John Elliott: Insights In Jazz

John Elliott: Insights In Jazz Code: TL135C	£25.00
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Learn how to memorise chord progressions and play them in any key. Consolidate your knowledge of the most important harmonic patterns that jazz standards are based on so that you can quickly remember the changes.

For the jazz student faced with the challenge of how to learn a basic jazz repertoire, Insights In Jazz makes a powerful promise. By focussing on learning just 20 small harmonic ‘bricks’ and 5 ‘joins’ you can cover the basic material required to play most of the 238 commonly played jazz standards analysed in Insights of Jazz.

The author suggests a possible order of learning ‘bricks’ and related concepts, based on the frequency in which they occur in the songs analysed. This helps you to build your repertoire from the ground up in a way that maximises results.

Good players can play hundreds of tunes from memory in any key. They do this by breaking song forms into smaller harmonic patterns that are easier to memorise. Once you know a few building blocks, memorising and transposing tunes is much easier because the same figures keep recurring in different songs.

The CD features audio examples of 55 must know harmonic patterns, plus reliable chord changes and colour coded roadmaps for 238 of the most commonly played jazz standards in pdf format, from Ain’t Misbehavin’ to You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To.

Being able to remember your repertoire is a crucial step towards becoming a successful musican. Insights In Jazz shows you how it can be done and will help you build a substantial repertoire the quick way.

Here is an example roadmap from page 4 of the book:

Example roadmap from Insights in Jazz by John Elliott

Your ‘observations’ are tremendous! Just what I always hoped would happen, taking Harmony with LEGO bricks to the next level and opening up possibilities, without losing sight of the essential thing of remembering songs without effort. - Conrad Cork, author of Harmony with LEGO® Bricks

Please note - Insights in Jazz is not aimed at beginners, but at intermediate level players and composers working on developing a substantial repertoire of tunes who are already familiar with some song forms and structures (eg 32-bar AABA, 12-bar blues.) If you are new to the LEGO bricks concept you should buy Conrad Cork's Harmony with LEGO bricks.

Comb bound book/CD (55 CD audio tracks and 200-page roadmap pdf), 68 pages

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Other products from Jazzwise Publications

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by John Elliott

Date Added: Saturday 31 October, 2009

Review by Conrad Cork: Insights in Jazz by John Elliott Conrad Cork, 2009. The idea behind Harmony with LEGO Bricks is very simple. Your best approach to the individual chords in a song is via an overview of the song’s shape. You see the wood before the individual trees. That way you always have a context, and the actual key is incidental. This ‘top down’ approach has many other advantages. You can see that many songs share quite large sections with each other, for example, and also that much of what appears at first sight to be complex is a matter of variations on simple underlying structures. My own introduction to this way of looking at a song came nearly 50 years ago, when I was playing bass behind the great baritone player Harry Klein. Not surprisingly, he wanted to play Bernie’s Tune. When I said I wasn’t sure of the bridge, instead of calling the chords out, which would have solved the immediate problem but had no investment value, he talked to me about how it worked. And that has stayed with me ever since. In the early 1980’s I disappeared deep into the French countryside and attempted to analyse all the songs Lionel Grigson’s A Jazz Chord Book, in a quest to find recurring patterns. The resulting first edition of Harmony with LEGO Bricks solved my problems and the problems of anyone with my background. Over the course of the next fifteen years or so the book (and its target audience) expanded as a result of feedback from my students, primarily at De Montfort University, but also private teaching and adult education courses, so that it became usable by anybody with an interest in listening to and playing jazz. Necessarily I only had space to include a couple of dozen or so songs as fully worked examples, and by no means covered every possible structure, even having to omit some common ones. What I hoped to do was to set people up so that they could find their own way through songs I hadn’t covered. And that is what has happened. But it still left a gap for a full-sized book of jazz changes, presented in the form of LEGO bricks. The triumph of John Elliott in this astonishing and comprehensive new book is to have achieved that in spades. Here are over 200 songs (all you will ever need, really) laid out as LEGO Bricks. Each song is presented in diagram form, ‘brick walls’ which are what Elliott calls ‘road maps of bricks and joins’, with the careful use of colour to provide emphasis and add clarity. This is all admirably done. But of course, if you haven’t met Harmony with LEGO Bricks before and you open Elliott’s book at random, you won’t have any idea what is going on. You need an ‘in’. And this is where Elliott succeeds brilliantly. In an extraordinarily readable opening section, he introduces the idea of the top down approach to a song (he calls it taking a ‘meta view’) and provides a ‘flow chart’ to help you see where you are and what you might want to do as you learn. The reader is then guided through the whole process of seeing the bricks and the joins, and introduced to a core repertoire of 13 songs with their principal distinguishing features described. So even a complete beginner will have a handle on what is going on. Ornette Coleman once said that you didn’t need to be able to spell in order to speak, and following that principle, Elliott manages not to swamp the reader with too much detail. What he does do is to present the whole of the LEGO Bricks system in a beautifully written cogent and concise form, which is made easy to absorb by the writer’s clear and approachable style. It is as if he were having a conversation with you rather than trying to teach you something. Each brick and join is analysed, explained, illustrated with examples of songs where it occurs, and cross-referred to other songs. Because of the constant references to other songs, Elliott makes the reader feel that they understand the repertoire as a whole, which is massively useful in aiding coherent musical thought. In itself that will make anyone’s playing better. A set of diagrams summarise the system, and then Elliott introduces his road maps, explaining how and why he does it the way he does. I defy anyone to find any of it difficult, abstruse, or irrelevant. In a letter to me at the time of the original publication of my book, the late Ken Rattenbury said ‘in a word, needed’. That is even more true of John Elliott’s new book. It is an idea whose time has truly come, and I doubt whether it could have been done better. It is little short of magnificent. It is the book I wish I could have written myself...

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

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This product was added to our catalog on Friday 30 October, 2009.

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