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I was chatting to a friend of mine who claimed they really couldn't name a Jazz Guitar learning book that they got a lot out of... (I'm specifically not talking about biographies or jazz history books here - specifically a book for learning how to play Jazz or Jazz Guitar)
That got me thinking ... are there any jazz books you used at any point while learning (or even very recently) that you could fully stand behind and recommend as a truly great book for Jazz Guitarists to use - a 'must buy' I suppose? Books that you have used lots and learned lots from.
I've seen many people point to the Charlie Parker Omnibook, as well as books like The Advancing Guitarist; Forward Motion; some of the Joe Pass books as well as the Bert Ligon book on Linear Harmony.
I guess I want to start a discussion on whether books have a place in regular jazzers practice, and if so, what are the 'best' books for you personally !
TVMIA!
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08-24-2025 06:06 AM
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I think Randy Vincent's books are among the best jazz books specific to the guitar that I know of. I have most of them - the one I'm aware of not having is the one on drop 2 chords.
Anyway, I'm working my way through his Line Games book which starts with hexatonic scales. It's chock full of info that'll keep me busy for years, and that's before I get to The Cellular Approach book!
And the one on three note voicings is another sine qua non.
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Yeah I like the Randy Vincent Guitarists introduction to jazz.
I don’t use it to teach myself (though I think I could) and didn’t learn from it, but has everything it should and the order it teaches it in is IMO a good order.
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Many books focus on advanced topics that are inappropriate for someone getting it together. They could be great books for players who can already play well, but they aren’t going to teach you the music.
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Inappropriate? How so? (Just curious...) Not that I know what books you're talking about.
Originally Posted by Christian Miller
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To quickly build vocabulary for all the chords you'll encounter playing standards, I'd recommend Sid Jacobs' Complete Book of Jazz Guitar Lines and Phrases. The book is unique in its approach and it is brilliant. There are about 30 or so pages towards the beginning where he shows "shapes" for minor, dominant and major. These are about 20 or so idiomatic short "cells" of bebop phrases per each chord. Some cells are idiomatic resolution patterns, others are common line ideas taken from transcriptions. Then he shows how to build longer lines by connecting them and explains how you can apply them to any chord.
The rest of the book discusses how to build lines for the more modern (modal and non functional) jazz using pentatonics, quartal harmony, polychords, intervals etc. You can skip this second half of the book safely for now.
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This book is by far my favorite….and the book I got/get the most out of…plenty of discussion about this book here on the site….it touches on everything…I love it and always come back to it….I’m overdue.
Jazz Improvisation for Guitar - A Melodic Approach Book - Garrison Fewell
Amazon.com
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Alan Kingstone’s book on harmony for guitar changed the way I play and think about guitar. Sadly, he never followed it up with a volume two, so it serves as an excellent introduction.
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I have the Cellular Approach book. I find that different ways of "working through" these books will produce wildly different outcomes. It is tempting to go through every idea and phrase thoroughly. But I think that's a bit of a trap. As the author says, one should really take small pieces and take their times with them patiently without worrying about all the other things they are not covering and perhaps will never get to. Originally Posted by James W
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Books I found helpful include:
Colin/Bower - Rhythms Complete
Mark Levine's Jazz Theory (helps if you can read on piano).
Nelson Faria's Brazilian Guitar Styles
Warren Nunes' book on Blues and another of his books the title of which I can't recall.
The Real Book and the old cardex fakebook.
Books that didn't help me, which is not to say that they wouldn't be enormously helpful to somebody else:
All lick books.
The thin George Van Eps book.
Ted Greene's Chord Chemistry and another on soloing.
A Joe Pass book, can't recall the title.
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Originally Posted by jamiehenderson1993
The books that did the most for me are Bill McCormick's books 403 Forbidden Nothing else comes close. The most useful for me is his "rhythm changes volume 1" book. I spent about six months memorizing that book (12 choruses of rhythm changes 4 chords to the bar, increasingly "modern" as you move through all keys). All aspects of my playing improved.
His "instruction" books roughly in order of easy to hard, are "A walk through the blues", "essential standards", the three "rhythm changes" books (the two "Folios" for $2.95 are great too). These are all pretty easy. There are no "instructions", you learn by learning to play what's written. Listen to Tracks 3,4,5 from "Music for guitar" on his web page to hear snippets.
I like his "solo guitar" books even better. These are not for the lazy because they are meticulously notated. Think learning a tricky classical piece. Some of the tunes are inspired by gospel, blues, Brazil, others by Metheny and Goodrick, I'd recommend his "eight reflections" first, but they are all excellent, especially the blues ones.
And he knows every guitar trick. eg try this Db7 on bar 11 of a Db blues (from his tune Home fries):
7th fret harmonic B on low E/F/B/D/open B/open E
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Today there is a wealth of material in all mediums-print, vids, online classes. Originally Posted by jamiehenderson1993
For me the Ted Greene site--Tedgreene.com has alot of material used in music applied in jazz and other styles.
Chord studies,harmony,theory,improvisation and melody studies.
Other materials;
Intervallic Designs by Joe Diorio
A very good source of improvisation material from BobbyStern.com
On this forum site..Dirk has some very good starter lessons.
Now the thing is..It takes a great deal of time and constant practice to digest the material no matter what book you study from.
Even the basic Micky Baker books have value and require some intense study to gain benefits from them.Last edited by wolflen; 08-25-2025 at 11:03 PM.
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Mickey Baker, but I’m looking to play a certain style and it’s in that book.
Second would be the real book(for tunes to play with people) and third would be Easy Jazz Guitar by Mike DeLiddo(for comping ideas after you get bored with your playing behind other people).
There really isn’t a lot to learn before you need to get out into the world and play with other people. You definitely don’t need to know all the chord inversions for all the string sets or any mode stuff before you play at a jam.Last edited by AllanAllen; 08-24-2025 at 06:29 PM.
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Yeah the Randy Vincent ones are all excellent. They haven’t all grabbed me — maybe the cellular one hits you and the voicings ones don’t or whatever — but if one of them interests you, they’re all excellent.
I think I’d recommend Guitarists Introduction to anyone intermediate or anyone interested in teaching.
After that Line Games is really really good and sort of a sampler platter of things he gets into in a little more detail in some of the other books. Except maybe the hexatonics — that’s really interesting and I don’t recall seeing it in another of his books
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I recommend the Barry Harris workshop for theory. Chords by Chuck Wayne doesn't just give you a bunch of chords, it tells you how to make them. Barry Galbraith's books on comping, soloing and arrangements for solo guitar are all useful. I didn't learn from books in the sixties and seventies. I learned by listening, copying, learning to read and play Charlie Parker tunes and standards, and things picked up here and there. Then the Barry Harris Workshop video came out in 1995 and after that the internet, full of lessons. The Charlie Parker Omnibook is good but get the rhythms from the recordings. It is very difficult to notate the rhythms in transcriptions correctly. It is more important to get the feeling from the source.
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There are SO many books I've read, used, learned from and referenced in the half century of playing and learning in. I've come to the conclusion that there are so many layers of learning that any one method can only give a focused look of any one aspect (scales, chords, how to create a bebop sound, how to progressively ornament a line to sound "jazzy", etc.)
I have gotten a different story from talking with the musicians that have mastered the craft and art of playing jazz. They told me there have been any number of good books out there but none that could mirror, reveal and address the multiplicity of aspects that a teacher could... none except the one who taught THEM about how expansive a task it is.
John Scofield, Mike Stern, Lage Lund, Wayne Krantz, Pat Metheny, Julian Lage, Wolfgang Muthspiel, Ben Monder, Nir Felder are just a small sampling of the musicians who have used Mick Goodrick's The Advancing Guitarist ?as reference for everything from tying harmony and melody together by seeing the power of a single string to voice leading all possible intervals on the guitar. It's truly a monumental work that won't give you quick answers, but can provide the reference to guide you throughout anybody's journey to being a limitless guitarist.
Advancing Guitarist is one of the few books that lets you work at your own pace on any number of seminal roads to guitar mastery, not by telling you what to play, but by offering exercises that challenge the user to create your OWN version of the jazz language not by copying, but by learning the concepts and realizing them through guided practice.
It's a book that other books dovetail with and it's a conceptual can opener that lets you work with any other guitar "method" book and use those materials to propel your own path to your own advancing knowledge.
Mick's The Advancing Guitarist is a lifelong companion... and it's fun to read.
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For daily practice Linear Expressions Pat Martino.
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Great topic, and clearly there are many choices. I agree that context and intention are important to take into consideration, and some books might be better for different levels.
I've recently been going through the dozens of books that I have amassed over the years and can honestly say that the only ones that really stuck with me were the ones I used in my formative years. That'd be pre-internet, in the 1980s. I was studying guitar at a music conservatory, with a focus on arranging, ear training and composition, and taking guitar and bass lessons from regional pro musicians. That all helped me to get a jazz guitar scholarship at a regional college, to play in their big band. I also studied several books on my own, while having a go at being a full-time working musician playing in a wedding band, a big band, various small combos and doing some studio work. But by the 1990s, I became disillusioned and restless with the lifestyle, and so I sold all my gear and quit guitar to travel and study, in particular studying world music. But I kept most of the formative books, and I took them out again when the guitar beckoned me back around the early 2000s, and I also added many other books to the library with a new found enthusiasm but also an impulse to simply purchase what I thought I needed. But as I said the older ones I'd still stand behind. Nowadays, music is just a pastime, an occasion for social interaction.
In the early studies, both with various teachers and on my own, it was these books I used:
The Leavitt book I went through with a teacher in weekly lessons, and it really developed my reading. The Chuck Wayne arpeggio book I got along the way; he'd been teaching at one of the places I'd been in. The Joe Pass books I got on my own, after being enthralled with his playing in listening to the trio record of Ellington tunes, my gateway to jazz guitar.
During that same time period, I also explored the Ted Greene and Barry Galbraith books, which really broadened my horizons and gave me so many ideas and things to practice. Recently, I reviewed the Galbraith comping book. A lot of Ted Greene stuff is now online.
Early on, I'd gotten into transcriptions. I had no patience to do my own, so I used these:
Those books were from the 1970s Jazz Masters series, of which I had others, but somehow the Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk volumes were lost to time. I still find Charlie Christian lines from one of those transcriptions turning up, subconsciously, in my playing to this day.
Then there were a number of artist focused books, the earliest being the Tommy Tedesco book, which was both informative and hilarious. Steve Khan's volume on Wes Montgomery was indispensable, after I'd discovered Wes from listening to the Small Group Recordings LP on Verve, which I still have and listen to today. And the Jim Hall and Bill Frisell books I got after my return to guitar, as they were the artists that spoke to me most. I learned about the Yusef Lateef repository from a regional tenor sax player with whom I jammed.
I'm in full agreement with those that mentioned the Real Book. In fact, although the series has broadened since then, I still have and use the first two unofficial volumes today, which in those days were indispensable on gigs, with warts and all. More recently, the cognate to those books, put together by a Japanese jazz bassist who IIRC studied at Berklee, are the two volume Jazz Standard Bible, which is commonly in use at the jam sessions I frequent. Some of the elder players around here still have their old Real Book from the 1970s. The JSB series includes CDs with backing tracks for selected tunes. They recently added an ad-lib focused volume with examples and tracks for improvising over a number of tunes.
The JSB books led me to a series of Japanese LPs with transcripts and folios of tunes, ad-lib examples, and arrangements for selected tunes, including "minus one" type recordings with a full band. I trawl the used record shops looking for other volumes from that series. I find these locally produced materials valuable for connecting to the Japanese jazz history.
I have no intention of suggesting that these are "the" books or "best" books; more simply, these are books that helped me in the formative years and some I discovered in the second phase of my jazz guitar journey, most of which I still find valuable. But if I had to make my choices, it'd be those books from which we can learn the common repertoire, as others noted (e.g. RB and JSB), to enable developing a social side of jazz, playing this wondrous music with others in our own locales. Wishing you all the best in your own jazz journeys!
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These are mine. I know technically one is a tenor banjo book, but it really got my brain oriented the right way, and I got to play some tenor banjo stuff too, which has intermittently come in handy.
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How could I forget Early Jazz Guitar Chord Soloing!! That’s a great book.
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Also, checkout Mikko Hilden's You Tube channel. He reviews and demoes books on a regular basis.
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This is a rather "off the charts" book of which I have an old edition and really enjoy working with...
Amazon.com
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Stuff like the Jazz Theory Book, which I think is best for someone who can already fluently play changes and has a good grasp of jazz vocabulary. Originally Posted by James W
You get so many people who can type essays about chord scales and avoid notes and they can’t yet play. Maybe it’s just the sort of students i personally come into contact but there’s a lot of them.
There’s books that I don’t like but there’s books that I like a lot that I don’t think are useful for every student. I wouldn’t recommend any BH stuff to someone who couldn’t play a bit of jazz already.
You might never get around to studying modal theory, Barry Harris harmony or the Mick Goodrick voice leading books but it doesn’t mean you aren’t going to be killing jazz player if you do the work required. (If, it’s a lot of work.)
Sent from my iPhone using TapatalkLast edited by Christian Miller; 08-25-2025 at 08:33 AM.
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Books that are actively harmful?
There are I like more and like less, but I don’t tink so.
Tbh I question the effect things like the Real Book and Omnibook have had overall. You want to emulate the people who wrote those books. Don’t skip the work! But they still have their value.
Mostly it’s a lack of context for people who aren’t getting input from a teacher and the wider playing community. Books don’t have much context to them on their own. Teachers will set students right on the importance of ear learning and rhythm etc.
I find the same thing with videos.
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It's still knowledge though - regarding reading The Jazz Theory Book - even if you read it before being able to properly play jazz. You described it initially as 'inappropriate' - I wonder how this manifests itself in how a person tries to play jazz, because being able to write an essay in and of itself is no bad thing... Originally Posted by Christian Miller
I say this as someone who read that book before being able to play. I guess I was a bit disappointed with it TBH, though it does contain some words of wisdom, useful suggestions and knowledge, and I still do approach soloing in a chord-scale kind of way. You can doubtless tell. I ought to spend more time learning licks and bop lines etc.
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