jaelliott

[quote name='Gareth Hughes' post='956934' date='Sep 15 2010, 09:49 AM']The other thing I found that I do is that if I'm sight-reading all the time then my memory shuts down completely. I did ten weeks of 'RENT', seven shows a week. I honestly could not play one song now start to finish without the music in front of me. Yet when I have the music in front of my I barely look at it. It's like a safety net - don't look down!!!![/quote] Yeah. sight reading is a great skill for jobs and playing in big bands, but sucks for real jazz where you cannot play meaningful improvisation unless you know where you are going. And you can only sound authentic if you learn tunes from (recording of) real jazz players, rather than books. I am new to this forum, I am the author of the book mentioned above by Mike above which is all about knowing the most common moves in jazz standard harmony so that you are best prepared when it comes to live gigs. You know the usual stuff, a song you don't know the changes to, or a song you thought you knew, but in a singer key! As has also been said in this thread, the sooner you stop using music, the better. The traditional way to learn this stuff is to learn hundreds of songs by playing in jam sessions several times a week. But most of us just don't have that opportunity these days. So a statistical approach makes sense. In my book, I show the most common moves and where they occur across 230+ songs. There is a clear roadmap for each song. And you can electronically search across the songs to maximise your payback each time you learn something. There's lots of free stuff if anyone is interested in getting a flavour of the approach: [list] [*]Sample pages, table of contents and index; audio tracks of the bricks of chords [url="http://www.dropback.co.uk/contents.html"]http://www.dropback.co.uk/contents.html[/url] [*]regular podcasts about the method [url="http://www.dropback.co.uk/Podcasts.html"]http://www.dropback.co.uk/Podcasts.html[/url] [*]a Google Group where the method is discussed and material freely exchanged [url="http://www.dropback.co.uk/overview.html"]http://www.dropback.co.uk/overview.html[/url] [/list] If there are any questions about this approach, I'd be happy to answer them. Best John Elliott www.dropback.co.uk