Product Description

This book and CD pack will teach you how to play jazz chords all over the fretboard in a variety of styles and progressions. It covers voicings, progressions, jazz chord theory, comping, chord melody, chord soloing, voice leading, and more. The CD includes 99 full-band demo tracks.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #851394 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 149 pages

Customer Reviews

A key resource for your Jazz Guitar Practice Regimen
A great method-supplement for Jazz Guitar, but not the first or only book to buy if you are just starting out in Jazz Guitar.

This is a good chord method book/CD package, heavy on method, lighter on comping, chord melody, and chord soloing, and jazz standards. If you already have some good Jazz intro books, and found them easy going, this book may help round out your skills. It is recommended as a complementary study and follow-on once for the aspiring Jazz Guitarist needing very structured practice-method material.

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Reach exceeds grasp
This book is definitely not for beginners. I'd recommend it for advanced guitarists who already have some knowledge of jazz guitar. The book could probably be much shorter than it is. I only use the first 20 pages which contain all of the voicings. The rest of the book is full of exercises and his approach to chord melody and chord soloing. Most advanced players expect to only gain a little from most publications because many books are geared toward people who don't know the instrument.
I think it's definitely worth $20 if you'd like a systematic grouping of chords. Don't expect to gain much with chord soloing and chord melody if you're not already capable of these.

Disappointing
There are a number of problems with this book.
First, there are way too many difficult/unusable chord forms that you are supposed to memorize. These are not the forms that are used by most real jazz guitarists. Joe Pass never played 80% of these chord forms.
Second, there are only a few useful ideas presented and the same text is repeated over and over to fill 150 pages. The author uses a strange hard-to-use notation to symbolize chords instead of just using the normal block diagrams.
Finally, the main thrust of this book is to show how you can play all the different chord types with every note of the scale on top. That's not a very useful scenario.