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please recommend book with jazz standards for a beginner

Hi everyone,

I'm about to start playing bass in jazz bend, we well play standards, and I'm wondering is there any book suitable for beginners in jazz?:) I need only bass walking lines, don't really look to learn all the jazz theory.

It would be nice if book could be bought as e-book with paypal payment option

thanks in advance
 
While lots of people will (rightly) recommend Ed Friedland's "Building Walking Basslines" book, IMO someone starting from scratch would be better off with this one first.

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The Ed Friedland book would then make a great follow up to the one above.

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Another great book, when you get more advanced is Ed Fuqua's :


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All books come with a play along CD with lots of jazz standards on it.
 
I use the Jay Hungerford book a lot. I tend to alternate with other books. And as far as providing walking basslines for jazz standards while avoiding any theory (direcly) that probably is the book that best fits the description.

But walking bass is all about theory and Jay Hungerford's lines didn't come about spontaneously without a theory background. Because he's not locked into theory teaching lessons, he can move right ahead into a lot of examples, but they're all well founded in theory. One of the 'fun' things about his book is seeing how his lines follow the ideas expressed in other more 'academic' books. And maybe it would be possible with careful study and memorization to begin to internalize what's going on with the note choices, but it's easier for most to have some idea of the framework that the choices are based on. Eventually you're goingto want to crerate your own lines instead of picking and choosing from a set of patterns -- and maybe it is all a set of patterns -- but in the flow of things making choices is easier if you know some theory.


Things didn't really start coming togther for me Till I picked up Todd Johnson's Vol 1 and 2 esp regarding position and fingering (4 + 2) and thanks to TB'ers I learned that came about from borrowing from Gary Willis Fingerboard Harmony book.

here are some other observations that may or may not be useful now or in the future:
1) Ed Friedland's book concentrates on 1 on beat 1 and 5 on beat 3. This is very basic and a great teaching tool, but ultimately limiting.

2) Once you go through some of these teaching tools of note one on strong beat , The Gary Willis exercise of playng 4 note chords acrosss the fretboard and playing the nearest note of the next chord (not restricted to 1 on beat 1) really opens things up. I found it easier to actually hear the chord chages once I was playing all 4 notes of teh chord for one thing. This may not be as importanat when playing a support role in an ensemble.

Maybe more than anybody wanted/needed to hear, but ...
 
Hi kucor!

“I'm about to start playing bass in jazz band, we will play standards”

Will you be doing this in a school situation or other?

Do you have the sheet music or other for the material you intend to play or is that actually what you are looking for but in a simple format?
 
Just to answer the original question, you're not really going to find a book that will have walking bass lines written out for a lot of standards. Mostly because the idea is that, if you are playing in a quartet, that there will be two choruses of a (for example) 32 bar tune played (the melody in and the melody out) and at least one chorus of solo for the lead instrument, the chordal instrument and maybe even the bass. So that's 5 times through the form, or 160 bars of quarter notes. For even 50 standards you'd be looking at something like the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
There are a few books that will have a few standards with 1 to 3 choruses of a written walking line, mostly with the idea that you'll just keep repeating the written line until you start hearing the changes enough so that you venture outside what's written with your own line.

But it's not really that walking lines are "all about theory", they only came to be taught that way when formal academic jazz courses of study came about. My suggestion would be to start (if you aren't already) listening to the way the "language" sounds, not to try to grab notes or phrases, but just to hear how different players move the harmony forward. You will find, as most of us did, someone whose playing speaks to you on a very personal level and you'll want to start tearing their lines apart to try to understand why they made the note choices they did.
If you're going to be playing the standard repertoire, yes you'll need to have some grounding in how functional harmony works, just like you'll need reading skills. But if you want to play this on any musical level at all, you'll need to understand that EVERYONE in the group should be improvising. Because ultimately this music is a conversation that each musician participates in and contributes to.
 
The Abersold books are good resource as well. It doesn't have lines written out, but they include play along CDs where you can mute the bass part (left/right channel). helpful so you can hear an idea for the walking line. First one I got was Maiden Voyage which has some easy to play standards.

The best thing that heped my walking lines was getting a fake book, some good recordings, listening, analyzing, and playing along. You're not really going to be able to find a lot of written out walking lines. And even if you do, that kind of defeats the purpose of jazz... for me it's a very personal expression, every time I play a different song my part is different.
 
If you don't have it already, you will eventually need at least The Real Book vol. 1., and to learn how to construct/improvise walking bass lines based on chord tones and chromatic approach notes. That's kind of the name of the game, and it's a LOT of fun once you get the basics down.
 
Not a book per se, but check out TBs own Todd Johnson's website. He's got a great series called "Playin Through the Real Book" . Each lesson is based on a standard jazz tune and includes a video lesson, transcription, and play-along. Lessons are on walking bass lines, solos, and chord comping. Very cool stuff. Todd's site is www.toddjohnsonmusic.com.
 
Maybe more than anybody wanted/needed to hear, but ...

Very interesting and valuable comments, to me at least. I've bookmarked your post and will do some research on the teachers/authors and books you mentioned.

I'm a beginner looking ahead... the brown truck brought me Friedland's book walking book just today.

Thanks too to Ed Fuqua, your comments on how to relate the *Theory Beast* to the *Booty Shake* are much appreciated!
 
I agree with you Ed Fuqua, but to me its not clear what the OP is actually looking for. How he asked the question ""start playing bass in jazz band"" not A jazz band, leads me to believe it's a high school situation of sorts.

Well, since he actually said "jazz bend" I made some assumptions about English being a second language.
 
re: Ed F's this
Also, I have found this to be helpful....
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PROXIMITY - you want to use not only root postion arpeggios but also all inversions to maintain "close" fingering and common voices through the tune. For example, a progression of D-7 G7/ Cmaj7 - instead of D F A C G B D F C E G B (root position, root position, root position) one choice could be D F A C D F G B C E G B (root, 2nd inversion, root).

This practice is kicking my butt right now, but also opening up walking lines enormously. Todd Johnson's rendition of Autumn Leaves has a few sections of this that really open up the walking line into melodic musical area that stiffer guidelines wouldn't reach.
Basically it comes down to knowing your chord tones in every inversion and forwards and backwards (up/down). It's apparently easy and common to know a chord's tones from the root and forward (up). It's quite a push out of my current comfort zone to get away from always reaching for the root tone on beat one, but for lack of a better term it feels like I'm actually learning the music when I go there.
 
As another data point, Mike Downe's book on bass lines is, in my opinion, fantastic:

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A theory topic, then real-world examples drawn from transcriptions from all the classic bass players, then theory, then more real-world examples.

He also has lots of side-by-side transcriptions: "Here's how Ron Carter did these changes, here's Charlie Hayden's version, here's Paul Chambers".

Great stuff. I have the Friedman books and a bunch of others but still learned tons from Mike's book... partly because I found his approach to the theory clear, partly because of all the real-world transcriptions from all my favorite bass players.

Not associated with Mike in any way, BTW, just a happy customer.

Vince