Mission:

This web page was created out of a certain frustration with current learning materials available for Jazz guitarists. Not that the author claims to have looked at every available Jazz Guitar Method. There has also never been such a mass of material available. Most of it, though, doesn't stress originality but imitation. But basically there seem to be two main groups of materials out there:

Method books

dealing with all sorts of 'what-scale/pattern-can-I-play-over-what-chord'. Most are doing a pretty good job at teaching you exactly that. However, this author thinks that there is another dimension beyond that in Jazz music. As a matter of fact this is where the second type of materials comes in:

Solo transcriptions

This type of material is equally important. Virtually every important Jazz player is covered in some form of transcription book/video (any CD Roms, yet?). If you are a good enough sight reader you can probably read down a lot of solo transcriptions without knowing what you actually play. Other players may have minimal knowledge of how to read music but are able to pick up solos with their ears and work them out without the use of music notation.

Even more important than readily available transcriptions are the ones you take off records yourself. It trains your ears, makes you think about where the guy (or gal) on the record was on the guitar neck and probably makes you play phrases and chords you would have never thought up yourself.

This author thinks that it is even more valuable to transcribe jazz 'heads'. This is a process that might be very easy (as in a tune like Coltrane's 'Impressions' or Miles's 'So What') or very involved (as in Weather Report's 'Black Market' or John McLaughlin's 'Sanctuary') - of course you should not only listen to the guitar part but also write down any significant bass or keyboard parts.

One area seems to be very neglected among all the 'how-to-books' available today:

Challenging and creative sightreading material

Recommendable for guitar are many of J.S. Bach's works for violin (things like the '3 Sonatas and Partitas' come to mind). The author had the luck to have a good friend working for a big music publishing house in Germany. Every few weeks they would sell books with little faults, which they couldn't sell to the dealers at just pennies a pound. What a drag to discover that once moved to the US that great source of sightreading material was gone. Guitarist Barry Galbraith's 'Jazz Guitar Study Series' contains nice stuff, too. His books are available from the Abersold catalog and at some local music stores.

To get to the point of this page:

This author would like to present some alternatives to teaching materials out there. For the time being these consist of a library of compositions (not only or necessarily for guitar) and a bunch of lessons (or rather analysis of how to play some of the tunes and how to approach soloing over them).