Customer Reviews

Jazz Style of Tal Farlow : The Elements of Bebop Guitar

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This is at once the most unusual and the coolest guitar book I've ever studied. Unlike other books that just seem to cover scales over chords, this one really digs into the style of a well known old school jazz guitarist Tal Farlow. The way this book talks about visualizing the neck and using anticipation and expansion in my one note lines had quite an impact on my playing after I practiced the examples in the book. Of course some of Tal's great music is used in this book, but they also cover the many variations of jazz chord changes and reharmonizations. If you're a fan of his music, you'll FREAK over this stuff, but even if you're not the unusual approaches used in his playing will probably intrigue you enough to check out his music. Again, outstanding!

A beautiful book, you can feel the passion of the author on each page. Very interesting musical stuff too, which gives an insight of Tal Farlow's playing. I haven't played through all examples so I won't comment those, but the few I played were nice. There are some solo transcription with small neck diagramms showing on which position the notes were played (by group notes of 5 or 6 if I remember well), and I think it is a very clever way to give a better understanding on how a player thinks, which IMO speaks much more than tablature because you still have to read the musical notation.

There is an interesting part on the chords he used and his re-harmonizations, once again I haven't practiced those for the moment so I won't comment. The detailed explaination which follow each chord-melody transcription seems to be very good though.

Most of the examples come from actual Farlow recordings (not "à la..."), so if you play through all of them, you should indeed get some ideas used by this great master.