Mel Bay Brazilian Jazz Guitar
November 7th, 2009 | 
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Number ten in the Mel Bay/Warner collaboration contains a collection of beginning to intermediate arrangements for Brazilian Guitar. All tunes included in standard notation and tablature are: “One Note Samba”, “Meditation”, “Silent Nights of Silent Stars”, “Chega de Saudade”, “How Insensitive”, “The Girl from Ipanema”, “A Day in the Life of a Fool”, “The Island”, “So Nice”, “Desafinado”, “A Felicidade”, “Sabia” and “Ge… More >>
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You get spiral binding which is nice and tabbed out beginning to intermediate arrangements by Mike Christiansen and another guy. You get solo arrangements and vocal accompanying arrangements along with lyric lead sheets(who knew The 1 Note Samba had words?) certainly not I.There are 4 bonified hits in this collection at least to my ears(you know the ones that got radio airplay like The Girl from Ipawhatever , 1 Note Samba,A Day In The Life of a Fool(tale of my life) and another one. and 7 or 8 filler songs you may or probably won’t want to play. The CD has okay quality but not super pro grade, just home studio grade. For the money I reckon you have a brilliant value here because of the spiral binding,CD and 3 treatments per song(the lead sheets are not in tab , the other 2 arrangements are). These arrangements have some nice touches thrown in to spark your own thoughts but I personally found them to be on the bland side but then again that’s purely subjective. The arrangements are professionally competent. If you like this kind of music and play fingerstyle guitar especially if you accompany a singer who likes to sing songs like this, go for it!
Rating: 4 / 5
This product is terrible.
I would have sent it back immediately had I not had to go out of town for 3 weeks.
The arrangements are choppy and harmonically uninteresting. The CD is amateurish and rough.
There are much better arrangements out there. Brazilian Masters comes to mind as does Noriyasu Takeuchi’s effort.
To my mind, it is worth attempting to play a more hard arrangement than to settle for something like this which is simpler but very off the mark as far as Brazilian music goes.
Rating: 1 / 5
Brilliant news first: this book comes with both notes and tab, as well as rhythm and solo arrangements. It also has a diverse set of songs and artists. Fantastic. . .but what makes this certainly *not* a 5-star book?
(1) The sample playing on the CD, to be perfectly frank, is not that fantastic. It doesn’t sound like the guitarist played with a metronome, much less had much of a desire to keep an even tempo. I know it’s ‘jazz’ but I don’t reckon that means thrown even tempo out the window. The ’solo version’ of Girl from Ipanema exemplifies this. As a result, it’s kind of annoying when you’re trying to play along with the CD and the player sounds like s/he’s trying to frantically race you.
(2) There are no chord charts, which would have been extremely helpful. Since there are no chord charts, you are left spending time figuring out how to finger the Fmaj7 so that you can go from a fretted G on the E string to an open E string, while keeping the general chord form. This can take several minutes.
Repairing these two things would make this a 5-star book! Alas, 3-stars. I would give it 3.5 if I could.
Rating: 3 / 5
After working with Nelson Faria’s brilliant Brazilian Guitar Method for awhile, I was looking for authentic arrangements of complete tunes that I could play unaccompanied. This book delivers with fantastic tune choices, all Brazilian classics, and a large well designed book. The solo arrangements are intermediate in level and require a pretty solid knowledge of typical jazz chord forms, though TAB can help with this I guess. There are quite a few fascinating and characteristic Brazilian open string voicings not typically found in jazz. The lead sheets with decent changes and english lyrics and comping chorus are a nice bonus. All in all, each arrangement presents a creaqtive solution to combining melody, chords, and bass simultaneously. The most challenging aspect of authentic Brazilian music is rhythmic feel (“Ginga”). Unfortunately the examples on the cd are out of tune and stiffly performed. If you are already familiar with Bonfa, Gilberto, Baden Powell, Toquinho, etc, you can adapt the feel to make the tunes flow more smoothly. There are chord substitutions and some liberty is taken with the melodies. I have been warmly received playing these arrangements in public and have come another huge step closer to getting at the heart of this incredible and timeless music. The arrangements are designed for Classical fingerstyle guitar. This book is a fantastic value, and worth the time it takes to master the tunes, which are ultimately playable-not nearly as rough as the Barbossa-Lima book. I graduated from Berklee if that makes a difference.
Rating: 4 / 5
This book was just what I was looking for. It features fantastic Brazilian songs, it’s laid out in tab and standard notation, there are three versions of each song so you can also learn the rhythm parts, and the included CD is high quality. It’s intermediate, I’d say, and for beginners it’ll be a bit tough learning to go between chords. Still, it’s not very hard; I’m still a beginner and chose this book because the challenge is what helps me improve. Bottom line: if you’d like to learn some fantastic Bossa tunes and you don’t mind working at it, this is the book for you.
Rating: 5 / 5