How to Play from a Real Book: For All Musicians

by Robert Rawlins

All musicians should be able to sit down at the keyboard and make sense of a tune. With that goal in mind, every instrumentalist and singer can profit from this book. It covers many techniques for exploring, understanding, and performing the songs found in real books. You will learn how to analyse the form and harmonic structure, insert an introduction, interpret the melody, improvise on the chords, construct bass lines, voice the chords, add substitutions, and much more. Offering a theory-based approach, it addresses many aspects of solo and small band performance that can improve your own playing and your understanding of what others are doing around you. Playing from a real book is all about options. The material presented here will offer you a full range of techniques that you can putto use right away. After You´ve Gone Alice In Wonderland Beyond The Sea Bye Bye Blackbird Doxy Gee Baby, Ain´t I Good To You Georgia On My Mind Giant Steps Give My Regards To Broadway Have You Met Miss Jones? Honeysuckle Rose I Got It Bad And That Ain´t Good IHear A Rhapsody I Remember You If I Were A Bell I´m Old Fashioned In A Mellow Tone In A Sentimental Mood Indiana (Back Home Again In Indiana) Lazy Bird My Buddy My Ship Oleo On The Alamo Opus One Pick Yourself Up Robbin´s Nest Rose Room Scrapple From The Apple Swing That Music That Old Black Magic The Girl From Ipanema (Garota De Ipanema) The Way You Look Tonight There Is No Greater Love There Will Never Be Another You There´ll Be Some Changes Made They Didn´t Believe Me Triste Wave You Made Me Love You (I Didn´tWant To Do It)

Genres: Music

Paperback

First published February 1, 2012

Reviews

[bartosz · Rating 3 out of 5]

At this point in my life I'm not even going to pretend that someday I'll be a musician. Yet music in general, and playing jazz specifically is something that I like to dabble with. Having trouble with building the jazz repertoire I decided to get How To Play From a Real Book by Robert Rawlins.

The book is organized into 9 chapters: the first reviews western music and jazz harmony, the second presents the approaches you'll need to analyze a jazz tune, the third and fourth analyzes the common jazz forms and how to play over them. The fifth chapter is devoted to playing bass lines, while the sixth and seventh chapters are on comping/chords-on-melody approach. The last two chapters are about improvisation and reharmonization, respectively.

For what it sets out to be - a basic primer for the jazz idiom I think that the book is great. Each chapter explains the concepts clearly, lists several alternative approaches (different forms, different ways of constructing chords and bass-lines etc.) using standard musical notation. Everything is well tailored to get you to play from a real book convincingly enough.

While the book promises to be "instrument agnostic", it is clearly written for pianists. There's no specific advice for comping with instruments that are more limited than the piano (e.g the guitar or the xylophone), no advice how to accompany when you're the drummer. While other musicians might get "something" from the general knowledge in the pages, pianists will certainly get the most out of it. The book focuses on the swing, bebop, blues and latin idioms almost exclusively - modal jazz, fusion etc is entirely absent.

I certainly don't regret buying How to Play From a Real Book. The book can be read over a single evening, while offering several weeks worth of exercises. My only wish is for a book covering the same topics but broader in scope!

[Richard Pohl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally great, practical guide with all necessary theory explained. I cannot imagine musician who would not benefit from this volume. Highly recommended, and not only for beginners!