The Bluesier Side of Jazz for Alto Saxophone and Eb instruments by Andrew D. Gordon and Frank Villafranca was inspired by the piano students Andrew teaches at Shepherd University School of Music in Los Angelesand is dedicated to those students: Jungwon, Yumiko, Yoko, Eunice, Sooji, Hae Ji and Ok Kyu. As with many students that come from a classical background it is a difficult transition to learn to play Blues & Jazz. When a musicianimprovises they usually play a variety of riffs or phrases that they have developed and learnt over a period of time and can access these phrases instantaneously whatever key they are playing in to create a seamless improvisedsolofrom the phrases they have learnt.
Andrew's idea for this book is to create phrases or riffs over two measures of various Blues progressions. He sub-divided each of the 12 Bar Blues progressions used in this book (the chordprogression for Watermelon Man is a 16 measure progression) into six sections (two measures each) and within each of the six sections created four different phrases or riffs so that the student has a choice of four differentphrases to play over every two measures. They can then create a solo based on which phrase they choose for each two measures. By breaking down these phrases to two measures each, he has found that the students have an easier timeof learning to improvise than by trying to transcribe a whole solo from an audio recording or leaving them to their own devices in trying to play a solo based on the Blues scale or other related scales.
Each of the tenexamples are based on common Jazz/Blues chord progressions from Jazz songs such as 'Watermelon Man', 'Blue Monk', 'Tenor Madness', 'Route 66', 'Blue Trane', 'Bag's Groove' starting off with basic I-IV-V chords and increasing incomplexity throughout the book. There are over 200 phrases/riffs to choose from that can be learned and applied to many types of jazz songs.
The package includes:
- Book or PDF file
- 30 audio tracks to playon your CD player or computer
- Over 200 mp3 files
- Over 200 MIDI files
- EAN: 0663389114722
- UPC: 663389114722