Jazz singer's handbook


Book Description

This book provides practical advice on professional jazz singing. Topics covered include getting inside the lyrics, personalising the song, creating an emotional mood, word stress, melodic variation, breathing, rhythm, choosing a key, writing a lead sheet, creating an arrangement, organising a gig book, rehearsing, and playing styles.




The Jazz Standards


Book Description

An updated new edition of Ted Gioia's acclaimed compendium of jazz standards, featuring 15 additional selections, hundreds of additional recommended tracks, and enhancements and additions on almost every page. Since the first edition of The Jazz Standards was published in 2012, author Ted Gioia has received almost non-stop feedback and suggestions from the passionate global community of jazz enthusiasts and performers requesting crucial additions and corrections to the book. In this second edition, Gioia expands the scope of the book to include more songs, and features new recordings by rising contemporary artists. The Jazz Standards is an essential comprehensive guide to some of the most important jazz compositions, telling the story of more than 250 key jazz songs and providing a listening guide to more than 2,000 recordings. The fan who wants to know more about a tune heard at the club or on the radio will find this book indispensable. Musicians who play these songs night after night will find it to be a handy guide, as it outlines the standards' history and significance and tells how they have been performed by different generations of jazz artists. Students learning about jazz standards will find it to be a go-to reference work for these cornerstones of the repertoire. This book is a unique resource, a browser's companion, and an invaluable introduction to the art form.




Jazz Piano Handbook


Book Description

"[Student will learn the following:] open a fake book/sheet music with chord symbols and play a tune, accompany vocalist/instrumentalist on any type of tune, get a solo piano/vocal gig, use the piano as a helpful tool to practice vocal improvisation, analyze the chord changes to a song and understand the function of each chord within the progression, double-check published leads-sheets for accuracy, improve composition skills by being able to play and hear the tunes, improve improvisation skills by understanding the harmonic construction of a song."--Page 2




Vocal Improvisation


Book Description

Designed for vocal students to better connect what they "hear" with what they "play."




So You Want to Sing Jazz


Book Description

Since the 1930s and ̕40s, jazz has stood tall in American popular music, drawing into its embrace not only great horn players, percussionists, guitarists, bassists, and pianists, but also some of the greatest singers in America’s musical history. Jazz has laid the groundwork for important innovations in modern singing, opening up entirely new ways of delivering songs through what would eventually become jazz standards—songs that formed the basis of the American Songbook. In So You Want to Sing Jazz, singer and professor of voice Jan Shapiro gives a guided tour through the art and science of the jazz vocal style. Throughout, Shapiro hones in on what makes jazz singing distinctive, suggesting along the way how other types of singers can make use of jazz. She looks at such key matters in jazz singing as the role of improvisation, the place of specific singers who influenced and even defined vocal jazz as we know it today, and the unique way in which jazz incorporates vibrato, conversational delivery, rhythmic phrasing, and melodic embellishment and improvisation. The book includes guest-authored chapters by singing voice researchers Dr. Scott McCoy and Dr. Wendy LeBorgne. In So You Want to Sing Jazz, singers and voice teachers finally have the go-to resource they need for singing vocal jazz. The So You Want to Sing seriesis produced in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Like all books in the series, So You Want to Sing Jazz features online supplemental material on the NATS website. Please visit www.nats.org to access style-specific exercises, audio and video files, and additional resources.




Jazz Pedagogy


Book Description

DVD provides over three hours of audio and video demonstrations of rehearsal techniques and teaching methods for jazz improvisation, improving the rhythm section, and Latin jazz styles.




The Melodic Minor Handbook


Book Description

What would you play when you see the chord symbols A7b9-sharp9, F7+5, Csusb9, or D-flatMaj7+5? What would you "blow" over a D Locrian #2? The Melodic Minor Handbook provides musicians of all levels with these answers in presenting a concise, practical, easy-to-absorb method of exposure, study, and practice in the components of melodic minor harmony, and its use within the jazz vocabulary. Although the sound of melodic minor harmony has been a staple of jazz music over the last half century, familiarity among many aspiring musicians with its derivative modes and chord types still seems to remain a mystery; and even though touched upon to a greater or lesser degree by various books and methods, a comprehensive study stressing melodic minor harmony as a unique harmonic universe of its own has been absent---until now 176 pages, spiral bound.







Singing Jazz:


Book Description

Explores the evolution of jazz singing with profiles of great performers, discussing how they learned their craft and the experiences that shaped their careers




This is Bop


Book Description

If any man could be defined as the epitome of the modern jazz singer, it would surely be Jon Hendricks. His contributions to jazz as a whole were colossal: a hipster, a bopster, a comic and raconteur, a wordsmith par excellence, and a fearless improviser who took the arts of scatting and vocalese to new heights. As a founder member of the groundbreaking vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, he changed forever the public perception of what a jazz singer could be. Jon Hendricks started singing professionally at the age of seven. Within five years he was supporting his entire family - including three sisters, eleven brothers and a niece - with his earnings from radio appearances. He was active in jazz long before the birth of bebop, and didn't stop until he was in his nineties. Taught by the pioneering bebop pianist Art Tatum, Hendricks performed with everyone of any consequence in jazz, from Louis Armstrong to Charlie Parker. Before Lambert, Hendricks and Ross astonished the world with their album Sing A Song Of Basie, he was writing songs for Louis Jordan. Later he wrote for stage, screen and the press, and influenced and worked with Manhattan Transfer, Bobby McFerrin and Kurt Elling. Not content with writing lyrics for jazz instrumentals, he turned his hand later in life to classical works by Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninoff. When Jon Hendricks died in 2017, he left behind a final masterwork - his fully-lyricized adaptation of the Miles Davis album Miles Ahead.