book. A student who wants to learn jazz guitar will need a lot of patience in order to stick with this book.

Finally, I thought that the absence of arpeggios in the book was a huge weakness. The book makes a clear distinction between chords and scales, going so far as dividing the book into "A" sections (for chords) and "B" sections (for scales). I think this approach is somewhat misguided -- it wasn't until I learned to utilize arpeggios and target chord tones that I could make my soloing sound jazzy. I think that, for many years, I was stuck in a rut precisely because I had so thoroughly separated chords from scales in my head. In contrast to this book, Ted Greene's Single Note Soloing Volume 1 introduces arpeggios within the first few pages, shortly after he introduces chords and scales. This has the effect of reinforcing the close relationship between the two concepts.

The Intermediate Jazz Guitar book (the next one in this series) is a little bit better because it starts you off playing jazz from the get go. In addition, it provides a little more guidance in internalizing the concepts and the CD has some backing tracks for improvisation. Personally, I think most people who want to learn jazz guitar can skip this one and go straight to the Intermediate level book. If you don't mind reading standard notation, the Mickey Baker book I mentioned above is a good one, as well as Ted Greene's Chord Chemistry and Single Note Soloing Volumes 1&2.

What else can I say? I am a Blues/Rock self taught guitar player, and I have been trying to get into Jazz for 3 years! I did a summer workshop that got me so frustrated when I realized that I was simply not able to follow the bands because I just did not speak the language (I also have to admit that the students were a bunch of jazz snobs belonging to a sort of superior species of musicians...).
This book has allowed me to enter the world of Jazz (trying not to become a snob). It is a strange feeling to review some things that I almost already knew, but all of a sudden, it just makes sense. I don't know if it is also because I was getting ready after having gone through some of those concepts, but anyhow, this book was the key. I moved on to the second of the series, but I come back very often to this one too. As the author says, "a lot of material is covered", and it will take more than a couple of exercises to master it! One small flaw? The tunes which illustrate the different chapters are not really exciting...

In my 8 years of playing, I haven't seen a book or resource that organizes things so well, and in such a way that if you literally just follow the advice and material in the book, you can trust it to make you a much better player. Can't wait to get the next in the series ...'Intermediate'.

Excelent! My favorite Book of and favorite series. You will get everythig from technique to theory! I also own the intermidiate and Advance books of this series and they pack a punch! I'm still working on this one and so far the organization and difficulty level have been excellent for the novice jazz player. You do will need some experience (6 to 12 months of practicing) and basic theory (Maybe one semester of music) as the complete novice may get frustrated.

Let me start by stating that I own A LOT of guitar related books. Probably close to $1500.00 worth, or more. This beginning jazz book series is the BEST intro to jazz playing that I've found. It's not too easy, but It's not overly dense like most. The author is very smart in the way he teaches you a concept and then has you use it in an etude. Most books just teach you a set of chords or a mode or something, and that's it. You're then stuck with something you've never really applied to a musical context, and is soon forgotten or very dusty in your head. I think of those as REFERENCE books, not method books. Even though some are labeled methods, they are much too dense for actual use. This is a gentle series, it doesn't intimidate.
To absolute beginners, I agree with the author that you should know basic folk and blues techniques before starting this book. It's not so hard that you can't start out right away on it, but I think folks would have an easier time if they did have some basic knowledge first.
Take your time, work with other materials/teacher as well as this, and you and others will be suprised how nicely you are playing shortly.