A landmark in jazz studies, Thinking in Jazz reveals as never before how musicians, both individually and collectively, learn to improvise. Chronicling leading musicians from their first encounters with jazz to the development of a unique improvisatory voice, Paul Berliner documents the lifetime of preparation that lies behind the skilled improviser's every idea. The product of more than fifteen years of immersion in the jazz world, Thinking in Jazz combines participant observation with detailed musicological analysis, the author's experience as a jazz trumpeter, interpretations of published material by scholars and performers, and, above all, original data from interviews with more than fifty professional musicians: bassists George Duvivier and Rufus Reid; drummers Max Roach, Ronald Shannon Jackson, and Akira Tana; guitarist Emily Remler; pianists Tommy Flanagan and Barry Harris; saxophonists Lou Donaldson, Lee Konitz, and James Moody; trombonist Curtis Fuller; trumpeters Doc Cheatham, Art Farmer, Wynton Marsalis, and Red Rodney; vocalists Carmen Lundy and Vea Williams; and others. Together, the interviews provide insight into the production of jazz by great artists like Betty Carter, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, and Charlie Parker. Thinking in Jazz overflows with musical examples from the 1920s to the present, including original transcriptions (keyed to commercial recordings) of collective improvisations by Miles Davis's and John Coltrane's groups. These transcriptions provide additional insight into the structure and creativity of jazz improvisation and represent a remarkable resource for jazz musicians as well as students and educators. Berliner explores the alternative ways—aural, visual, kinetic, verbal, emotional, theoretical, associative—in which these performers conceptualize their music and describes the delicate interplay of soloist and ensemble in collective improvisation. Berliner's skillful integration of data concerning musical development, the rigorous practice and thought artists devote to jazz outside of performance, and the complexities of composing in the moment leads to a new understanding of jazz improvisation as a language, an aesthetic, and a tradition. This unprecedented journey to the heart of the jazz tradition will fascinate and enlighten musicians, musicologists, and jazz fans alike.

"What every aspiring jazz musician should know. A concise text on the essential rudiments of jazz, providing ... insight into construction and the art of improvisation."

Jean-Michel Pilc, jazz pianist and faculty member of Steinhardt School, New York University, has written a remarkable book about the artistic and creative process in the arts. The conversational style well suits the wide ranging topic which draws examples from art and music both classical and jazz. A beautifully expressed work on a subject otherwise impossible to write about. Hailed by musicians around the world as enlightened and inspirational.

Jazz, America's original art form, can be a catalyst for creative and spiritual development. With its unique emphasis on improvisation, jazz offers new paradigms for educational and societal change. In this provocative book, musician and educator Edward W. Sarath illuminates how jazz offers a continuum for transformation. Inspired by the long legacy of jazz innovators who have used meditation and related practices to bring the transcendent into their lives and work, Sarath sees a coming shift in consciousness, one essential to positive change. Both theoretical and practical, the book uses the emergent worldview known as Integral Theory to discuss the consciousness at the heart of jazz and the new models and perspectives it offers. On a more personal level, the author provides examples of his own involvement in educational reform. His design of the first curriculum at a mainstream educational institution to incorporate a significant meditation and consciousness studies component grounds a radical new vision.

These essays, all of which originally appeared in the New Yorker, cover the entire range of jazz history. Presenting fascinating glimpses of musicians in their unguarded moments, it is concerned with analyzing that elusive and essential jazz quality, improvisation.

Learn how to create your own etudes in the style of your favorite musicians! Doing so reveals their favorite phrases and stylistic tendencies, allowing you to better understand and absorb their approach and concept (plus, there are unique, hip etudes that will be fun to play and share with your friends and students). Well-known pianist David Hazeltine used this method to develop his own style and refined it over the years to help his students. Now, it is available in book form for all who want to master the art of better phrasing. This is not a piano book. This is a single-line approach designed for all instrumentalists, including piano. David Hazeltine is, quite simply, one of the finest musicians I've had the chance to perform with in my two-plus decades as a professional musician. Over the years, I've asked Dave to show me some of his harmonic and melodic concepts. Most times, he'll present me with a portion of one of his etudes that he's come up with. I've found them all to be tremendously informative. They are crafted in a way that makes the concepts contained in each exercise very organic, and readily accessible to me in my own improvisations. Dave's meticulous study of the masters of his instrument has yielded a treasure trove of information. His etudes are designed to maximize the internalization of particular styles and modern Jazz language in general. I'm confident that this book will provide countless hours---years even---of enjoyment and learning to all who take the time to look into the mind and the learning process of this brilliant musician." ---Eric Alexander"

Improvisation is a practice of musical exploration and discovery. What we explore is our lived experience and what we discover we share with our audience. As improvisers, our creative resources include sense perception, imagination, somatic presence, and the vitality of emotional expression. In collaboration we develop relationships that serve the music and balance the priorities of self and others in the ensemble. Being Music describes the craft of improvisation as “spontaneous composition” including an awareness of form, compositional focus, theme and development, stillness and creative flow. Miller and Lande address the problem of perfectionism and offer strategies for overcoming judgmental thinking and other obstacles to creative spontaneity. Abundant written musical examples and exercises offer the reader ample opportunity to practice the principles outlined in the text. With over forty-five years of experience performing together, Miller and Lande's dialogical reflections on creativity and community offer a clear and practical guide to the creative process of improvisation for musicians of any style or genre, and at all levels of experience.

This fresh look at the neglected rhythm section in jazz ensembles shows that the improvisational interplay among drums, bass, and piano is just as innovative, complex, and spontaneous as the solo. Ingrid Monson juxtaposes musicians' talk and musical examples to ask how musicians go about "saying something" through music in a way that articulates identity, politics, and race. Through interviews with Jaki Byard, Richard Davis, Sir Roland Hanna, Billy Higgins, Cecil McBee, and others, she develops a perspective on jazz improvisation that has "interactiveness" at its core, in the creation of music through improvisational interaction, in the shaping of social communities and networks through music, and in the development of cultural meanings and ideologies that inform the interpretation of jazz in twentieth-century American cultural life. Replete with original musical transcriptions, this broad view of jazz improvisation and its emotional and cultural power will have a wide audience among jazz fans, ethnomusicologists, and anthropologists.

This collection of etudes, written during the 1970's, was composed as a result of Jimmy Wyble's explorations into the musical worlds of counterpoint, harmony and chord melody improvisation for the jazz guitar. the right and left hand fingerings presented in this book were also developed as techniques needed to improvise jazz in two lines. Jimmy uses very standard jazz guitar chord shapes in these etudes; however, these shapes move through the harmony in lines rather than block chord structures. This broken chord technique creates a unique contrapuntal sound that separates Jimmy from the rest of the fingerstyle jazz guitar world. It is hoped that jazz and classical guitarists playing and working through these etudes will see many familiar chord shapes moving in new ways and creating new sounds. These new harmonic sounds combined with beautiful melodies will inspire any quitarist to new levels of musical creativity. Written in notation and tablature. 92 pages.