Customer Reviews

Jazz Guitar Structures

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While "Jazz Guitar Technique," Andrew Green's first book, (highly recommended) covers many facets of jazz guitar playing, "Jazz Guitar Structures" is focused on the process of solo line development. "Jazz Guitar Structures" provides a detailed approach to building improvised jazz lines using short identifiable structures. Anyone familiar with Andrew Green's first book, "Jazz Guitar Technique," knows that he is concise and direct in delivering information. This new book also includes a CD that demonstrates many of the lines in the book with bass & piano rhythm section accompaniment.

This book details an approach that includes hearing, facility and visualization exercises by which the reader gains experience in hearing and applying familiar melodic figures to most chord types. This approach really helps to reduce the seemingly huge amount of material that one can feel confronted with when working at jazz improvisation. This is not a book of licks or stylistic examples. Rather, it is a detailed approach to making the greatest use of short melodic structures. What excites me is that this approach, once mastered, will enable a person to fully develop many, many uses for melodic structures as they come into one's musical consciousness. As a student of improvisation, I have read interviews with the masters where one will refer to hearing one of her or his favorite players apply an idea in many different contexts. I am quite sure that "Jazz Guitar Structures" provides a method with which to do that. This is excellent material.

great..book... it changes the way you think about playing..the guitar.. it show you things that you may or may not know.. and connects the dots.. for example: arpeggios... I never thought about them in terms of a visual 4 note pattern..starting on each string.. i was always taught from low e to high e.. but Andrews book shows you the arps in small quick to finger patterns.. that lay out the whole fingerboard. Like i said stuff that you may know.. but never made the connection.. then all of a sudden a light goes on!

I have many books.. but if you really want to know what you are doing and don't have a lot of time to work on it.. this is a great place to start...

PS.. if you are looking for TAB.. try something else.( you need to at least know the basic notes and a little theory)..

This book opens up a whole new world..and the stuff sounds goooood..!

"keep Playing"

KAS...

It's funny how you can go for years playing guitar solos based on the same old riffs, feeling like you have hit a wall, and someone shows you one thing that increases your soloing ideas 20-fold. EVERY PAGE of this book has such a moment. It's not just full of riffs, like other books I've picked up, but linear ideas based on major and minor scale fragments, built upon different scale degrees of the chord, which you can manipulate into original melodic ideas. It this sounds technical, the book will too. It is NOT a beginning guide to jazz guitar. No tablature, so you need to know how to read music...and know your chords!!
Spend one day on one page, and get a hundred new ideas.
Great book, Mr. Green!!!!

I bought Jazz Guitar Technique a little over a year ago and am still working my way through it. My wife bought this book for me for Christmas and let me tell you, these books are DEEP. There is so much information in this series of books that you'll be picking them up again and again before you feel like you've absorbed everything they have to offer. Andrew Green's instructions in this area are key: Don't try to learn too many things at once as it waters down the learning process.
Before I go further though let me warn you, these books are not for the total beginner looking to learn jazz guitar. Also, if you can't read music AT ALL then this book is not for you. My music reading isn't that great, but I can muddle along slowly and actually this book is helping me in that regard as well. Mr. Green's exercises are usually in eighth notes so the rhythms aren't complex. He encourages the readers to try the exercises not just in other keys and positions (which we should all be doing anyway) but in other rhythms as well, truly making them your own.
The content itself is very easy to understand and work with. If, like me, you've been practicing the same sort of stuff for years, the material in here will not only beef up your lines and overall knowledge of the instrument, it'll make you feel like you ran into the phone booth as Clark Kent and came out Superman. After I had a few things down and started trying to improvise with them it was scary how fast I was able to adapt the ideas into my style and how they instatly added a whole world of melodic depth to my playing. Even when I wasn't trying to sound "jazzy" I still found that the things I ws playing sounded much more interesting and relevant to the chords I was playing over.
It's strange that there are probably more guitarists today than there ever were previously and yet there are almost no heroes. There are a GAZILLION of us and yet so many of us are still trying to emulate Hendrix or Page or Montgomery or Christian. As a rock guitarist with a strong love for jazz I feel that this book and Improvising Jazz Guitar can help us learn new ideas while at the same time feeling inspired to achieve new heights in our own development as well as the development of the language of popular guitar. THANK YOU ANDREW GREEN!!

This book has been the stepping stone I need to get to applying arpeggios all over the neck and combining different sounds with them. I've only gotten through the 1st section (minor arpeggios) and I'm not only more able to connect arpeggios over the neck but also able to substitute them in over other chords. For instance, before this book I didn't know how to substitute and play only minor arpeggios over a ii V I progression. Now I know multiple ways and can very the sound depending on degree of the chord I build off of. There is a lot of information and so much to get out of the book. The other sections that I haven't even gotten to yet covers in the same way how to use and apply major triad +2 and minor tetrachords.

The best thing about Andrew's two books I have (Comping is the other I have) is they way he presents things. The examples he gives allow you to understand the concept and then later know how to easily apply it. So many books give too few examples that are so easily applicable outside the book.

To get a better idea of the contents of the book, check out Andrew Green's website at www.[...]com. This along with his Comping book have been two of my favorite books in a while. Know that both of these books require reading skills (no tab) and they are not aimed at beginners.

This book is great on two levels: (1) it introduces the reader to a smattering of essential jazz structures and the harmonic environment in which they are played; and (2) it gives a thorough system for internalizing the structures at the most intuitive level.

The second part is really the key, because when the structures in this book run out you can take the system and apply it to other structures that are out there. By combining this book with the Charlie Parker Omnibook, Building a Jazz Vocabulary and a healthy dose of transcription, you can fundamentally improve your sound.

this will teach you the fundamentals in creating your own voice in jazz guitar, instead of wriggling your fingers, now you can play interesting triadic lines and hip modern superimposed harmonies, thank you andrew green!

Very clever book, I never read the notions explained here anywhere else,
or maybe it was because it wasn't clear enough. The material is precisely
organized and the examples sound great. This gave me another way to hear
bebop, recognizing some structures.

You have a lot to work on this stuff to make it comes naturally, but the
challenge is really worthy, so good luck !

peace

This book, though limited to just a few melodic structures, gives a very good insight to what improvisation is about: telling your own story, using coherent and consistent melodic structures. It goes to the basis, and because it doesn't overwhelm you with all possible modes/scales/structures but just sticks to a few powerfull tools, enables you to understand and implement. A must for the advanced guitar player.

I bought a copy of "Jazz Guitar Structures" a few weeks ago because of the glowing reviews I saw here. They were right. Andrew Green supplies a perspective on soloing that I haven't run across before, and while I don't own every jazz guitar book in print, I think I'm close. I found Green's material to be fresh, original, and masterful. His premise is to employ arpeggios of different chord colors (but mostly minor) and superimpose them on the bar harmonies. I loved it. However, this is not a book for beginners, and intermediate players will struggle as well, so be forewarned: you must know every note on the fretboard; you must be able to read staff notation fluently (there's no tablature); you must know the spellings of chords; and you must be conversant in all the scale fingerings and modes. This book is for already-comptetent players looking to ratchet their playing up a few notches. It's working for me, and it'll do that for you. Excellent book.