Improvising Blues Piano

The basic principles of blues piano explained for the intermediate-level pianist in an easy-to-grasp fashion.

If you can play a little piano say grade 2 or 3 and like the blues you will get a lot out of this book. Beautifully presented with pictures of the masters and different types of blues, takes a slow and easy progression from very basic triads to simple but really terrific sounding stuff to the more complex stuff. He encourges you to experiment and improvise and truely teaches ways to do this. Happily for my nieghbours I have headphones on my piano! CD has all the music on it with some different versions in triplet feel etc. Richards is a performer and teaches at a London music college. Certainly helped me. If you want to learn the blues this is really nice book. The book has its own web site so hunt around. Allows you to download a very nice blues and the sheet music to it.


I've bought several other blues piano books over the years, and in my opinion this one outclasses them all. The pieces sound great, and the pacing of the material is fantastic. The book does a great job of slowly introducing the idea of improvisation, by encouraging mixing and matching ideas from the different pieces. It also goes into ideas like horizontal and vertical improvisation without making it too intimidating, and introduces some blues "cliche" endings and turnarounds. It covers many different styles from barrelhouse to stride to jazz blues.

The included CD lets you know how this stuff is really supposed to sound, and it's got a full "Recommended Listening" in an appendix if you want to explore further. All around one of the best instructional musical texts I've seen.

http://rapidshare.com/files/188213856/Improvising_Blues_Piano_www.softarchive.net.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/188210175/Improvising_Blues_Piano_www.softarchive.net.part2.rar

(m_g)