Dr. Keith Kelly, Eric Rasmussen, and Adam Roberts would like to welcome you to this volume of material, composed in support of Maricopa Community Colleges’ MTC130: Jazz Theory courses. In combination with live coursework, this text will guide the student’s studies through the critical elements of a jazz language.
What this text aims to do:
- Provide a hands-on perspective on the key touchstones of jazz music, including critical foundations like The Blues, time-worn classics like the legions of works in song form, the liberation of notes from chords introduced through modal jazz, and the democratization of jazz through the 60s avant-garde and beyond.
- Connect the reader’s understanding of the many facets of jazz theory into a coherent whole, rather than a pile of disparate parts.
- Explain how jazz theory is both an after-the-fact way to understand what transpired, and a tool to generate new ideas.
- Present jazz theory as a vital, living science (Art? Both?) that the reader can engage in and possibly (Hopefully!) even advance.
The authors are 3 members of a long-standing, Arizona-based jazz group of creative composers and improvisors. We teach what we daily put into practice in our careers as educators and performers. It is our intention that the reader uses these tools and strategies to understand what came before, and, most importantly, follows the authors in putting them into practice in their own art.
“In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” – Yogi Berra
This Book is an Open Educational Resource. It is designed as a living document to be adapted and utilized by Teachers and Learners at no cost.
Except where otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to share and adapt this work with proper attribution.
