L'esprit Manouche: A Comprehensive Study Into The Gypsy Jazz Guitar [楽譜]

In its foreword, the authors wrote "we sincerely believe we have created a major paedagogical and cultural work". After owning the book for a couple of week, I can sincerely say that this is a true statement. The autors introduce you not only in a detailed, meticulous fashion into the world of gypsy (jazz) guitar, but they provide from all jazz guitar methods I have so far seen the most understandable introduction into jazz music and its application to guitar. Granted, the typical jazz guitar book has the concept of introducing you to about 247 x 16 different scale and harmony patterns, with no prospect to learn anything playable within the first 15 years. Mostly, you are tortured with far to complex chord and harmony arrangements, and in the gypsy jazz literature, the typical procedure is apparently to start playing with Django standards, which leads you to nowhere, unless you are an extremely talented player, or have been adopted by Reinhardt family members somewhere in Alsace. This book, for example, starts with a four chord song (Swing for Ninive), and you are teached an arpeggiated solo over an Am/Bb6/E7 chord change. Harmonics are explained in detail and in a very clear and concise way. The fact, that Romane uses, with a few exceptions, his own songs in the book allows him to arrange the lecture patterns for a particular effective learning curve. I see this as a plus, not as a deficit. The material, although, is far from easy. Mastering the first song at 65% speed requires already a significant level of guitar proficiency. If you devote, say, two to three years of your life to this book,you will, however, achieve something. The wonderful situation is that it is all there , mapped out, nothing to guess, no enigmatic embellishment, you just have to pick up your guitar and study it. All the material is covered by original cuts from Romane albums on the CD which comes with the book, and in addition, all practice exercises are on the midi file. The comment of my fellow author (with the one star review) about the midi files is completely off, since the midi files are a a valuable tool to learn the beat and the phrasing of the exercises at any speed. If you don't like them, you can also slow down the original tracks by, e.g., using the windows media player and selecting a lower speed. The only thing which the book lacks, in my opinion, as a practice tool, would be an additional recording with only the rythm tracks of the songs, so that you can play along. Sure, as the authors recommend, you can record them by yourself and then play along. This is also likely part of the practice, but its more fun to play to a nicely laid out ryhtm track. Also, don't expect to much about rhthm playing itself (the "chompe"). I you are looking for that, you would need to search elsewhere. Apparently, Romane wrote also a treatise about that, but I did never had a chance to look into this. All in all, a true masterpiece.

While it is true that L'Esprit Manouche is a thorough study of Gypsy Jazz guitar, I would not go so far as to say it is "the only book you need". I have had it for a year and scarcely touched it, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the study pieces are not the familiar great tunes of Django. So the first thing you need to do is familiarize yourself with the study pieces (mostly Romane compositions). Secondly, this work is definitely not for beginners or even intermediate players. It doesn't begin on the bottom rung of the pedagogical ladder. You jump right into learning a complicated piece, Swing For Ninine, that has fast melodic phrases and difficult fingerings for the likes of me(I have only been playing 20 years). Having said all that though, this is an excellent volume for advanced musicians who love Gypsy Jazz (and Romane's music), and wish to learn exactly how he plays those neato riffs. But the rest of us will need an intermediate book.

This massive (330+ pages) book has been out for a while, but only in French. This English translation is superb; the entire gypsy jazz manouche style is broken down by Romane, a french non-gypsy who was taught at a young age by Manouche guitarists. The vast majority of the compositions that are taught in the book are Romane's own compositions, but he seems to use his tunes as a vehicle for teaching theory and tecnique. Even in translation, Romane comes of as a natural teacher of the jazz manouche style. I would recommend this book to any serious musician . Most of the music is in tab and standard notation, but some stuff is only standard notation.

Note: I am an amateur musican, and not really that great at all at jazz manouche. But this book still kicks butt.