Customer Reviews

Mel Bay Kurt Rosenwinkel Compositions

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

 

 

The book is helpful in pointing you in the right direction, but you'll still have to do a fair amount of transcribing to nail the tunes exactly. The solos are generally good, but the chord symbols are often incorrect. Other times the symbols are presented in a non-intuitive fashion (i.e. C#7(Maj7)(#5)).

In order to get working lead sheets for my group I pretty much had to transcribe all the tunes from scratch. I'd like my 20 bucks back.

I bought this book of course loving Kurt's music and possessing a great deal of zeal and desire to learn many of his tunes. Whew! That zeal was quickly re-evaluated. These MFs are are HARD to play, but they are rewarding and challenging creatively once you begin to feel comfortable with the changes (a task which, with most of the tunes, is not really possible on one read-through). If you are looking for something to immediately impact your playing, this might not be the book for you; this is the type of loaded product, however, that potentially supports long-term growth as a musician.

Kurt Rosenwinkel is one of the most creative and original guitar players on the jazz scene today. I think the only reason it has taken this long to come out with a book of his transcriptions is because they needed to find somebody who could take on that monumental task (Chuck Stevens-amazing job). The book contains lead sheets from "Deep Song" as well as several selections from past albums. The selections from his past albums are all excellent choices, for example "East Coast Love Affair" and "Zhivago". The music is written in lead sheet form, bass parts, tabs (solos only), and piano parts (piano for three selections only).
The guitar voicings used by Kurt are not written out so using the lead sheets in conjunction with the recording is a must. The written out solos are a really nice feature of this book. The entire solo is written out in tabs, which really helps when determining positions.
In the "selected Kurt Rosenwinkel compositions" section only the basic lead sheets are included and this is where I wish they included a little more. For example, in "Zhivago", Kurt's intro solo is not included and there are some tricky things he is doing with voicings and alternate tunings (I think) which are not included. Also, it would have been nice to have a little bit of analysis of his style and writing. Maybe some brief words about the chord progressions and his creative use of the melodic minor modes.
Other than that, I love this book. There is enough material to keep one busy for many years.

This book about Kurt Rosenwinkel's compositions and solos is not worthy buying it for me. If you're interested in his soloing style, maybe you'll find something to work on, but on the other side, the lead sheets of his compositions are real crap. I bought this book because I wanted to study and learn Rosenwinkel's tunes guitar arrangements, which are sometimes really interesting and beautiful. But there's nothing about those guitar parts in this book. If I would learn Rosenwinkel's Zhivago briliant guitar arrangement I would have to transcribe it myself from scratch.
All the tunes are presented in a sort of "real book" style, which really means providing not enough informations to understand the arrangement and play correctly these beatiful pieces.
I bought Ben Monder's compositions book, it's very well written, and everything is there, every note.
Unfortunately this isn't true for this book, and this is really sad, because Kurt Rosenwinkel is a fine composer too.
I would like to have my money back, or better, an integration to this book that contains the guitar parts for the tunes.

Most of the songs are from the latest cd, Deep Song. It is a great resource to study and understand his music

I thought listening to this guys music was crazy enough. When you try to analyze Kurts compostions/solos and get into his head, you fully realize the gravity of this mans deep understanding of not just music, but life. Nice simple photos..this thing is strong and will hold together over time. Buy this book is has bass parts and Mehldau's piano voicings, even tab! YAY!!!

Kurt is a great musician and much can be learned from these transcriptions and compositions. I would highly recommend this for musicians looking for that modern jazz sound.