Adam Neely Recommended Books

An exploration of musical harmony from its ancient fundamentals to its most complex modern progressions, addressing how and why it resonates emotionally and spiritually in the individual.W. A. Mathieu, an accomplished author and recording artist, presents a way of learning music that reconnects modern-day musicians with the source from which music was originally generated. As the author states, "The rules of music--including counterpoint and harmony--were not formed in our brains but in the resonance chambers of our bodies." His theory of music reconciles the ancient harmonic system of just intonation with the modern system of twelve-tone temperament. Saying that the way we think music is far from the way we do music, Mathieu explains why certain combinations of sounds are experienced by the listener as harmonious. His prose often resembles the rhythms and cadences of music itself, and his many musical examples allow readers to discover their own musical responses.

A walking bass line is the most common approach to jazz bass playing, but it is also used in rock music, blues, rockabilly, RandB, gospel, Latin, country and many other types of music. The term 'walking' is used to describe the moving feeling that quarter notes create in the bass part. The specific goal of this book is to familiarize players with the techniques used to build walking bass lines and to make them aware of how the process works. Through the use of 90-minutes' worth of recorded rhythm tracks, players will have the opportunity to put the new learning directly into action. This book literally gives bassists the tools they need to build their own walking bass lines.

One of the most important books on contemporary music in the twentieth century. Here for the first time is an orderly presentation of the harmonic procedures to be found in music of the first half of the twentieth-century. The author examines the nature of intervals in various contexts, discusses the modes and other scales employed in modern music, describes the formation and uses of chords by thirds, by fourths, and by seconds, of added-note chords and polychords; he deals with different types of harmonic motion, with harmonic rhythm and dynamic sand ornamentation, with harmonic behavior in tonality, polytonality, atonality and serial composition.

This book should be seen as a method to help the artist to develop his or her own way when trying to improvise chromatically. Through the concepts and examples offered, the improvisor should be able to use this material alongside already familiar tonal ideas. Specifically, the book serves as a guide for organizing chromaticism into a coherent musical statement meant to satisfy both the intellectual and emotional needs of artistic creation. The reader will be introduced to more than one way of conceiving chromatic lines and harmonies. There is nothing theoretically complex or new in the text, it is the organization of the material as well as many musical examples and transcriptions (Bach, Scriabin, Coltrane, Shorter, Hancock, Beirach, Liebman a.o.) which should serve to inspire musicians to expand their usual diatonic vocabulary. This book also provides insight into the style of playing that David Liebman is known for. In addition the book contains 100 assorted solo lines and 100 chord voicings. More from David Liebman at his homepage.