Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account

Sudnow is a trained ethnographer and social psychologist who gave up teaching in his fields to study piano and write exclusively about music. In 1978, he published the first edition of this work, a skill-development classic that documents how he taught himself to play jazz piano. The premise of that edition, as well as this update, is that the author's hands, apart from his conscious direction, learned to improvise jazz: "I sing with my fingers, so to speak, and only so to speak, for there's a new being, my body, and it is this being (here too, so to speak) that sings." This new version represents Sudnow's attempt to reach a broader, less academic audience with his findings.