Harmonic Foundation for Jazz and Popular Music
by Jimmy Amadie
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jimmy AmadieEdition: Spiral-bound
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-12-28
ISBN: 0961303506
Number of pages: 168
Publisher: Thornton Publishing
Book Reviews of Harmonic Foundation for Jazz and Popular Music
Book Review: Making the complex simple, so your playing can be as complex as you want.
Summary: 5 Stars
Jimmy Amadie is one of the most brilliant people living. He is in that little group of people who figured out that you could communicate by talking, that clothing keeps you warm, and that the explosion of igniting gasoline can be controlled and used to propel automobiles. He is a Ray Kurzweil of music theory education. When Amadie came to music education he found insane chord notations, and statements showing little understanding, like "you can play a C chord over a D minor chord", and jazz education that produced dead comping, repeating the same voicings over and over and over. After much thought and 20 years of honing his educational strategy, Amadie came up with a blindingly simple conception of harmony and chord voicings, and then went on to develop an amazingly effective method of conveying the conception so that players were infinitely inventive and comping becomes as creative as a lead solo.
Here are some of the core concepts: There are only four chords: major, minor, minor 7th, and 7th (dominant). All chords that you might create turn out to be harmonically in one group or another. If you want, you can freak out about your favorite notation, but often you're not freaking about the notes, the harmony, or the voicing. Often, you're just stuck in what you call the chord.
Every voicing can be acheived with two notes in the left hand and three in the right. This system makes Amadie's approach work extremely well for players of other instruments who want to explore harmony on the piano or would like to be able to provide a little support on the piano. This is not a system that depends on piano chops.
All the wild and weird notes that you can add are . . . wait for the suspense . . . embellishments. That's it. Nothing fancier and nothing less.
As you work with the book, expect it to take you about a year or two. You can sit down and read all the words in a day, but you won't have followed Amadie's assignments and you won't have integrated the harmony and voicings into your playing. And, if you read it all in one day, the book may not make a lot of sense. You probably won't get it. You have to work your way through it.
Along the way, you will find that your ear has changed. You will hear 6ths, 7ths, diminished 9ths, and so on. And you will find your improvising changes. This is not a book about improvising, but it necessarily changes what each note of a chord's mode means to you, and that will give you more power to create what you're aiming for in your solos.
Every system produces a type of sound. Some systems, like Baroque and surfer, are very limitting, and everyone following the system sounds a lot alike. Once you have mastered Amadie's system, you may alter it to create a sound that is outside what Amadie sets the foundation for. But even if you stay inside his system, you can cover a range of music from Swing, through Bebop, Cool, Smooth, Modal, Fusion, to Free. Trad (Dixieland) requires that you hold back on the embellishments more than Amadie recommends, as does most of the pop tradition, including Rock and Roll.
I studied this book in 1981. 25 years later, I am still overwhelmingly grateful to Mr. Amadie for the gift he provided by discovering this conception of harmony and this way to master the concept.
Summary of Harmonic Foundation for Jazz and Popular Music
This book teaches the student how to construct, embellish and notate chords that will enable him/her to create chord voicings and harmonize melodies applicable to jazz and commercial music.Music Books
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