(Jazz Book). From Thom Mason comes a fun and interesting guide to help you develop aural skills. This book focuses on improving your technique in hearing pitches, rhythms, melodies, and chord progressions, as directly applied to actual music in the jazz repertoire. The text will help you to hear music in your head from the written page, transcribe, and sight sing, all the while making it musical through appropriate jazz phrasing and articulations. The valuable lessons learned can be applied to any instrument or voice, with skills that transcend jazz, useful in all styles of music.

In jazz circles, players and listeners with “big ears” hear and engage complexity in the moment, as it unfolds. Taking gender as part of the intricate, unpredictable action in jazz culture, this interdisciplinary collection explores the terrain opened up by listening, with big ears, for gender in jazz. Essays range from a reflection on the female boogie-woogie pianists who played at Café Society in New York during the 1930s and 1940s to interpretations of how the jazzman is represented in Dorothy Baker’s novel Young Man with a Horn (1938) and Michael Curtiz’s film adaptation (1950). Taken together, the essays enrich the field of jazz studies by showing how gender dynamics have shaped the production, reception, and criticism of jazz culture. Scholars of music, ethnomusicology, American studies, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies approach the question of gender in jazz from multiple perspectives. One contributor scrutinizes the tendency of jazz historiography to treat singing as subordinate to the predominantly male domain of instrumental music, while another reflects on her doubly inappropriate position as a female trumpet player and a white jazz musician and scholar. Other essays explore the composer George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept as a critique of mid-twentieth-century discourses of embodiment, madness, and black masculinity; performances of “female hysteria” by Les Diaboliques, a feminist improvising trio; and the BBC radio broadcasts of Ivy Benson and Her Ladies’ Dance Orchestra during the Second World War. By incorporating gender analysis into jazz studies, Big Ears transforms ideas of who counts as a subject of study and even of what counts as jazz. Contributors: Christina Baade, Jayna Brown, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hairston, Kristin McGee, Tracy McMullen, Ingrid Monson, Lara Pellegrinelli, Eric Porter, Nichole T. Rustin, Ursel Schlicht, Julie Dawn Smith, Jeffrey Taylor, Sherrie Tucker, João H. Costa Vargas

An intimate exploration into the musical genius of fifteen living jazz legends, from the longtime New York Times jazz critic Jazz is conducted almost wordlessly: John Coltrane rarely told his quartet what to do, and Miles Davis famously gave his group only the barest instructions before recording his masterpiece "Kind of Blue." Musicians are often loath to discuss their craft for fear of destroying its improvisational essence, rendering jazz among the most ephemeral and least transparent of the performing arts. In The Jazz Ear, the acclaimed music critic Ben Ratliff sits down with jazz greats to discuss recordings by the musicians who most influenced them. In the process, he skillfully coaxes out a profound understanding of the men and women themselves, the context of their work, and how jazz—from horn blare to drum riff—is created conceptually. Expanding on his popular interviews for The New York Times, Ratliff speaks with Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Branford Marsalis, Dianne Reeves, Wayne Shorter, Joshua Redman, and others about the subtle variations in generation, training, and attitude that define their music. Playful and keenly insightful, The Jazz Ear is a revelatory exploration of a unique way of making and hearing music.

Jamey Aebersold's Jazz Ear Training is a no-nonsense approach consisting of two hours of recorded ear training exercises with aural instructions before each. It starts very simply, with intervals and gradually increases in difficulty until you are hearing chord changes and progressions. All answers are listed in the book, and contains transposed parts for C, B-flat, and E-flat instruments to allow playing along. Beginning to advanced levels.

This book is a study of chord progressions found in the jazz musician's repertoire. Through the tunes, the chord progressions are compared to one another, linked together by commonalities, and harmonic traits are codified, aiding in memorization and identification by ear.

(Jazz Transcriptions). Transcribed guitar solos from over 30 Pass classics, including: All the Things You Are * But Not for Me * Cavalerie * C.E.D. * Chlo-e * Django * 500 Miles High * For Django * Giant Steps * Have You Met Miss Jones? * I Love You * In a Mellow Tone * Just Friends * Limehouse Blues * Love for Sale * Love Is Here to Stay * Meditation (Meditacao) * Night and Day * The Night Has a Thousand Eyes * Oleo * Robbin's Nest * Rosetta * Satin Doll * Soon * Speak Low * Stella by Starlight * Stompin' at the Savoy * Tricrotism * Watch What Happens * Windows * Yardbird Suite * You Stepped Out of a Dream.