Jazz Improv: How to Play It and Teach It [Plastic Comb]

Jimmy Amadie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1991

This book contains a unique method for improvising based on the tonal concept of tension and release providing students, teachers and professional musicians with important principles of improvising melodic ideas, culminating in a creative procedure for tonality, modality and bi-tonality practices.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jimmy Amadie is recognized world-wide as a jazz musician, educator, teacher and author. His texts: "Harmonic Foundation for Jazz and Popular Music" and "Jazz Improv: How to Play It and Teach It" are used in more than 35 countries including Australia and Japan with information on the texts published in English, Italian, German, French and Japanese. Mr. Amadie has been pianist/composer in Woody Herman's Big Band, Mel Torme's personal accompanist, co-author of compositions with Steve Allen and composer/condutor for the National Football Film scores. In addition to teaching privately, he teaches at both Berklee College of Music in Boston and Villanova University for their summer programs. He is also a concert artist for Baldwin Piano Company as well as an artist/clinician for Korg Inc.

Product Details

• Plastic Comb: 158 pages
• Publisher: Thornton Pubns (January 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0961303514
• ISBN-13: 978-0961303518
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #883,498 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A BREAKTHROUGH IN JAZZ ED. BUT..., January 3, 2000

By 

Eddie Landsberg "My 10th year as a reviewer !... (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Jazz Improv: How to Play It and Teach It (Plastic Comb)

Amadea's approach to teaching Jazz improv is a major breakthrough. The book that precedes this and which you should read first (HARMONIC FOUNDATIONS FOR JAZZ AND POP MUSIC) is incredible. It presupposes you know NOTHING, yet after you work through this book it'll be like finishing 4 years of college in 6 months and graduating MCL. - - The one drawback of JAZZ IMPROV is that it requires a lot of thinking... meaning it ain't no magic carpet ride... ya gotta be willing to work at it and stick with it. To put the book in a nutshell, you think of scale tones numerically. You then learn concepts of how to target the tones. His concept of improv is based on TENSION and RELEASE. - - WARNING: Don't think just because you've read the chapter and understand it, you're ready to go on with the next. You have to internalize it. A neat book I used in conjunction with this is BERT LIGON's CONNECTING CHORDS WITH LINEAR HARMONY.

14 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, we have someone who can teach and write about jazz., April 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Jazz Improv: How to Play It and Teach It (Plastic Comb)

Jazz is recognized throughout the world as America's greatest art form and we who create this music owe a great deal to Jimmy Amadie for his ability to explain what we are doing and how it can be improved. His conception are exactly what is needed by student and professional to keep our music in step with the 1990's and beyond. He defies the old saying that jazz cannot be taught.

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely excellent, November 28, 2011

By 

NewMexicoKid - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jazz Improv: How to Play It and Teach It (Plastic Comb)

As a competent classical pianist, I have struggled for years trying to learn to play jazz from instructional materials like the Aerbersold series, Mark Levine books, and any number of other books on the subject. It hasn't been for any lack of ability, but, like many people, I have found a lot of these books to be vague or poorly written. Some are too advanced to be of any use to me as a beginning jazz musician. Others are too simple and basic. All of them seem to offer frustratingly useless advice, like "train your ear", "play what you hear in your head", or "play solos over these modes" without providing any concrete support in terms of structure or practical exercises. It had seemed, at least in the world of written materials, that there wasn't anybody who was willing to teach, or capable of teaching, jazz. (The only exception to this is Bert Ligon's "Connecting Chords with Linear Harmony", which I recently discovered. But Amadie's books cover everything Ligon does, and more.)

I generally don't like to review a book before completely reading it, but in this case I want to share my excitement, about not only one, but two Amadie books. I just recently discovered them and have started working through the beginning chapters.

I have to say: I'm glad I finally found something that makes sense. Amadie's books are no-nonsense, no frills, direct, to the point, practical and immediately useful. He doesn't beat around the bush. He doesn't make it seem like jazz is some mystical/magical art. He knows how to play jazz and, even better, knows exactly how to convey this information to a student. Right from the first page, you will experience the "a-ha" of knowing exactly what you need to do and where the learning process will take you. The books are light on theory and heavy on method. Nothing vague about the method. You know exactly which tones to work with.

I'm a firm believer that teachers should not only be good teachers but good practioners of what they teach. With this in mind I was pleased to discover Amadie's website and see for myself that he knew how to play jazz. Go to his website and listen to the samples. It's a shame there aren't any recordings from his young years before he had problems with his hands. I believe the recordings are all from his later years (in his 60s) after various surgeries and decades of limited playing. Wow! Imagine what he sounded like when he was playing with popular bands so many years ago.

In "The Harmonic Foundation" book Amadie shows you how to construct jazz voicings over the set of chords you find in lead sheets and fake books. Each chord can be voiced in different ways and so he shows you the method and it's up to you to choose which voicing to use at a particular moment. There are several chapters, each chapter treats a different type of chord. The voicings are for both hands. In each chapter, he introduces the method, provides some examples, and provides a series of exercises for the student to work on. After the exercises are some "real songs" and again the student must use what they've learned to provide voicings for the chord changes. Working through this book the student will learn the full range of chords required in playing jazz, how to voice them, and will practice them enough in all keys as to be able to follow along lead sheets in impromptu sessions.

The other book "Jazz Improv: How to Play It And Teach It" is all about improvising with the right hand. Starting out right on page 1, he shows how to construct chromatic and non-chromatic approach tones to the chord tones, again providing examples and asking the student to work through exercises on C7 F7 G7 progression. These approach patterns get more elaborate as the pages progress. Still on C7 F7 G7 progressions. Then, he moves on to melodic ideas on the scale and adds a few more chords to the exercises. In the left hand he gives appropriate voicings and refers the student to the other book for more ideas. The book goes on to cover all types of chords (not just dominant 7ths) and how to apply what's learned to improvising in bebop, blues and standards. The same standards of excellence are applied throughout the book. He doesn't skimp on any material and he makes sure the student knows which exercises to do.

In both books, you do not need to wonder what notes to play. It's all there for you. You don't need to think about it, you just need to practice it. The challenge is in practicing it enough so that you get as much mastery as you want out of it. With enough time and practice and assuming you have sufficient dexterity, you should be able to play like how Amadie himself sounds on his recordings.

I think Amadie deserves a lot of credit for breaking down an art form into its quintessential building blocks and sharing that information with us.