006 Introduction

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Introduction

Where This Book Is Coming From

Is This Book For You?

What Kind Of Book Is It?

If You Can’t Hear It You Can’t Play It

How This Book Does ItHow to Get the Best Out Of This Book

How This Book Is Organised: An Overview



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Introduction

Where This Book Is ComingFrom

Understanding music has nothing to do with reading notation, playing an

instrument, or knowing technical terms. If you love and can remember whole

performances by your favour ite players, then you do understand music.

While this is true of all music everywhere, it is especially important for jazz players.

A jazz musician personally decides on every note s/he plays, so any attempt to play

jazz without the requisite understanding in place is the wrong thing to be doing!

There is even more to this issue of personal choice, though. It is because you choose

what to play, that you don’t have to have a virtuoso technique in place before you

engage with the process. As long as the understanding, (or taste as it is also called),

is there, you can start with any level of competence. And without it, you can’t start

at all, no matter how ‘competent’ you are.

All that the technical terms, the musical analysis - and even the historical background

- are for is to explain the understanding that you already have.

The achievement of this book is to have identified what it is necessary to explain up

front, and to have discovered that the amount of knowledge you need is unbelievably

small - as well as being very easy to learn.

This book works by separating out the pre-requisites. It doesn’t clutter and confuse

the learning process by mixing them up. And it always places ‘theory’ after practice.

It starts with the problem of understanding . And from there, but entirely without the

paraphernalia of technical language, leads you from just listening to jazz, to a deep

appreciation of the processes involved.

It then shows you the tiny knowledge components you need to be able to translate

thought into action. Separated and clear so you can see the ‘theory’ for what it is.

Applying the knowledge (practising) is where the playing begins. So you will find a

lot of deeply practical help about what and how to practise. This book will give you:

• A thorough understanding of the jazz repertoire as a whole.

• The ability to play anything you know in any key, with no effort.

• Matters for further thought as you grow into a more rounded player.

• The most thorough programme of playalong material you will find anywhere.

U



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Is This Book for You?

This book is about getting you ready to hold your own as a jazz player, on

bandstands, with the fastest company around.

Even if you don’t play an instrument at all yet, there is enough here to do that job for

you, starting from scratch.

But the book is structured so that the price you pay for not getting all of the way

through it is trivial. You can bale out at any point, and still retain all of the benefits

gained to date.

This has two immediate and inevitable payoffs, almost regardless of how little

attention you pay:

• First, whether you are a musician or not, this book will show you how to get more

out of listening to jazz. The section called What to Listen for in Jazz is a

complete guide to what happens during a jazz performance. It shows you the view

from the improviser’s head, as it were. You get to discover the thinking behind

the solos. And yet it does it all by directed listening (to great music, needless to

say), and has no pre-requisites in terms of musical knowledge. Just dive in, and

dig the music.

• Second, if you are already, or if you want to become, a jazz musician, this book

will help you improve the quality of your improvisation. It will remove, almost at

a stroke, one of the major obstacles which aspiring players of all levels confront-

that of the conflict between having to know harmony thoroughly, and the

discovery that applying that knowledge, consciously while playing, limits your power of expression. Harmony with LEGO Bricks solves this problem. Your

detailed knowledge of harmony will be immense, as will your view of the

repertoire. But you won’t consciously have to think about it at all while playing,

whatever key you are playing in!

So you can answer the question ‘is this book for you?’ quite easily for yourself.

If you are not interested in listening to or playing jazz, then it will have little to offer

besides perhaps some intellectual curios ity. And if , as a player , you are not interested

in developing your potential, then it certainly isn’t for you.

Q. I’ve got the Original Harmony With LEGO Bricks . Do I Need This New Book?

A. That depends. Despite the overlap between the two (some of the text is the same),this one might suit you better.

The very first Harmony with LEGO Bricks was for people with a background like my

own - self-taught working jazz musicians who wanted to systematise and strengthen

their knowledge. As such, it made few concessions to people who weren’t like me.

The second edition - the one everyone thinks of now as Harmony with LEGO Bricks

- was revised by request to let in people who had no playing experience and no

technical jazz knowledge, but who wanted a practical guide to those things, without

getting entangled in ‘classical’ musical education. But it was still exclusively for

players and would-be players.

This new book is accessible to anyone, whether they play yet or not. Or even if they

never want to play! Part of the impulse to bring out a new guide to Harmony with LEGO Bricks was the realisation that a lot of beginners were having difficulties



In t roduc t ion

which could be sorted by leaving their instruments in their cases, and really learning

to listen before starting to play.

That demanded a different sort of book

This is that book, and it might be just what you want

What Kind Of Book Is It?

It is not a theory manualYou should be under no illusions. This is not any kind of a theory manual, either about jazz

harmony or about anything else. It presents no new knowledge, just a new and better way of

confronting and absorbing its subject. It is a deeply practical and pragmatic guide to doing this

the easy way, because you don’t have time for the hard way.

Have you got time to do it any other way?The hard way to learn is to practise eight hours a day for a thousand years. You don’t have that

much time. The hard way makes you take on trust that you are being taught properly, and

requires you to learn a whole raft of abstract matter you can’t see the use for before you can start

to practise or become yourself. The easy way shows you how to do it right from day one, andthen just let your underpinning knowledge develop naturally as you keep on doing it right. So

the easy way is self-reinforcing too, because all the ‘theory’ you learn will always be deeply

involved with your daily practice.

With this book you will end up knowing far more than if you had come by the knowledge another

way. Well enough in fact for you to be able to teach at a professional level if you want.

But the book does not duck the ‘difficulties’ of harmonic sequences, it merely approaches them

in a different way. You will get a far richer and more detailed knowledge of ‘jazz harmony’ than

you would ever get by concentrating on ‘which scale goes with which chord’, and your

improvisation will be coherent and personal. On the other hand, you will (of course) end up

fully conversant with which scale goes with which chord, but in performance you won’t be

thinking about it. In fact, it will pose so little problem while you play, that you will be able to

play any tune you know in any key, without even thinking about transposing either. In

psychological terms, this might be described as reducing the real-time computat ional load on the

brain, but without any sacrif ice in the qual ity of the resource. It operates in a

cognitive/analytical way, which cooperates with the way the brain works, rather than requiring

you to learn detailed lists verbatim.

This book teaches you by getting you to do things that are unconventional in terms of ‘classical’

music lessons. But as we examine in Part VI, which is about Practice, the conventions of those

lessons exist because the agenda for them is set, (as indeed it should be), by the goals of the

tradition in which they operate. And, unsurprisingly, those conventions are not always, or even

usually, helpful to an aspiring jazz player. The techniques used in this book are common in other

forms of skill development however, and are the subject of much contemporary work within

cognitive psychology.



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Try a LEGO bricks taste testIf you want to get a flavour of what this actually means, there are a couple of places you could

look for a quick check. First, try Part III, Just Do It . This shows how the ‘practice before

theory’ idea works. You’ll see that even a total beginner will find it easier to play rich, proper

jazz sounding chords on a keyboard, involving substitution and inversion, than they would by

learning arpeggios and starting off sounding like a hymnal. Then, for the LEGO bricks memory

system, take a look at the discussion of I’ll Remember Apri l , in the Part VII, the Repertoire

section. If you don’t understand LEGO bricks terminology, some of what it says may not yield

its full meaning. But all the same, you should be able to tell how the approach gives the player

an effortless autonomy in viewing potential repertoire. The way the song works is clearly

presented, so that remembering it is simple. And yet, the thing you actual ly remember is the

pattern, not the concert pitch changes, so that you can play the song with accuracy and subtlety

in any key at all, without having to consider questions of transposition. You might also like to

check out the Cherokee Case Study in the Perspect ives and Polemics section for the same

reasons.

If You Can’t Hear It You Can’t Play It

Jazz isn’t mechanical, it’s emotional. It depends on the player knowing the ‘language’ and being

able to speak (i.e. play) it. This book is all about helping you to play effectively, and most

particularly, it is about how to improvise a melodic line effectively - and by effect ively I mean

one which communicates your feelings. And that starts (and ends) with your ears.

This book is about melodyI realise that at this point it may strike you as perverse for a jazz book whose title uses the word

‘harmony’ to claim that it is actually about the primacy of melody! Bear with me. The epigraph

at the front, from Lee Konitz’ liner notes to The Real Lee Konitz is its motto. Study it and think

about it carefully. Harmony exists, and is important in jazz, but it also needs to be put in its

place. This book aims to do just that . And that place is not as the ‘engine’ which generates what

you play. If such an engine exists at all, it is surely the gestal t of the song, not any one part.

But pre-eminent though, as Konitz says, is the melody. This book systematically refutes the

mechanical approach of deriving the improvised line from the harmony.

This book shows you how to learn a repertoire

This book will show you how to understand what jazz does, whether you are a musician or not.

If at that point you want to play, it shows you how to get a substantial body of knowledge and

experience into your head, and how to be able to draw on it in performance without a second

thought!

Jazz has its own agenda of practical (i.e. performance) problems. Somewhere around the top is

the learning of the common repertoire, becoming conversant with the literature as it were, so that

you can communicate with your peers and your audience. This book presents a way of

committing to memory those pieces in the repertoire that are based on ‘harmonic progressions’,

or what musicians call ‘blowing changes’. For musicians, using this book will solve many

practical problems. As we have said, these include playing in any key you happen to fancy, and

remembering a large number of pieces.



In t roduc t ion

This book will show you how to listen to jazz performances of songs. Then, how to internalise

them so that you can improvise freely and effectively. In doing so, it touches on a large number

of songs from the standard repertoire, and looks at some of them in detail.

Don’t however become obsessed with clocking up huge numbers of songs. A working jazzmusician carries around in his/her head somewhere between 200 and 300 songs, but generally

tends to play a much smaller number. Lee Konitz has words of wisdom here too. In the liner

notes to Very Cool he articulates opinions explicitly shared by many jazz musicians, notably

including Bill Evans.

‘If the tune has the ingredients with regard to good melody or good changes, it will be a good

enough challenge. If I got to the point where I could play perfectly the tunes I know a number of

times, I suppose I’d figure I’d achieved the point and would look for something harder to do. So

far, however, I’ve been playing a handful of tunes a number of years and I guess I don’t know

them as well as I feel I could. It’s very easy to flit around, but now I’m more concerned with

something becoming a part of me, and that takes a long time - 10, 15, 20 years’.

Look at the percentage of Bird’s output that was based on the blues, Cherokee, and I Got Rhythm , and you will see that an apparently small repertoire in no way holds you back.

Again, now that so much of it is becoming available, look at how small Miles Davis’s ‘live’

repertoire was in the early 1960’s. Night after night, If I Were a Bell , All of You, Walkin’ , Oleo,

Autumn Leaves , and, frankly, not many more. And it was anything but a limiting factor.

On the other hand, how many live recordings of Coltrane playing Giant Steps are there? It

wasn't where Trane lived, so he didn't do it.

Use Harmony with LEGO Bricks alongside Lionel

Grigson’s A Jazz Chord BookHarmony with LEGO Bricks makes an ideal companion to Lionel Grigson’s A Jazz Chord

Book , by far the best and most authoritative work of its kind, and something you should buy

immediately if you don’t already have it.

Grigson spends a few lines in his introduction describing in general how you might go about

learning a repertoire. In particular he stresses the importance of learning the songs, not relying

on sheet music.

This book picks up Grigson’s ball and runs with it. While only a couple of dozen songs are

looked at in full detail, many more of the songs in Grigson’s book are referred to, usually several

times over, in various contexts. So using Harmony with LEGO Bricks will give you a

systematic informed overview of the essential repertoire that Grigson presents.



In t roduc t ion

While Lionel Grigson’s A Jazz Chord Book is an attempt to document a broad based standard

jazz repertoire, this book is an attempt to let you see that repertoire as a cohesive body of

musical tradition, not just an otherwise random assemblage.

How This Book Does It

The approach is based above all on listening. It is true that if you can’t hear it, you can’t play it.

But be assured it is equally true that you don’t have to know any technical terms in order to hear

it!

You think about what you hear, and can work towards understanding what it takes to make whatyou hear happen. You can stop anywhere along this route if you don’t want to be a player, but

even so you might well surprise yourself at just how far you can get.

You will be amazed at the startlingly small knowledge base you need to begin practising as a

musician. From this you accrue all the other skills you need to play what you hear.

Interspersed with the text are some sections that help to discriminate between jazz and other

musics in a variety of contexts, from a new way to see jazz history to music lessons to copyright

royalties. These are intended seriously, but can be viewed as ‘entertainments’ in the context of

the book as a whole.

So I should again stress that Harmony with LEGO Bricks is a new approach to its subject, and

not a theory about it. It does not even try to be exhaustive, either as a grammar (or even a

catalogue) of the phenomena found in jazz harmony. Instead it introduces you to a new way oflooking at the standard repertoire and the problems of playing it in jazz. If you adopt the

approach offered, you will be ideally placed to continue to develop your own knowledge in your

own way.

And so as not to be misunderstood, I should also emphasise that just because the book focuses on

one aspect - i.e. ‘standards’ - there is of course no intention to exclude or judge other types of

jazz performance or practice, or to pronounce about the relative worth of different approaches.

To that extent (and to that extent only) Duke Ellington was right when he said there was only

good music and bad music. In any case, ‘standards’ do remain relevant to most of jazz. A

majority of players regularly play them on gigs and records, along with modal or ostinato pieces

and free performances too, as their needs dictate. And these days the whole vocabulary of the

jazz language is avai lable to be played over ‘standards’ - you can be as ‘ins ide’ or as ‘outside’ as

you like when you play them.

Accordingly they are the chosen vehicles by which this book will teach you to listen to jazz. But

you will also find that your increased listening power easily transfers to jazz that uses other

material.

No jargon‘Standards’ have another advantage too if we are trying, as this book is, for a resolutely non-

technical ‘ears only’ approach, available to anyone interested, and not just restricted to

musicians. Many of them have words, or as they are usually called, ‘lyrics’. So we can identify

the part of the song we are thinking about, not by using phrases like ‘beat three of measure

fifteen’, or even ‘the beginning of the bridge’, but by saying ‘the place where the words say‘eventide’ .



In t roduc t ion

Music Music MusicLet’s clear the field by defining some terms.

In this book I am not trying to impress music teachers and educators. I am trying to helpaspiring jazz musicians. As Gerald Wilson of UCLA said recently, ‘jazz is a serious music, very

complex’. It needs its own methods.

So very deliberately, unlike far too many other books that claim to help you, I don’t introduce

‘classical’ terms (like ‘secondary dominant’ or ‘polychord’) which are of no practical use in jazz

but which are often felt to give a book about it a spurious legi timacy. Such ‘classical’

terminology as I do use is there because it is undeniably useful to jazz players, and such new

terms as I have invented are there because they are so effective at evoking a whole panoply of

notions from one simple trigger.

In the more than thirty years I have attended, observed, and participated in many events related

to jazz education, I have almost always been depressed by the suffocating weight of ‘classical’

methodology restricting and controlling the ways and means proposed and practised for teaching jazz.

WEAM

‘Classical Music’ is not even a sensible term to use for the tradition to which it refers. The

word ‘classical’ simply describes a period where there are prevailing norms and orthodoxies

accepted by practitioners. It is in opposition to ‘romantic’ or ‘revolutionary’, which describes a

period where one or more iconoclasts have broken the mould of the prevai ling classicism, and

artists are committed to doing it their own way. Any art form which is alive will follow a

revolution with a new classicism, based on what the revolutionaries found out. And this

classicism will be used by artists for as long as it is any use, and specifically until a new

revolution takes place.

So ‘classical’ is wrong when it is applied to, say, Beethoven!

The other word in the term 'classical music' is ‘music’. ‘Classical music’ refers to a particular

musical tradition. But other traditions are music too however, and they also have their ‘classical’

periods. Some people try to get around the problem by contrast ing the ‘classical’ music with

more ephemeral material, like pop music. This leads them to use terms like ‘straight music’ or

‘serious music’. I find that unbelievably offensive. It presumes a monopoly of seriousness

within the ‘classical’ tradition. However there is a point in trying to emphasise seriousness of

purpose. But what is generally meant by ‘Serious music’ is far more useful ly described as ‘art

music’. And, taking a leaf from the establishment practice of using terms like ‘Indian Classical

Music’ in order to acknowledge the artistic merit of another tradition, I use the term Western

European Art Music to describe the tradition usually called ‘classical music’. This has a nicely

pronounceable acronym, WEAM, which is what I use from here on in.

I offer it freely to lovers of that tradition. It reminds them that their tradition is particular and

precious (a real tradition) but also that it is only one of many possible kinds of art music! It is

not innately superior, and its practices (including its pedagogy) may be utterly unlike those of

other art music traditions.

Imperialist orthodoxies: the WEAM mindsetUnderstand me. I intend to cast no aspersions on the worth of WEAM as a tradition. You will

find nothing in this book remotely pejorative about WEAM as music. All the critical matter

referring to WEAM is to do with the presence and prevalence of the kind of cultural imperialism

that equates WEAM with music, and thus logically equates WEAM music teaching with musicteaching, and WEAM norms with music norms.



In t roduc t ion

To the extent that they damage the perceptions and development of jazz players, they are malign

norms.

WEAM is a minor tradition in the wider context of world music making. It has developed a

particular terminology, and more especial ly a particular approach to music educat ion that meetsits own purposes very well. But it shares with other western social, political, and cultural

phenomena, a tendency to assert that its norms are universal. That is, it thinks that they don’t

only hold within their own culture, but that they are right, and can therefore be used to map and

to judge altogether different cultures.

So it is vital to understand that WEAM is not ‘right’. It is just itself. And it is vital to resist

pressure, whether from paymasters of academic bodies, or from cultural pundits, to conform to

WEAM orthodoxies as if they were universally authoritative.

Jazz, by having one of its historical feet in the European camp as it were, has more problems

here than other world musics. This is because it evinces certain musical phenomena which bear

some resemblance to WEAM. Some of its raw material, (most notably the use of the particular

twelve notes in the so-called ‘octave’), has its origins in WEAM. But that should not prevent usfrom looking at jazz on its own terms, including making up a specifically jazz notation where

doing so is necessary to establishing the semantic purposes of the music.

How To Get The Best Out Of ThisBook

Use your ears

Everything in the book depends on you knowing the contents of Part I What to Listen for in

Jazz section. And if you are, or intend to be, a player, you will also need to know Part V A Kit

of LEGO Bricks to Build Songs With . Between them, those chapters make around 150

references to specific recordings, dealing with more than 100 songs. Don't do anything else until

you can hear everything it talks about. In particular, don't be tempted to start dabbling with the

repertoire before it makes sense through your ears. Remember a little learning is a dangerous

thing. The real investment is in your ears, what they hear, and what they can tell you. Equipped

with ears, there is nothing you won't be able to find in yourself.

Make up your own set of Companion Recordings beforeyou startYou should make a set of Companion Recordings containing all the material referred to above,

so that you can listen to it as you read and study. As the Appendix B: Discography makes clear,

you don’t have to use the versions recommended if you have others you prefer. But if there are

some songs you don’t have any versions of, you will have to buy or borrow the records. (Much

the same is true when you start to use Lionel Grigson’s A Jazz Chord Book ). Use the lists of

recommended versions as a shopping list to fill any gaps in your collection. Sometimes the vocal

recordings are not ‘jazz’ ones but usually, as with Frank Sinatra, at least within sight of jazz. It

really doesn’t matter if you can’t find the exact recordings, because every vocal version will use

the lyrics, so any one will do. But without the recordings, the real meat of what this bookoffers you just won’t be accessible.



In t roduc t ion

So before you do anything else, use the order of presentation given in Part I What to Listen For

in Jazz , and Part V A Kit of LEGO Bricks to Build Songs With , together with the Songs and

Albums listings in the Appendix B: Discography to construct your own set of Companion

Recordings. When I first put mine together, I recorded full versions of all the tracks, not

excerpts, and it extended onto 13 CD's. It took a leisurely, and hugely enjoyable, couple ofweeks to do that. In fact, I hardly remember enjoying myself so much.

You don’t have to be daunted by the apparent scale of the task. You will be listening to some of

the best music there is while you put your Companion Recordings together, and it will be an

investment in being able to use, re-use, and move on from, what this book has to teach you.

And you may find, like me, that afterwards you put these recordings on anyway for their own

sake, instead of always listening to specific albums.

If you are serious about your playing or listening you owe it to yourself to make the basic

commitment of time and money that making a set of Companion Recordings involves.

Furthermore, if you are serious, you will want to acquire transcriptions of solos, playalongs,

other books, and maybe some videos and DVDs. For me the best source of supply is JAZZWISE

Publications, whose catalogue is an Aladdin’s cave of carefully chosen treasures for all levels of

jazz player , and who can always advise you as to what is best if you call them. Some pointers

are in Appendix A Other Playalongs Relevant to This Book , Appendix B Discography and

Appendix C Bibliography.

How This Book Is Organised: An

Overview

What to Listen for in Jazz

Getting right to work, and with frequent listening suggestions, What to Listen for in Jazz shows

you how songs work. Not just in terms of repeating sections etc, but in terms of the large scale

components from which they are built, and, more importantly, those ‘magic moments’, the

‘joins’, when the song moves on from one component to the next. By the end of it, all sorts of

connections will have been made - like the feel of going into the bridge of Cherokee being the

same as going into the third section of Blue Bossa. The big picture will be securely in place.

And you haven’t had to be a musician to have understood any of it!

Perspectives and Polemics

Then the book takes time out for some Perspect ives and Polemics . These start with some views

of jazz history. The conventional ‘harmony as the engine’ perspective is comprehensively

refuted. Instead, The Song as Raga offers an alternative, and much more coherent account of

how jazz developed. Copyright Royalties shows how the legal WEAM definition of music

actively prevents jazz musicians getting paid for their work. And the durable myth that the

bridge of Cherokee is in some way difficult is systematically rubbished in a Case Study. Enjoy!



In t roduc t ion

Just Do It Just Do It shows you how to voice jazz cadences on a keyboard, even if you have never

touched a keyboard before. All you have to know is where middle C is! If you already play it

may surprise you that you actually start using substitution in the first voicing you learn. But you

don’t have to know what it is! It just so happens that substitution is easier for a beginner than

non-substitution. This section gets you to play cadences, accurately and confidently , and only

then invites you to think about the theory of what it is you are actually doing. Isn't this the best

way to do it?

The Transition from Listening to Playing

All the 'theory' you will ever need, in just 15 minutes of your time.

At this stage, if you want to be able to play, there are a couple of things (only two) you have to

know first. The Transition from Listening to Playing shows you that while you do have to learnsomething, it isn’t much. It is easily acquired, and you can get right into playing straight away,

picking up any additional theory you need along the way, as you play. So this is the ‘bridge

passage’ of the book. Its claim is that it is al l the ‘theory’ you’ll ever need. And, as I indica ted

above, your need is to be ready to play in the fastest company around. You start, as always, by

doing it right from the outset, and learning what you are doing as you learn to do it.

Even so, it may surprise you to learn that you don’t have to be able to play an instrument at all in

order to learn what the rest of the book teaches. Even when it does come to practice, you can do

it all by singing and clapping if you want. So if and when you do try these things out on an

instrument, you have only the physical problems of playing it to reckon with, because you will

already know everything else. Even if you already play, it is arguable that taking yourself back

to basics like this, leaving your instrument to one side while you learn from the book, might be

the best way to refresh your playing.

The Map

(The 'what')

If you want to play, then you have just two basic things to learn before you can start to

experiment with your own playing. Between them they take about fifteen minutes to learn, and

they are described fully here. (But even in this section, because this knowledge is free standing,

a non-musician may still find it interesting). It tells you what you need to know, and how to test

yourself to make sure you really do know it. This will give you the 'map' of the territory in

which all chord sequences occur.

The Motor

(The 'how')

What to Listen For in Jazz showed you how to hear what is going on. The Map showed you

where it is going on. The Motor shows you how to get around on the Map. It carefully

separates the what from the how. The question of what actual knowledge you require to

describe things - the basic terminology - is separate from the practical matter of how you make

the sounds you want happen.

Terminology



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Chord Symbols: How to Write Down the Sounds You Know

This section not only names the sounds you already know and identifies them as specific chord

types, it discusses the conventions used, and gives details of variations in the use of symbols

which you may encounter when you meet something written by someone else. It also demystifies'substitution'; something which, by the time you get this far, you will know is much easier than

'non' substitution.

Don’t' skip it

So even if you think you already know how to play, don't skip The Transition from Listening to

Playing . It shows you a perspective that will give you a breathtaking grasp of the material, for

scarcely any effort. You don't want to spend your life hacking through the dense jungle when a

yard and a half away there is a clear arterial road! Put it this way, if you think that there are

several types of cadence, each with its own changes, and each of those has 12 possible keys it

can be played in, you might (and I have seen it happen) set yourself to learn 'several times 12'

things. This section will show you there is only 1 thing.

A Kit of LEGO Bricks to Build Songs With

Within the context of both having learned to recognise all the LEGO bricks from What to Listen

For in Jazz , and having met the big picture in The Transition from Listening to Playing , you

then get the actual changes to A Kit of LEGO Bricks to Build Songs With . This is a thorough

survey of what you meet in blowing changes. All of it is carefully classified, so that you start

with the basic form of something, and then see its variations as just that; variations: not complex

free-standing entities.

How and what to PracticeThen, before getting down to practical work, comes one of the most useful sections of the book ,

How and what To Practice . It discusses why WEAM music lessons are not appropriate for jazz,

and is a mine of good ideas for you to set up a viable practice regime for yourself, and learn how

to make real progress as you work on your playing and yourself.

A LEGO Bricks Approach to Some Core Repertoire

This section discusses two dozen typical and often-played songs in some detail, showing you in

practical terms how you can map a song (often in more than one way) just by using LEGO

bricks and joins. By now you will be able to do this easily, at a glance. And the payoff is that

remembering the changes is an almost nothing task. Furthermore, because what you

remember is the ‘map’, the key in which you actually perform is irrelevant. There is no more

to remember. You can play anything you know in any key. Contrast this to the early experience

of one famous British musician, who felt that because he could play Al l of Me on alto as well as

tenor, he knew two tunes! Playalongs are recommended for each song.

More Things to Think AboutThis discusses a few more things you should know in more depth. These include scales, how you

should write out lead sheets and transcriptions, why Giant Steps is a doddle, and how to teach

LEGO bricks in a classroom to people who can’t (or won’t) read this book. To be a mature and

rounded musician, you will need to have a view on all these things, even if you don’t share mine.

But they only need to be considered, well down the line, as they are here. Specifically for

instance, the larger discussion about scales does not need to, and indeed should not, precede your

starting to improvise.



In t roduc t ion

The Harmony with LEGO Bricks PlayalongHarmony with LEGO Bricks comes with a double CD of playalongs, which methodically take

you through what the book has to teach in terms of LEGO Bricks and joins in all keys. After

this, no blowing changes will hold any terrors for you. Each track is discussed, showing you the

reason for its inclusion, and for the choice of presentation. The text is integral with the Concert

changes, but there are Bb and Eb transposing instrument changes too.

AppendicesTo help you connect to the playalongs you need, Appendix A lists the actual playalongs referred

to in the Repertoire section by album, showing which song(s) each contains. After that, make a

quick call to JAZZWISE and you are on your way.

Appendix B is the discography of the 150 or so tracks from the recommended listening program

in Part I What to Listen for in Jazz and Part V A Kit of LEGO Bricks to Build Songs With .

You get the albums listed under each artist of course, but I have also provided a cross-referenceof the songs the book refers to as well. All part of the process of helping you to learn the songs

you should know.

Appendix C is the Bibliography, and gives you details of the books specifically mentioned in the

text. (There wouldn’t be space to list all of the books consulted during the writing of this book).

006 Introduction

Documents

Transcript of 006 Introduction