Product Description

The basic principles of blues piano explained for the intermediate-level pianist in an easy-to-grasp fashion.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187452 in Books
• Published on: 1997-12-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 262 pages

Customer Reviews

Terrific Book
If you can play a little piano say grade 2 or 3 and like the blues you will get a lot out of this book. Beautifully presented with pictures of the masters and different types of blues, takes a slow and easy progression from very basic triads to simple but really terrific sounding stuff to the more complex stuff. He encourges you to experiment and improvise and truely teaches ways to do this. Happily for my nieghbours I have headphones on my piano! CD has all the music on it with some different versions in triplet feel etc. Richards is a performer and teaches at a London music college. Certainly helped me. If you want to learn the blues this is really nice book. The book has its own web site so hunt around. Allows you to download a very nice blues and the sheet music to it.

best blues piano book I've seen
I've bought several other blues piano books over the years, and in my opinion this one outclasses them all. The pieces sound great, and the pacing of the material is fantastic. The book does a great job of slowly introducing the idea of improvisation, by encouraging mixing and matching ideas from the different pieces. It also goes into ideas like horizontal and vertical improvisation without making it too intimidating, and introduces some blues "cliche" endings and turnarounds. It covers many different styles from barrelhouse to stride to jazz blues.

The included CD lets you know how this stuff is really supposed to sound, and it's got a full "Recommended Listening" in an appendix if you want to explore further. All around one of the best instructional musical texts I've seen.

Just what I was looking for ....
This is a great book! I'm a beginning/intermediate piano player, I went through the first two Alfred's All-in-One Adult piano books and really enjoyed them (and recommend them!). But I found myself at a fork in the road: I was happy to continue memorizing "pieces", and practicing "technique", but I found myself wanting to know more about improvising. I play drums in a blues band, and I've had some music theory for keyboard percussion, so I'm not a total musical-novice. I tried out some other books (Mark Harrison's "Blues Piano: Hal Leonard Keyboard Style Series", but it's still a little over my head, perhaps in a year or so it'll be good for me. Also "David Bennett Cohen Teaches Blues Piano: A Hands-On Course in Traditional Blues Piano", but it really didn't light my fire either, and if I recall correctly, didn't have finger markings which I still find helpful.) This book pulls it all together for me: some blues music theory, some blues history, clearly-marked "assignments", a CD included, (a spiral binding that lays flat on the stand!) ... I'm hooked!