Customer Reviews

Jazz Standards for Piano (Piano Solo Songbook)

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

 

 

This book contains 19 standards arranged as jazz piano solos. The solos are not the standard sheet music for these songs. They are arrangements at an early to mid-intermediate level, very clean (no big runs or fills) yet very full sounding. The chord voicings are jazz oriented. So even with no improvisation, the music sounds like real jazz. The chord symbols are there (some nice extensions and substitutions) so you can learn them and improvise if you want, however, the songs do not include a written out improvisation. The nice thing is that if you just want to learn a song as a recital piece with no improv it will still sound great. For the money this is a great book. The notes are all there, just add the swing.

The arrangements are by Thomas Coppola. The following songs are included:

Alice In Wonderland, April In Paris, Autumn Leaves, But Beautiful, Everything Happens To Me, Girl Talk, How High The Moon, I Didn't Know What Time It Was, I'll Remember April, Im All Smiles, Lush Life, The Nearness Of You, People, Stella By Starlight, Sweet And Lovely, There Will Never Be Another You, The Touch Of Your Lips, What's New?, You Are Too Beautiful

This was wonderful music to learn. The chords are lush. For those of us new to jazz piano, it's a fascinating change. I do want to say that I think some of this music is beyond the reach of early intermediate pianists (and a couple of the chords in "Alice in Wonderland" are literally beyond the reach of most human hands), but it's OK for solid intermediates. Well worth buying.

Happy with the purchase. The book has some typos but corrections are available. I managed to get some MP3s of the songs in the book as played in the book. That helped a lot. If you're building a reportoire you'll need a couple of books to get all the songs (better to get a book a month as opposed to a massive fake book), and this is definitely one of the books to get.

At first I thought, oh my, not exactly jazz standards in the book, but when I heard the MP3s I realized what a good choice of songs they were indeed. This book also gave me one of those rare occasions in life when you discover an absolutely fantastic song you've never heard before. I'm talking about Autumn Leaves. I you-tubed it and found a singer named Eva Cassidy. Absolutely incredible rendition of a beautiful song. So now I know about about the beautiful heartfelt ballad and also the jazzed up version in this book.

I am short on words but I like this book. The title is correct. Check the chords. They look funky but after checking the notes they sound good, if different. I use this book for fun with chords. My wife likes to listen to me play them, and then add to the scores.