Product Description

One of the finest books available on jazz guitar chords. Joe covers all the bases with two sections on chord forms and chord passages. Chords are divided into six categories: Major, Seventh, Augmented, Minor, Diminished, and Minor Seventh Flat Fifth, each showing substitutions and inversions that Joe would play when confronted with "basic" chord symbols. The chord passage section is divided into nine categories, including such topics as Major Sounds, Diminished Sounds, Augmented Sounds, Standard Patter Chord Substitutions, and other chord progression - related topics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #401136 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-04
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 24 pages

Customer Reviews

Disappointing and incomplete
I disagree with the other glowing reviews of this book. I love Joe Pass and have great respect for him as a guitarist, but this book is very disappointing. It was probably ghost written, and I don't think that that person, or the people at Mel Bay put much effort into this book. I have found other Mel Bay books with errors in chords (TABS don't match the chords written in standard notation) etc.

Two or the other reviewers say that this book was recommended by someone else (Joe Satriani and their teacher respectively) and seem to base part of their review on that recommendation. I've been playing guitar for 35 years and have had the book for 6 months and can't agree that this is a valuable resource.

The book has two section (not three as another person said): (1) Chord Forms and (2) Chord Passages. The former is 10 pages long and is filled with about 15 chord patterns per page. Those chord patterns are presented in six groups: Major, Seventh, Augmented, Minor, Diminished, Minor Seventh Flat Fifth. It is important to realise that these are only chord shapes (all in C), and are not labeled in any way. Other reviewers have mentioned this as an annoyance. I think this is a fatal flaw in the book. There are a number of shapes with absolutely no indication what kind of chords they are and absolutely no indication how to use them or put them together.

The second half, Chord Passages, has 5 pages of useful material showing how a few of the chord shapes from each category can be used in a passage. This gives some good examples of how to use the chord shapes and how they go together ... but again doesn't indicate what the chords are or what changes they might go over. This IS useful, but only marginally so. The last five pages of this section are filled with "Standard Pattern Chord Substitutions". The first example involves the pattern Dm7 .... Dm7 and gives 12 different chord substitutions. i.e. the first one says that you could instead play Dm7 ... Bb7... Eb9. That is ALL that is in this subsection - there are no chord shapes, no chords even written in standard notation - just the chord name. One reviewer called these slash chords. That is incorrect. A slash chord is a chord with a bass note other than the root on the bottom. What is here is only blank notation with a chord name written over top. Mildy interesting perhaps, but it has absolutely no connection with the first section. The first section had chord shapes without names. The second section has chord names without shapes.

There is a half page of introduction from Joe at the beginning of the book, and another half page before the second section. In the first section Joe says "The purpose of the book is not to identify each chord by name, but to portray their sound in context with the category of being played. These are the chords I commonly use and improvise on when confronted with one of the six categories." Those two sentence are just about the only instructions on how to use the book. If you are really interested in Joe Pass's approach to chords I would suggest giving this book a pass and instead buying his excellent DVD "Joe Pass Solo Jazz Guitar". That DVD presents Joe's approach to chordal playing in his own words and much much better than this underwhelming, thin book from Mel Bay. I think that that DVD really helps to explain Joe's chordal concepts in ways that this book does not. He says something like "some chord books are filled with 10,000 chords, but what they don't tell you is that 9,000 of those are worthless. When you watch Jazz guitarists most are playing the same chord grips." So it is important to know those 'grips' or chord shapes. But in the DVD he most certainly does explain that a chord is a 6th, or 13th, or 9th raised 5th or whatever (unlike this book). He doesn't say, as this book implies in the first section, that it is not necessary to know what kind of chord you are playing other than major or minor etc.

I am sure there are many ways that the information in this book could be useful, but Mel Bay couldn't be bothered to include a few more pages to make it so. I can't recommend this book as it is. Instead buy the DVD previously mentioned, or Ted Greene's chord book, either of Joe Beck's DVDs or even Jimmy Bruno's DVD (surprisingly the Paganini of Jazz guitar is OK at teaching about chords).

More than I'm ready for
This is a great book for someone more advanced than I am. I don't understand all the terms yet but I'm working on it. I know it will be a valuablr resource later in my development.

A great resource, if you're willing to put in the work
My guitar teacher recommended this to me, and I was surprised when I got it. It was so short, compared to the Ted Greene bible of every chord ever made! Where were the chord names? Not even the roots were marked! What was I supposed to do with this book?

My teacher told me to take each chord and try different roots on it. One shape can have several distinct functions. Record each voicing in a modal vamp that ascends chromatically each measure and practice playing a coherent line over it. Use one voicing to play a whole progression, or practice voice leading with many different chords. If you're willing to experiment, everything you really need to know about jazz chords is in this book.