Product Description

The Changes: Guide Tones for Jazz Chords, Lines, and Comping is offered for beginning to advanced players as a way to visualize guide tones on the fretboard. From these shapes lines can be created for soloing and voicings can be built for comping and chord melody. Most importantly, the changes of the progression being played can be heard with only a few notes. The simple approach is always best; guide tones are easy to play and are how the ear identifies a chord progression. Embellishing guide tones is what improvising musicians from baroque to bebop to beyond have been doing to make the changes. Companion CD includes all exercises.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #167035 in Books
• Published on: 2004-01
• Released on: 2004-01-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 40 pages

About the Author
Sid Jacobs grew up in Miami, Florida and began guitar lessons at the age of seven. As a teenager he became serious about jazz playing and would study and practice by day and sneak into the jazz clubs at night. When the Jacobs family moved to Nevada he obtained a position as guitar instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This made him, at eighteen, the youngest faculty member in the school's music department. While living in Nevada Sid found work in the hotel pit orchestras, and as touring accompanist to a number of celebrity singers and jazz artists.

After moving to Los Angeles he developed the curriculum for the Jazz Guitar elective at the Musicians Institute (GIT) and the Advanced Bebop and Jazz Guitar course at the Dick Grove School. In 1991 the CD It's Not Goodnight was released featuring his original compositions and improvisations.

Through his involvement in education, his personal associations with jazz notables, and his own discipline Sid continues to gain recognition as an influential educator, composer, and performing artist.

Sid currently divides his time among his pursuits as GIT instructor, musical equipment manufacturer's consultant, performance and recording artist, and jazz clinician.

Customer Reviews

Fantastic! Could be the single most useful book for playing jazz better
As an aspiring jazz guitarist, I've bought a lot of books over the years, classics and others, and without exaggeration this single slim volume is the most useful, practical guide I've ever found to playing jazz, solo and in a group.

The beauty of this approach is that you don't have to be technically or theoretically advanced to learn this stuff. Less is more! While there is plenty for the advanced player to chew on, I've given this book as a gift to friends who were just learning to play- I think it's the best introduction to actually playing jazz (and not just on the guitar either!)

What it is not is a manual of music theory- sure, there are some chord diagrams for the examples, and the book does touch on basic chord progressions and scales. But that's not the main point here- and for good reason.

Don't get me wrong- studying chords and scales and progressions is invaluable for understanding jazz and how it works. But if all you do is study chords and scales and progressions, when you sit down to play, what you get may not be very good jazz. How well I recall studying scales and arpeggios, and when I played, everything sounded like an exercise, not jazz! The problem becomes even more evident when you go to play with other musicians. If you play full six-note 'cowboy chords' all the time, it doesn't sound like jazz. If there's a bass player, it doesn't sound good to be playing the root all the time. The larger the group, the more important it is to be able to play more with less. The great masters did it. But how?

The answer is the use of 'guide tones', which are the 3rd and 7th of each chord, and how they move through chord progressions. This is the subject of this book, and it is an amazingly powerful key to playing well. Sid didn't make up this principle, it's a classic jazz element all the great masters know and use. Somehow it never gets talked much about- it usually only comes up in private instruction but in most books only in passing.

Sid does a fantastic job of teaching it- and no surprise, because this guy is not just a great musician, but a great teacher, he's the one who set up the jazz program at Musician's Institute of Technology, and as a teacher he's no doubt seen firsthand what material makes the most difference in helping aspiring musicians play better.

Sid takes you through the basics, explaining the power of guide tones to guide our ears through chord changes without even needing to hear the root. Then, through a series of elaborations and developments how this becomes a basis for both comping and improvisation. There are examples to play, to memorize, and to give your fingers new vocabulary that deepens your harmonic richness.

With this book under your belt, you'll find new ways of adding harmonic depth to your solos so they do more than cover the scale. You'll learn ways of covering chord progressions with only a few notes- which is vital to chord-melody solo playing because there's not much room between the melody and the bass line. And when you go to playing in a group (even blues and pop music) you'll know where to find those few notes that say it all as far as covering the chords.

Am I gushing? Yep, and this is one book that deserves it. Sid does such a good job of teaching and this concept is such an important one to playing well. The CD is good too!

If you love jazz and you're looking at reviews for good books, look no further. This one is a true classic, it deserves to be remembered up there with Ted Greene's wonderful books. Thanks Sid for writing it! Keep up the good work!

sid jacobs
This book starts out with a very helpfull aproach to jazz soloing. It would have been better if he would have dedicated this whole book to that approach with more examples. No it turns into a confusing mix of different stuff with also big mistakes in the tabs.