Customer Reviews

Building a Jazz Vocabulary

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Described in one word: useful!

If you were going to teach someone to read, would you start out by having them memorize and repeat great speeches from history, or would you teach them the alphabet and how to recognize common words and phrases?

Building a Jazz Vocabulary takes the latter approach and is a very cleanly organized book in which each section contains a brief explanation and expository exercises that illuminate a fundamental feature of the language of Jazz.

Topics covered include intervals, chords, scales, progressions, and solo building, among others. Perhap the gem of the book is the excellent coverage of cells and the development of melodic line.

One of the real advantages of Building a Jazz Vocabulary is that the exercises are not mindless transcriptions or the painfully mechanical contrivances that all too commonly fill up endless pages in many music books. Instead, each topic is covered with just enough explanation to make sure you get it intellectually and just enough examples and exercises to allow you to see how it works in practice. The topic then ends by providing enough suggestions on practice and application that you can proceed on your own for a lifetime or two.

As a result, this is the rare kind of music instruction book where you *will* want to have your instruments in hand, but *will not* just be reading exercises off of a page.

A couple of things to be aware of, this book doesn't do a lot of hand-holding; it's written in an easy to understand manner but it is definately for adults and does presume some existing knowledge of music and music theory. Additionally, it covers 'vocabulary' only in the sense of notes and phrases. Coverage of intonation or rhythm is very brief.

FWIW, I'm a somewhat experienced musician and play a number of instruments, primarily guitar and violin. My wife is a relative novice and plays tenor sax. We both love this book. I'll be getting her a copy for her birthday. Do I love my wife? Sure! But mostly, getting her a copy of her own is the only certain way to ensure she keeps her grubby fingers off of mine!

- Cayenne

I can count on one hand, the number of books on how to improvise jazz that are actually worth owning. This is clearly one of them!

One of the worst things you can see in a book on improvising is something like..."here are the scales that you can play over the various chords. Now go and randomly mix up the notes of each scale over the proper chord and you'll be on your way."

That's just not going to work, if you want to learn to play jazz.

The author of this book actually shows you how to develop a jazz sound by starting you out with some of the most basic and important melodic units, in simple 4 note cells, which you will learn to alter and string together, giving you the necessary foundation for developing meaningful, logical and authentic sounding solos.

Highly recommended!!!

I'm a fretless electric bass player, and I've played in jazz/fusion bands with competent, formally trained musicians for a few years. I can improvise walking bass lines freely over fast-moving chord changes, and can do some modal improvisation. I also studied classical piano for 8 years. So, I approached this book with the intermediate knowledge the author says you need to understand it.

I'm also a university teacher with about 12 years of experience teaching non-music courses.

With this background, I think a good text has the theory explained in simple concepts, with many very clear examples. A good book also has a significant number of practice exercises after each theory section. These exercises should allow the student to master the individual concepts, integrating them later on. The practice exercises should also provide answers, where applicable, so you can check your work.

Further, a good book presents material so the student sees an increase in their ability to improvise as quickly as possible -- this increases their motivation to persist with the remaining exercises in the book.

Against these criteria, I find Building a Jazz Vocabulary to be a fair, but not excellent book.

Its premise -- that there is a common jazz vocabulary that the students can use to "imitate, assimilate, and innovate" is interesting and sound. The author's explanations of the components of this common vocabulary are well explained, and he provides for simple and multiple examples often.

On the other hand, I found the book to be sorely lacking in carefully crafted practice exercises that help the reader practice the concepts. The author provides Etudes (studies) but they are long and sometimes complicated. Further, there are times there are no chord changes over the staff, which makes it hard to understand how the notes fit in with the overall harmony of the song. The author repeatedly puts the onus on the reader to find their own practice exercises, with exercises like "find a jazz solo and analyze it for four-note cells". Also, there is no CD with the book, so you have to use your own play-along software like Band in a Box if you want to practice at home, which will cost you an extra $50-60 or more if you don't already have it.

In terms of providing motivation, I also found the book wanting. Like many books on improvisation, the author insists that one must learn a concept in "all keys" immediately. This presents the reader with an instantly boring and daunting task, which has no immediate return on investment. I think the author would have done better to provide play-along exercises in concert keys C, Bb and Eb, throughout the entire book. This would help the reader see some results immediately, which would further his or her motivation to keep practicing with the book. At the end of the book, he could have then encouraged the student to extend the knowledge gained to all other keys.

I think there could have been some theoretical, written practice exercises too, with answers provided.

So, this is a book a good theoretical reference -- exposing the elements of basic jazz vocabulary in a fairly well-explained and simple fashion. But it doesn't put enough effort into providing you with practice exercises to help you get the concepts into your mind and hands.

What attracted me to this book was the idea of mastering a large number of melodic units, not just licks or phrases, but "get down to the essence of it all" core building blocks, and learning them in every key. The book presents this concept about "cells" and does a fairly good job in organizing the material so that the student can set up his or her own practice plan and get off on a path that should lead (hopefully) to great success. The presentation of the cell concept by Steiner makes an important contribution to Jazz study and at the same time results in a very compelling piece of educational material--at one point in the text, Steiner breaks down Coltrane's towering Countdown solo into a small handful of component cells. Fascinating stuff.

What's good about the book. The exercises start out very simply so that even the beginner can get on the ride. At times the reader is left to connect the dots, but for the most part every thing is here to put together a meaningful study plan. The student is provided with several sets of chord progressions (or alternately Key progressions) that are very handy. The practice sets of musical cell exercises are gradually expanded to include longer runs, patterns, and sequences where the student is constantly prodded to work through all the keys and progressions. The practice suggestions are quite numerous and thoughtful. There are definitely some golden nuggets of knowledge to be found here and the material should be very helpful in developing a productive practice routine.

Some critical suggestions. For the serious artist, I am not yet convinced that we have stumbled onto The Holy Grail. This book must be only part of one's immersion into the world of Jazz. The author covers a lot of important points but at times I wanted the discussion to be more thorough. For example, I would have liked a justification of building musical ideas from cells that was based on the aural and artistic experience of the musician, rather than a somewhat sterile development of the concept based on intervals. In one sentence in the book, Paul Hindemith is referenced as having had previously using the term "harmonic cell," but this is hardly an exploration of the development of Steiner's concepts within the Jazz idiom. The exercises at the end could have contained more suggestions about how the students practice sessions might develop or what the student might notice or start to become aware of as he or she progresses.

I do think that this book should be in your backpack as you head into the woodshed. This book successfully accomplishes what it sets out to do, albeit at times with an economy of words. I can't think of a reason why you would not want to buy this book.

This book is incredible. It is done in such a logical manner and helps you develop your skills as well as help you understand a lot about music theory. I play guitar and I've bought a lot of books on music theory and developing a practice, but this is one of the best, for any instrument.

This book is well worth the money. It takes a very interesting approach to melodic ideas that I have found very helpful in both stringing together jazz lines, but also simply learning music theory. I am originally a drummer, and so there are definitely holes in my knowledge of notes, chords, intervals and melodic concepts. I found that the way the author starts slowly and gets more complicated throughout the book helped solidify my knowledge of the interval aspect of jazz, and music in general. I also appreciated (again because of my percussion background) the way his "cells" represented something similar to a jazz guitarist's version of a drummer's paradiddle (a basic drum rudiment - RLRR LRLL, with countless variations and applications). Because of this, it felt somewhat familiar and I could grasp a little better the ultimate goal of the book... to provide different pieces, that could be put together in many ways to form jazz lines. Again, I would say this book is well worth your money... if nothing else to improve your basic reading skills, and get a start on building jazz lines. For me it's been much more than that.

I have to agree with the other one-star reviewer Jim-Jim. Of all of my Jazz Books, and I have quite a few of them, I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would praise this book. There is nothing in it but disembodied scale fragments, patterns and note combinations (which the author calls "cells"), which are totally useless on their own melodically, and the author offers no suggestions for left hand voicings or detailed harmonizations under them. Oh yes, he also includes some bafflingly minuscule snippets on "theory" which don't come close to explaining in any organic way the mysteries and complexities of beautiful jazz understanding. Almost nothing in the book "sounds" good on its own, and I would never mistake any of these naked, unharmonized note combinations as "vocabulary" if I heard them in, say, a jazz club. The best I could do with this book is play the pages as exercises, an experience which was joyless and mind-numbing. The title is completely misleading. P.S. I NEVER want to hear any of the people "play jazz" who have awarded this book with 5 stars if they have in any way used this book as a primary reference for their playing.

Man I hate to thrash somebody's book, but after dusting this thing off today to see whether I could get anything new out of it, I feel duty bound to save others from the frustration I experienced.

I got a bachelor's degree for guitar performance, and I have played in rock, blues, country, dance, variety, etc band since I was a kid. I have always felt like I have the right kind of mind for improvisation - I improvise well in those other genres - but I never got bit hard to make a serious study of jazz about 2 years ago. This book was the only book I bought to supplement transcription as my tutor.

So - yeah, first mistake right there. If you want to avoid my bad experience, be smart and buy a bookshelf's worth of books.

Now that I am off the ground as a jazz improviser (tho I wouldn't say good by any broad set of criteria - give me a decade to work on good), I can say that this book seems mislabeled.

I think the ideas in the book are novel and informative, especially for a composer who wanted to analyze jazz solos and make sense out of them - maybe develop a vocabulary of motives and develop them in a familiar classical composition process - but I don't see this a great tool for the woodshed in its current form.

For a new edition, I would like to see less - none, in fact - of the totally abstract permutation stuff like intervals on p19, and much more of the cookbook type stuff starting on p139.

I now understand where this book was coming from, but I simply didn't benefit much from it.

The exercises are really helpful. Just bear in mind: You will need a looot of time to go over all of them

Very well organized with a wide variety of presentations of the material. A finely structured presentation of several jazz basics with exteensive permutations of each.