Customer Reviews

How to Play Jazz & Improvise. Volume 1 [Play-A-Long Book & Recording Set for All Instruments]

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This book teaches how to learn to improvise for all instruments. Jamey's message is that it is easy to improvise. He introduces a way of practicing that starts simple and adds complexity step by step. There is much wisdom here, though sometimes a bit scattered and not that organized. The book is more practical than analytical, with short chapters on different topics and many musical examples and licks. I think the main strength with this book lies in the inspirational tone and the play-a-longs on the companion cd. I really like to play along with the songs. Even though the pianist, the drummer and the bass player play "simple" chord progressions and 12-bar blues songs they swing and they groove!

You should buy the DVD also, because in the DVD Jamey sits at his piano and explains many of the concepts presented in the book and shows how to play along. I find his way of talking about and demonstrating jazz to be very inspiring. He makes it simple. I have watched the DVD many times by now, just to get me in the right mood.

/Anders Vesterberg

The book explains the scales to be used with different chords. And gives some patterns to be played over these scales. The first play-along track have chord progressions to go along with those pattern, so you can play along using those pattern. The pattern starts very simple to more complex ones. Of course you may also improvise freely over the same backing tracks, using notes from the given scales. The book further explains ideas about hwo to build a nice solo, and introduces the concept of tension and release.

While all well done, I have only rated it 3 stars. I play the guitar, and found that an introduction to jazz specificly written for the guitar was much to prefer, e.g. by providing ideas on fingering of different scales. I guess that this would be similar for most instruments. Morover the main part of the book has to be written three times for instruments of different tuing.

The book proceeds directly to a modal approach to improvising. Non of the backing track would allow imporivsations within one major scale. I guess that the author want to avoid the reader to get stuck in the diatonic approach (Using the same scale if all chords are derived from one common scale, as the chord progression for many songs is.) Still, this makes the initial learning curve steeper.

On the other hand, after studying other book, I found lots of useful ideas when I reconsidered this one.