Customer Reviews

Jazz Ballads: Jazz Play-Along Volume 4 (Jazz Play-Along Series)

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I purchased this book, as well as another 7-8 books in the series and have found them to be FANTASTIC books for learning great songs and being able to practice improvisation! I even use the CD accompaniment tracks for performing at art festivals, dinners, etc. as the arrangements and jazz trio/quartet are great players and really make it great fun to play along with. I keep coming back to these books for long practice sessions on my different saxes, flute, and Yamaha WX5 EWI. These books are a great investment in learning, practice, and simple joy of performing a lot of great songs with rich and well-played accompaniment! As a note, I've been a performing (eg. pro) musician for more than 30-years...and still find these books of great use! Highly recommended (the entire series of books)!!!

This is a beautiful collection of jazz ballads--it's my favorite Hal Leonard play-along. Only slight disappointment is that My Foolish Heart is given a light-Latin treatment, rather than the slow-ballad treatment that I'm used to from listening to Bill Evans and Scott Lafaro, but a slow-downer program can pretty much take care of that, too.

The following comments are from an amateur bass player's viewpoint, and they apply equally to all of the volumes in the Hal Leonard Jazz Play-Along series: These playalongs come with two complete tracks for each tune. One is the "split-track" that puts the bass in the left channel and piano and drums in the right channel. There is a soloist--either trumpet or sax--who plays a VERY vanilla head, then there's a repeat with just the rhythm section so that YOU can try soloing against it. A bass player can just cut out the left channel and play bass behind the soloist and then play behind a "phantom" soloist. You can imagine a vocalist or whatever instrument you want. I think this is great practice since a real soloist might be playing anything, and you need to be able to play behind him no matter what his solo sounds like. Or YOU can be the second soloist yourself on these play-alongs, if you want. When using headphones and cutting out the left (bass) track to use as a bass play-along, I find that the right track sounds much more natural if I put it into both channels, using either a software program or special adapter cables I made. I do not find the second "stereo" track to be useful for a bass player since it is rhythm section only and you can't pull the bass entirely out of it. (Jamie Aebersold's play-alongs have only a rhythm section, no actual soloist, but you can split the bass out of his play-alongs and play along with the rest of the rhythm section, imagining any soloist you want.)

There is a bass clef section for C instruments in each Hal Leonard play-along book that accompanies the CD, but it contains no bass lines--just changes and a melody written for a bass clef solo instrument, like trombone. You can use it to learn the melody on bass, if you wish, then branch off from there to write you own bass solo. I think it's a good thing that no bass lines are provided because it's an excellent exercise to write your own bass line in two-feel, then write another one that walks. After a while, you can learn to pull this off on the fly, just looking at the changes. If you're a rank beginner, you'll probably be busy enough just playing roots that you get from the changes, then you can add approach notes, and pretty soon you'll advance to two-feel, then walking. I use these play-alongs in conjunction with instruction books on constructing bass lines to learn to apply bass construction techniques to Real Book tunes. Using these play-alongs is the next best thing to playing with a live group, and they're always ready when you want to practice.

If you're a Mac person, I recommend downloading your play-along CDs into iTunes, where you can organize them as you like. But I highly recommend actually playing them through Audiolobe, which you can buy online for $20 at its home website. You load the tune you want from iTunes into Audiolobe, which then lets you change tempo and/or pitch and even create focused loops on the fly--you don't have to make a new file each time you want to do this. A great and fun way to learn with play-alongs.

Great. Nice selection of ballads. Best ballad book for trumpeters. Real nice backing arrangements.

Good Arregments. And BAllad selection,
One of the best books of HAl Leonard Play Along series.