The Jazz Theory Book

This is a fantastic “what” book (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oPEWyxJjRo4oKHzMu/the-3-books-technique-for-learning-a-new-skilll) for learning jazz. It walks you through what tons of things /sound/ like, and goes on and on about how to derive and play scales.

What it doesn't do very well is prepare you to actually play this stuff. For example, the book takes 245 pages before it gets to “how should you be practicing what we've been talking about so far?” If you're like me and generally just dive into books at the front, this is NOT A PARTICULARLY GOOD STRATEGY. This is part of a more general flaw in the book, which is that it's disorganized. There are 16 chapters total which are organized more by theme than usefulness or skill progression. If I were to rework it, I'd suggest reading the chapters in the following order: 1, 4, 2, 3, 5, 12, 6—that's the order I wish I had approached them.