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The Art Of Improvisation by Bob Taylor is $23 well spent. It contains over 400 pages well thought out, insightful, and well explained improvisation concepts all accessible via PDF on the CD-ROM. The PDFs include hyperlinks to musical examples, so you can hear things right away, and not have to cue up a track on that old CD player.

This CD-ROM a great tool to learn improvisation, or at least give you another prospective on it. However….

There is only ONE thing I don’t like about this, and that is reading a PDF. I found it a real pain to read it on the computer screen. I actually ended up printing a lot of the chapters out on paper (double sided). Somehow that seemed easier to read, and easier to keep one’s place. I don’t know if it was the PDF format that was a turn off (I love PDFs my self) or it was the reading aspect of it. I think the concept is great, but maybe something more “interactive”, like a Flash or Director thing would have made more sense? I liked the hyperlinks to music examples. Actual MP3s of real people.

The theory content is excellent. Motif development, rhythm section ideas, rhythmic ideas, and so forth are excellent. I could have used more on “playing outside” as that is an area where people have a lot of interest in. I thought the chart on page 280 about playing “polytonally” was interesting, but more on playing “outside” is needed to really make this a cut above some of the other books out there. Perhaps some excepts of a Coltrane and his use of pentatonics, or Michael Brecker or Dave Liebman and their use of chromatics.

This book easily compares to “Intermediate Jazz Improvisation” by George Bouchard, and in a lot of areas offers more (such as sections on rhythm section ideas). My only complaint is I couldn’t get into the PDF reading on the computer. Surprising, I know, but somehow reading a book on a computer screen didn’t seem to work for me. Printing a hard copy of this CD-ROM’s PDFs worked very well for me. I’d rate this a 9.5 out of 10. Great work Bob!!!