The Jazz Piano 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.

I started from page 1 and worried about the ambiguity of the chord notation. Being a pop-, rock-, folk-,classical-type player, I feared not being able to navigate the book because of this. What is G7 to a jazz person? It is not explained, it seems. Does it use the B natural or the B flat? Can one of the four notes, even the root, be eliminated and it is still called a G7 in jazz? Why does Levine say 'voicings' are the same as 'chords' in jazz? To me, they are entirely different concepts.But I did not get discouraged.I went on to play the different two-chord combinations created from various of the masters of jazz and taken from their songs wherein halfsteps down and halfsteps up were being illustrated.I went into ecstasy! My Baldwin Acrosonic became a supersized jazz vehicle immediately.For each combination, I wrote down the "basic" chords that they were related to as I knew it. For example, the first such two halfstep-melodied chords, in my 'pop-rock-folk-classical' way of thinking, were simply 'jacked up' (or 'jazzed-up') versions of G7 (by which I mean a chord with G, B, D and F in it in any position) moving to C major. Or perhaps D diminished moving to C major. In the end, the chord combination, by Bob Haggart from his "What's New?", is first an F diminished with the note "E" added, followed by a C6-9, without the root note C (!) both carefully 'voiced' (in my words) using two hands.I guess the bass player plays the note "C" here, right?So far , this approach has worked for me. I am NOT playing the exercises rote! I am understanding the 'simpler' versions of chords from which they are 'derived', the chord of my 'old' world of music. I write this down. Then I write down what the given sheet music is chords (without burdening myself by also writing the voicings down, since they are already in the 'sheet' music given by Levine). Then I notice how perturbing and voicing the 'simpler' chords yields the 'jazzed-up' chords!THIS WAY IT ALL MAKES SENSE!! I am thrilled to tie my 'new' world of jazz, at least so far, to my 'old' world, of shall we say, more 'standard' music.I have a teacher, but he's like us all.........eccentric. In this case, hard to nail down for lessons. I'm listening to jazz. I'll see how far I can go. But I won't drop my pop, country, Beatles, rock, ballads, boobie-woogie and other styles at all. I'll try to simply (hah...not simple!) ADD jazz to my list.So far, then, I am grateful for this stairway to jazz, and I thank Mark. The lingo seems loose and variable. After all, the jazz pros probably grunt anything they can to one another about where, in general to go next, and somehow those grunts are seen as formal terms? Or they may write down fake sheets in any notation that makes sense to the four or five guys with them. Not sure about that. But this journey is heaven! Thank you again Mark!Jazz is cool, hot, and beautiful!