Customer Reviews

The Jazz Piano Book

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Before Mark Levine's Jazz Piano book came out, choosing a book on how to play piano was a lot like selecting a presidential candidate - - you may not have been crazy about the choices but... (blah blah blah) What makes this book different is that it walks a fine and brilliant line between theory, application and stylistics and it is never dry, and further it is contemporary. By chapter 10 and beyond he's getting into fourth chords, upper structures and "so what" chords. Most books sort of finish up just when Bud Powell is hitting the scene. This book however will take you up to McCoy Tyner and Kenny Barron. - - Unlike other books, his book also sites practical song examples and specific listening examples.

If you're entirely on your own, I think this book, along with a few Aebersold play-a-longs and Amadea's Harmonic Foundations for Jazz and Pop Music would really take you a long way. Your ultimate goal should be able to sit in at Jam sessions and with real players... that's where the real learning begins. Do what you have to do to get to the point that you can hang with a blues or Real Book standards.

(Regarding suitability for beginers vs. advanced players : This book is pretty good for players of all levels, though if you're starting from scratch another book to consider is Brain Waite's "Modern Jazz Piano : A Study in Harmony" or Amadea's book, then this.)

As a guitarist/percussionist who had piano lessons as a kid (and hated them) I have always been a little intimidated by the piano. Toward my goal of being able to comp and improvise over changes, I have purchased several jazz piano method books, including titles by Jerry Coker and Dan Haerle, and they have all been helpful.

Mark Levine's book, however, is exceptional. He introduces his concepts in perfect-sized chapters, with musical examples bracketed by coherent and engaging explanations. There are dozens of very musical exercises, and lists of suggested jazz standards for applying them. He conveys the essential elements of jazz theory in an easy-to-digest but highly intelligent anecdotal writing style.

The pacing of how material is presented in a method book is very important to the advancing musician. For example, I always knew that the melodic minor scale was important, but it only fully came together in my head when I worked through Mark's chapters on scale theory. Instead of being bombarded with chord voicing options, there are two or three. The emphasis is on getting you prepared enough to play music! Helpful hints seem to appear just as you need them, and Mark's enthusiasm for the piano provides subtle encouragement for the exhausting but rewarding process of learning jazz.

This is a book which stays on my music stand. It's large but spiral-bound. The font size is just right, and notes are professionally typeset (I hate books where you spend half your time deciphering notes from the author's scrawl). Bonus points for the great photos and the recommended discographies from all periods of jazz.

I would recommend this book to any intermediate to advanced player looking to expand and strengthen his or her abilities to comp and solo on piano. No one book can teach you everything, but this one is a hell of a start.

This is the best book on jazz theory I've encountered; would be one of my five desert-island music books. He's formatted the book like this: each chapter begins with a short transcribed passage that demonstrates, say, a particular type of voicing or scale in context. The musical concept behind the example is then explained and expanded on. Mark's brevity makes for a book that's dense with information, and the style is not so much prescriptive -- "play this and this and you're playing JAZZ!" as it is descriptive -- "Here's what you're hearing when you hear, e.g., this characteristic Bill Evans sound". The result is a book that covers everything, but still relies on the reader to listen to lots of jazz music, experiment, and practice.

Which is exactly how it should be. For the serious student, this is by leaps and bounds the best study guide to mastering the vocabulary of jazz piano as played by the musicians who've helped shape it over the last half-century-plus, and a great stepping stone toward developing one's own style.

I am a beginner interested in jazz piano, and have this highly acclaimed book. It is over 300 pages long, and filled with just about everything relevant to jazz piano you would need to know. The book begins with some basic theory, but assumes you already know such things as how to read music, and knowledge of the keys. Therefore I would not recommend this book to a complete beginner. If you have some music background, but want an in-depth study of jazz piano, then this is probably the book for you. Once Mark cuts through the basic theory(which he treats as a review), he gets into the following topics: circle of fifths, chord construction, extensive analysis of voicings (in a historical way...i.e., covers different styles of voicings from various jazz musicians), all types of scales (including rarely used ones), how to improvise over every type of chord (i.e., which scales to use), "modern" routines for practicing scales effectively, advanced playing styles such as substitutions, structures, and innovative voicings. The book is loaded with practice songs and great illustrations (including interesting pictures of jazz musicians.) His approach is friendly; he exhibits a true desire to help teach music and teach some history of jazz. Some aspects of the book are very complicated (and confuse me even after reading it several times), but this is to be expected with such a wealth of great information. This is the kind of theory book you can consistently turn to and use for a long time. I would recommend it to people who have some music background, and are motivated to study a range of theory, some of it very advanced.

Please read the other reviews. In my forty years of practicing, playing, and studying music in general and the piano in particular I have never seen such a well thought out, comprehensive, completely understandable, easy to read, value packed, exquitely formatted, thoroughly useful book on this subject. There is not any '....' to be found. It cannot possibly tell you everything you need to know, but it does tell you everything you need to know to find out the rest. Any one who does not derive tons of benefit from this book is simply too lazy to really study and assimilate what it has to say. Period.
Mark is to be commended, and Sher Publishing, too, for the lavish attention they paid to presenting a book whose production quality is on a par with its content. Also highly recommended is a new work by Randy Halberstadt, also published by Sher (check their website), called 'Metaphors for the Musician'. Master the information in these two books, Put it to use it by learning lots of tunes, and the only thing standing in the way of your success will be the amount of talent you actually have. What they don't cover, you probably don't need!!!

This is certainly no "Learn Piano Jazz" book and CD combo. You know the type: 15 progressivly harder lessons that get you to do just that. 15 things.
This, on the other hand, is a serious, complete, and deep-diving plunge into the inner workings of Jazz piano. If you are bored and want a shallow understanding of Jazz piano, buy a cheap book and CD combo. If you want to play the classic jazz standards, buy the sheet music. If you want to deeply and truly understand jazz piano, buy this book.

I've dabbled in jazz piano for many years to augment my rock chops. Treating this as a sideline (Until recently - I've started accompanying a standards singer), I haven't had a lot of spare money to spend on it. I've run into several frustrations with learning jazz piano that this book addresses with varying degrees of success:

1. Buying bad materials - mistakes are expensive. Buying this book is not a mistake. It is much more generally applicable than the "jazzy" major scales, arpeggios and marginally useful patterns that some books throw at you.

2. Finding good materials - Some of the best hard-to-find materials/tips I have compiled over the years have been the result of long searching and sheer luck - a great find at a used book sale, an excellent teacher (trumpet player!!!) at the community college giving non-credit continuing ed to adults, isolated useful jewels on the web, and occasional inspirations from the ether. Most of those building blocks are laid out nicely in this book, particularly in early chapters. To think where I'd be now if I had found this book 20 years earlier. . .

3. Self-contained books - No book, standing alone, can take you from newbie to virtuoso. There are printing costs, size limitations, royalities to pay for reproducing songs, etc. and it gets expensive for publisher and consumer when a book tries to do too much. However, after years of staring at my almost unused Meheegan books, that are useless without expensive and (until recently) hard-to-find fake books, I am quite sensitive to jazz piano books like this one that say, "Go look in your fake book." Jumping between books is a distraction, and perfect matches between fake books and instruction books is unlikely unless the author draws from a specific book (On the bright side, the book recommends two popular fake books). Copyright laws need to be respected, but I prefer the approach of Solo Jazz Piano: The Linear Approach (Olmstead ISBN: 0634007610) to this issue - borrow chord progressions from a song like "Laura", and write a new tune ("Flora") to use for exercises/examples. As a bonus, the new tunes are useful resources for embellishing old tunes. Another minor frustration is when the book provides a pattern and merely says, "OK, do this in all 12 keys." I own Finale, and other books do the job for you, but it would be nice to have at least some of these exercises written out completely. I do like that the book provides a recommended list of recordings for supplemental study, so you know where to go for inspiration when you're not working through the book.

4. Density - I love to fly through books that give instant gratification. Who doesn't? However, such books do not stand up to repeated and extended study, so there is limited bang for the buck. This book is not that way. Some paragraphs can take a week or more to work through completely (The sentence, "Now go master this in all 12 keys," is contained in many such paragraphs). This appeals to my cheapskate side - for the price of one or two piano lessons, this book is packed material that will keep students busy and will reward repeated viewing.

With this book, you're getting high quality and much content for a good price, but save up for fake books and a library of CD's in order to reap the full benefit of this book.

Mark Levine's book is about as close as you can get to having a professional jazz pianist sitting next to you as you play. If you start at Chapter 1 (even if you are an advanced player) and proceed through the book, your playing will undergo enormous and beneficial changes. The pacing is perfect and Levine's examples are just great. At first, I couldn't believe a jazz book could be this good. Maybe it's a fake, I thought. So I asked a very fine pianist I know who, it turns out, knows Levine. He told me this man is someone to listen to. I have no doubt about that opinion. The amount of jazz you will learn in this book would fill years of lessons. All you need to do is to sit down, go slowly and voila, you won't believe your playing in just a few weeks. In the long term, the benefits are inestimable. I wish Levine would write another book, perhaps one on the blues or style or whatever. He could write on politics, for all I care. He just does things right!!

The Point: Levine's book is truly great.

Levine gives you the real thing, and he explains it in a way that darn near everyone will be able to understand.

This book is not just for keyboard players. (I play the Trumpet, and Levine taught me more about Jazz harmony than any of my Jazz-trumpet-player buddies ever did.)

CAVEAT: To benefit from this book, you MUST know the fundamentals of music. Can you read music? If you had to (and you couldn't get out of it), could you tell me what note I was pointing to on a piece of sheet music? No matter what "key" it was in? Okay. Next, do you really KNOW your Major scales? Can you play them on your instrument? Don't BS yourself - could you really do it, even if your life depended on it?

If you said "yes" to the questions above, and you really want to play jazz, you are probably ready for this book.

Again, for those who want to play Jazz, if you know what a "staff" is, and a "clef," and you "know" your major scales, get this book. I beg of you, start here.

Levine clearly explains a whole bunch of the basic stuff regarding how to hear and play real Jazz. If you master Levine's lessons, you probably won't sound like a hack.

Levine's book gives you just what you need to know, right now. Real jazz involves relatively complex harmony, but it isn't nearly as hard or mysterious as many "jazz" books make it seem.

If this book had been around when I first started fumbling through all of those lousy "How to Play Just Like a Real Jazz Cat" books out there, I would have progressed in my jazz playing at a much faster pace.

I recommend this book to all intermediate/advanced musicians who are studying jazz without the guidance of a genuinely knowledgable jazz teacher.

Recommended!

If you are already a piano player and have some knowledge of music theory, this book will help you take your understanding of jazz to a new level. It covers a LOT of musical ground and places it within a historical context.

This is not a book that is loaded with exercises, but it is packed with concepts that one could apply and that would take most pianists years to master. Even if you are very good, you will not outgrow it anytime soon.

The Jazz Piano book goes into various types of chords, voicings and how to use them. It also talks about modal harmony, constructing various types of scales and how to apply these ideas to improvistational solos.

This book is well-organized, fascinating, filled with good pictures, examples and ideas. It is a bargain at any price.

If you are new to the jazz world and classically trained, I recommend Jazz Improvisation for the Classical Pianist. This will help you to get away from thinking in patterns on a page with specific fingerings and get you to develop your ability to hear tones and intuit music in intervals. This is an important step toward being a good jazz pianist. It will also help you to break a lot of the conditioning that comes from many years of classical training that does not serve you well within jazz.

I also think it is essential for pianists getting into jazz to apply what they are learning as much as possible. For this reason, I recommend Vol. 3, The II/V7/I Progression: A New Approach To Jazz Improvisation (Book & CD Set) and anything else by Aebersold because this gives you experience playing. The specific link above covers a progression that constitutes 70% plus of most standards. Therefore, this is a good place to get started.