Smooth Jazz Piano Book/Online Audio (Hal Leonard Keyboard Style)

Learning something new and involved in music takes time and persistence. There are no short cuts for new material. You have to really want to do it. Mr. Harrision's Introduction to smooth jazz skills is an "introduction only"...bare bone essentials, the initial salad...you have to bring your own hot meal and dessert. The student needs to have skills...fore-knowledge, to understand basic extended chord harmony, various scales, and the ability to read rythmic figures very well to eventually struggle with more complicated, advanced Funk rythms (to fully complete the book). Please understand that reading rthymic figures can be considered the most challenging venture for many musicians. It takes many bridges of reading experiences to read Funk Rythms. He does not offer and is not responsible to offer you training in the skills of reading or improvisation. Yet, you will need them to play smooth jazz well. This book will not bring you there but it will help a bit. It may provide a glimpse. YOU WILL LEARN SOMETHING...that smooth jazz artists are highly skilled musicians.The book starts out reviewing basic three part chords. Easy enough. These are altered by adding notes such as 9ths, 11ths, 13ths each of with are also raised and lowered a half step. Jazz musicians know these already. These altered chords may serve as a primary entrance into a portion of what is smooth jazz harmony. You need to know them. It will take some serious effort and memory power to master his method to build these chords. This is not his fault; it is just the way music learning curves are. What I expected and missed in Mr. Harrison's work is "bridging material" in some skill areas to new areas, the hot meal with dessert. It was not there. Upon reflection...in my opinion...his short book is not meant to be comprehensive but rather a primer into the beginning of a smooth jazz experience. A primer on one side of a huge valley to the realm of smooth jazz skills. I found his presentation of chording structure interesting and important. However, each of us has to fill in our large gaps of knowledge and figure out where to go from here. We may need a real live teacher (expensive) to bring us there. One only gets so much from an affordable and inexpensive book. If you are at least an intermediate musician, you may find it enjoyable. I recommend it.

The heart and soul of this book are the great short exercises and extended compositions that are excellently rendered on the included CD. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of this book drip smooth jazz just the way you hear it on the radio. It is very helpful to see this beautiful music written out and to hear it on the CD. Harrison illustrates each new playing technique with a very musical example that is fun to practice. He ties it all together with seven beautiful but practical compositions in the last chapter. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 are a bit thin. Harrison moves very quickly through the theory. Playing through the exercises in Mark Harrison's The Pop Piano Book will be really helpful in mastering Smooth Jazz Piano, particularly to master Harrison's upper structure over root chord voicings. For an advanced player, this is a stand alone book. The intermediate player will benefit by playing through the exercises in The Pop Piano Book, before moving on the Smooth Jazz Piano.

I previously purchased the Blues Piano book, also by Mark Harrison. I was so impressed by it that I purchased this one too. I was a little concerned that there might be quite a bit of redundancy between the two volumes, but that's not the case at all. The focus, of course, is on jazz piano so a lot more time is spent up front discussing chords and chord voicing relevant to jazz. Like Blues Piano, this book is an excellent value. It's not for beginners, and like the Blues book, it requires that the learner have basic sight reading skills. I found the CD to be very helpful, especially for some of the practice selections where the timing was challenging to count out.

I have this book along with "Blues" and "Post-Bop". I have enjoyed those books and their CD's. Their CD's are really nice. Unfortunately, the CD with this book: "Smooth Jazz", only plays the left hand notes. Somehow when this CD was recorded they erroneously did not include the right hand notation. There not much to learn from the CD if all you can hear are bass notes on the piano. Let me be clear on one thing, the book is great, the theory and explanantions are real good, but what I paid for included the price of the CD.I would still purchase this book/CD, but return the CD and call the publisher to be sure the problem has been fixed.

While I didn't expect to have a CD delivered wirelessly, I assumed that the Kindle version might have some kind of sound attachment to provide that important component for this item. But that isn't the case and so the Kindle version is, in my view, seriously compromised.I should point out that Amazon.com responded immediately to my concern and refunded the price of the Kindle version (and so I will purchase the paperback version). My five stars really go to Amazon for their excellent service.

I've been purchasing jazz books for last the 5 years searching for something worth while. Well look no further, Smooth Jazz Piano is the book to get. It has a very good format and the presentation is excellent. It also excels in the following:- Chord construction- Solo over the different scales and modes!- Gives plenty of proper examplesAnd I might add, the examples provided in the book are based on actual songs; I even bought those songs on Itunes.

The sections on chord progression and creating a melody are great. The book should be spiral bound.Getting it to stay open on my keyboard music stand is difficult.

I believe this is a good book for someone who wants to hit the ground running as a Jazz pianist. It's easy to read, and focuses on techniques without rigidly adhering to standardized musical notation, as a result, it may be preferred by the hobbyist, but not the professional musician. However, if you're now learning Jazz piano, this is a good starting point no matter what background you have.

Looks like it was manually scanned on a home scanner, blurred and top and bottom cut off. Views sideways on page. Useless. Amazon are not offering me a refund!! - why??Amended - Told by customer services that an intermittent fault means that a refund button doesn't always appear as happened here, CS rep refunded me with no problems. To be clear this is a good series of books, just this particular Kindle version that was rubbish.

well posted

Cette méthode de "smooth jazz" souffre de plusieurs défauts, qui me donnent à penser qu'elle a été conçue avec un peu de précipitation et de négligence.Tout d'abord la courbe d'apprentissage (ou de difficulté) n'est pas lisse, ça commence très doucement, et par petits sauts quantiques ça devient très complexe rapidement. Le premier chapitre est d'un abord très aisé, un débutant s'y retrouvera, il fait office de "rappels" sur les gammes et les modes. Puis le deuxième introduit les accords à 4 notes avant que le troisième chapitre n'explique comment former les accords à 4 ou 5 notes à deux mains.Le problème c'est que le discours reste très théorique, et l'auteur ne donne pas de méthode/technique pour acquérir l'aisance dans le formation de ces accords, or le pianiste qui n'aurait jamais travaillé les triades présentées au chapitre 1 aura besoin d'énormément d'heure de travail pour acquérir l'aisance nécessaire aux harmonisations proposées par la suite. Or l'auteur ne dit rien là-dessus, on pourrait croire qu'il suffit d'avoir compris la théorie et de travailler quelques jours ... Le chapitre 4 passe au rythme et commence par expliquer le principe des doubles croches ... bon, OK.Les extraits proposés ne sont pas des exercices mais des exemples. Certains sont intéressants, d'autres n'ont aucun intérêt (4 extraits musicaux pour expliquer la division de la mesure en croche et en double croche, c'est beaucoup)Ce qui m'exaspère dans cette méthode, c'est l'analyse systématique dans chaque morceau de la façon dont les accords ont été harmonisés (ex "un mi bémol mineur sur une basse de do donne un do bémol 7ème") et que c'est fait de façon mécanique, comme pour noircir du papier. De plus jamais l'auteur ne donne d'exercice ou d'incitation à essayer de son côté : il manque de la consistance, de la cohérence. C'est bien dommage.Au final, je ne vois pas bien à qui s'adresse cette méthode.mais les choses se corsent dès le deuxième chapitre. Je ne serais pas surpris d'apprendre que la plupart des lecteurs abandonnent à ce moment.

Me considero de un nivel intermedio de piano tocando piezas de música clásica y siguiendo tutoriales de Flowkey. Y aunque encuentras gran cantidad de información de Jazz online, loquería tener de una forma esquemática y estructurada. Para ello el libro es genial!!!

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