Comprehensive Technique for Jazz Musicians: For All Instruments

An incredible presentation of the most practical exercises an aspiring jazz student could want. All are logically interwoven with fine "real world" examples from jazz to classical. This book is an essential anthology of technical, compositional, and theoretical exercises, with lots of musical examples.

A common theme across all of Bert Ligon's books is that they are comprehensive and rooted in the reality of jazz. What do I mean by that? They are comprehensive in that their coverage of the subject area is full: you have an excellent single source of information. Rooted in reality? Whilst they cover the theory of jazz they do it in a practical way: a lot of analysis of actual improvisations has been done, and is used to illustrate the ideas. There are many exercises and the examples can be used as exercises. Any of the books could easily double as a source of jazz vocabulary.

You can see the contents pages elsewhere in Amazon. Each chapter explains things clearly.

It is not a mistake to buy any of his books. I have four. Years ago a departing friend said to me `I'm glad I met you.' That's how I feel about these books: they are a Jazz-send.

Whereas `thin' jazz tutors mention particular techniques such as Chromatic Embellishment or Neighbor Tones, and cover them in at most two pages this book covers all of its subjects in great depth, and with many exercises and examples.

It is an excellent book of musical jazz technique.

The chapter on Outline Exercises covers what Bert Ligon refers to as Outlines. These are three basic structures that recur with a mind-blowing frequency in actual improvisations by great jazz players. Think of them as some of the dots in a dot-to-dot drawing: the great players find ways to vary joining the dots (using the techniques covered elsewhere in the book). Again there are hundreds of examples taken form real solos. The reason I mention this is that `Outlines' also appears in the Volume I of Jazz Theory Resources and are the majority of the Connecting Chords With Linear Harmony. However, they are not `cut and paste' of a Chapter. Instead you learn a whole lot more of the power of Outlines with each book. The Outlines are only a small part of this book.