Jazz Fiddle Wizard: A Practical Guide To Jazz Improvising For Strings

Martin Norgaard

Mar 2011 · Mel Bay Publications

About this ebook

Jazz Fiddle Wizard is a book and audio tailored for advanced violinists who want to learn to improvise in the jazz tradition. The book contains practical theory lessons, presenting rhythms and scales that are immediately put to use. Concepts are introduced progressively, requiring comprehension of previously introduced techniques and terminology. Each lesson includes a theory section and an exercise or performance section.

The book's companion play-along audio provides professional full rhythm section accompaniment for each exercise and tune. As the method was designed for college students and advanced players, no violin tracks are included on the audio. The Stuff Smith solo from 'Knock, Knock- Who's There?'transcribed at the onset of the book is readily available at http://www.rhapsody.com/stuffsmith/tracks.html

This method assumes that the reader/player has a basic technical command of the instrument and reads standard music notation at an elementary level or higher. Jazz Fiddle Wizard is the most challenging of Martin Norgaard's fiddle improv books. If you are a novice jazz player, the author recommends beginning with Jazz Fiddle Wizard Junior, Books 1 & 2 followed by Getting Into Gypsy Jazz Violin, all of which include violin tracks on their respective companion audio.

Jazz Fiddle Wizard works in conjunction with the www.jazzfiddlewizard.com website, offering a unique interactive experience in which the reader is invited to pose questions directly to the author. This method has been field-tested with college students and other players from different musical backgrounds and at various levels of technical proficiency. The bottom line on this product is that IT WORKS! Includes access to online audio.

About the author

Performer, recording artist, and educator, Martin Norgaard, is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Music and Human Learning at The University of Texas at Austin. Martin Norgaard has performed in Austin & Nashville and throughout the country with his own jazz trio, the acoustic fusion band Acoustic Room, and with diverse artists including Buddy Spicher, Will Taylor, and Strings Attached, Eliza Gilkyson, and Sara Hickman. Norgaard taught jazz and commercial strings at Belmont University and Vanderbilt University in Nashville for six years and was director of the Belmont Jazz String Quartet and Jazz String Septet, featured at IAJE 2001, MENC 2002, and ASTA 2003. Norgaard holds bachelor's and master's degrees in jazz performance from William Paterson University, and Queens College in New York, where he studied with Rufus Reid, Hal Galper, Jimmy Heath, and others. Norgaard is a frequent clinician at state and national conventions including ASTA, TMEA, OMEA, IMEA, GMEA, MENC, and IAJE. Additionally, he is a frequent clinician at summer workshops such as the IAJE Teacher Training Institute, the South Carolina Suzuki Institute, the Santa Fe Suzuki Institute, the Augusta Heritage Festival, and Vanderbilt's International Fiddle School. In addition to his Jazz Fiddle Wizard and Jazz Fiddle Wizard Junior books, Martin is the author of Mel Bay's transcriptions of Bonnie Rideout's Scottish fiddle record Kindred Spirits, Aubrey Haynie's Doin' My Time, Mel Bay's French Tangos for Violin and The Greatest Stars of Bluegrass Music (fiddle edition). One of Martin's own solos is transcribed in the Fiddle 2000 Anthology, also published by Mel Bay.