A Guide on Jazz Piano, Composition, and Arrangement Textbooks (English Edition): between 1933 and today - Paperback

by Koji Kawai (Author), Akira Kawai (Author)

This guide provides an introduction to 260 different jazz piano, composition and arrangement textbooks written between 1933 and today.Though this may be hard to believe, there have been just as many, if not more jazz piano textbooks published in Japan as there have been in the U.S. Most notably, Eiichi Fujii, Yasutoshi Inamori, and Tomoyuki Hayashi have each authored over 100 jazz piano textbooks. In a time when the internet didn't exist as it does today, I would search for textbooks by a few different means which included referring to ads in American Jazz magazines like DownBeat, ordering catalogs from secondhand stores in New York, or asking friends who had studied at the Berklee College of Music, and then purchase any new textbook that caught my attention. Of course, nowadays, there are many more publishers in general, and an abundance of books that are quite similar to one another, so I haven't been purchasing as many publications as I once did. At the same time, I have taken a kind of philological, archaeological interest in unearthing the authors and publication dates of some of the earliest written jazz piano textbooks, and I decided to include many of these elusive, out-of-print works in this guide. I've also written about how I've personally worked with jazz piano manuals over the years through some of my own experiences, and noted where I had questions or doubts about the material or the way it was presented. I hope they can be of some use to aspiring students like yourself. Furthermore, I have limited this guide to the textbooks which I actually purchased and played through. Although it really goes without saying, this is because it would be just as impossible a task to review a textbook without having played through it as it would be to critique a CD or album without having listened to it. Consequently, I believe there are a number of works, some of which are highly acclaimed by instructors and students, that are missing in this guide when looking at the textbooks included from the perspective of jazz piano instruction as a whole. In this regard, I must take this opportunity here to apologize. I hope to include these works in future revised editions.