Customer Reviews

Mel Bay Learn to Play Brazilian Jazz Guitar

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If you have mastered the basics of nylon guitar fingerstyle playing, then this book will ease your musical journey into the world of Bossa Nova, Samba, Choro, and related South American styles. The book includes a very good chapter on how to read rhythm (probably the biggest challenge to newcomers of Brazilian style guitar), and chapters on chord construction and progressions. David Marshall's writing style is informal and friendly. He covers some music theory -- as it relates to the Brazilian guitar -- in a comprehensible, non-intimidating manner. He includes numerous rhythmic examples written in standard notation and tab, along with a CD to help you learn those difficult patterns. The latter half of the book consists of fifteen solos written in standard notation only (no tab). The solos range from moderate-beginner to intermediate in difficulty.

For anyone interested in pursuing the Brazilian jazz style, "The Brazilian Guitar Book" by Nelson Faria is a good place to continue after working through the Marshall book. Faria's instruction is more comprehensive, but geared more towards the advanced-intermediate guitar player.

I was very impressed with the well-structured layout of "Learn to Play Jazz Guitar". Marshall obviously loves this type of guitar playing, and manages to convey his enthusiasm and expertise to the reader. Studying from this book is almost comparable to attending private lessons with a competent Brazilian guitarist. Highly recommended.

This is follow up to Russell's fine review.

I'm a jazz and classically trained guitarist who has been teaching for 12+ years. Every year our studio gets a fair number of students that list learning Brazilian guitar as one of the styles they are interested in. I finally broke down and bought this book a year ago hoping I could recommend it to those students (at the time there weren't any helpful reviews on Amazon I could use to determine which method book would fill that need). While this book is very thorough, those who would benefit most from it would be intermediate classical guitarists looking to learn to play Brazillian style guitar.

One thing I would have liked to have seen less of is his arrangements which are mostly classical guitar pieces with Brazilian jazz style rhythms. Had he provided more traditional Brazilain pieces I would have given this book 5 stars.

Hopefully soon someone will come out with a good beginners Brazlian guitar book that features examples and songs that are authentically Brazillian.