Post by walkingdecay on May 1, 2018 9:41:30 GMT
You can't learn to play jazz from books. You can learn the theory from them, which will help a great deal; you can pick up core melodies and progressions from fake books and from more detailed forms of sheet music; you can pick up exercises which aid the development of speed, fluency and of just knowing where the heck everything is on an instrument - but the ability to express the music comes from listening to it being played, even from seemingly unrelated experiences and psychological responses of your own. Ted Eschliman's 2008 book Getting Into Jazz Mandolin seemed to me to tacitly aknowledge such shortcomings. It is long on useful theory, it is second to none in its presentation of useful exercises but is mostly lacking in musical context, while its information seems to be packaged into blocks, providing little sense of organic progression. Its pages simply couldn't offer the knowledge that, say, an hour of listening to Benny Goodman's small groups could towards creating fluid lines and rhythmic kicks.
There still seemed room for a follow-up to Eschliman's book however, and according to its introduction Don Stiernberg's work Jazz Mandolin Appetizers was initilally conceived as just that. What emerged is a series of original compositions which each offer ways to navigate familiar chord progressions, context for those dizzying pages of exercises and lots of friendly advice. After nearly a year of playing nothing at all on any instrument my own mandolin playing was even more scrappy and unfocused than normal, to the extent that when I resumed jamming with a friend I couldn't even get through How High The Moon or Minor Swing without jagged phrasing and breakdowns I turned to to the Eschliman book at first, and it did indeed help to get the fingers moving again, but it was playing through Don's book that brought it all together again. Unreservedly recommended.
Don, if you don't know, is one of the great mandolin players, perhaps not spoken of in the same breaths as Monroe, Grisman, Bush or as his own mentor Jethro Burns very often, but he should be.
There still seemed room for a follow-up to Eschliman's book however, and according to its introduction Don Stiernberg's work Jazz Mandolin Appetizers was initilally conceived as just that. What emerged is a series of original compositions which each offer ways to navigate familiar chord progressions, context for those dizzying pages of exercises and lots of friendly advice. After nearly a year of playing nothing at all on any instrument my own mandolin playing was even more scrappy and unfocused than normal, to the extent that when I resumed jamming with a friend I couldn't even get through How High The Moon or Minor Swing without jagged phrasing and breakdowns I turned to to the Eschliman book at first, and it did indeed help to get the fingers moving again, but it was playing through Don's book that brought it all together again. Unreservedly recommended.
Don, if you don't know, is one of the great mandolin players, perhaps not spoken of in the same breaths as Monroe, Grisman, Bush or as his own mentor Jethro Burns very often, but he should be.
Jo whoever he is.
