Francois Rioux
Les Productions D’Oz: 44 pages
This fascinating book is not your ordinary tutor book- far from it. Relating particularly to Jazz Guitar, this book methodically approaches harmonising on the guitar in two voices using various tools and strategies to enable the guitarist to swiftly understand what is happening and why, thereby enabling the player to master the complex art of harmonising in two simultaneous voices.
After the Glossary of terms there is a page going into the scales used, and this as you might guess is not just major and minor, 15 others besides! Then there are two pages of the main chords used, that correspond with these scales, some of them quite complex and not what you might be expecting.
After that, under the main heading of Direct Motion, are pages of examples of melodies in thirds, sixths, octaves, and tenths, all in a huge variety of ways, and different keys, where the harmony moves one – to one with the melody. Then there is another two pages where the harmony note moves in crotchets and the melody in quavers, again in a number of keys, and intervals, etc. A similar thing happens then where the one of the two parts is in dotted crotchets and the other in three quavers, each taking the upper spot at times. The detail that these examples go into is quite detailed and astonishingly varied.
The rest of the book, which is a further 20 odd pages is concerned with contrary motion in the two voices and this itself split into nine different categories, oblique motion, examples where there are free alternating voices with answers, and finally pages of chordal accompaniments and how to deal with them.
I would not have thought it possible that such a book as this would have been either possible or actually useful to a huge degree, but I was wrong completely, as this method is a fascinating insight into the actually huge number of ways that two –voiced harmonies could be utilized in guitar music (whether it be jazz, or classical) and so I definitely feel that this superbly written book should be looked into by any guitarists who feel that they could benefit from it.
Chris Dumigan